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The reality is undocumented migrants are “just part of our labor force,” Thornberg added.

“It didn’t bring a lot of those men on the couch back into the labor force,” he said.

Kachuck said he would welcome a tariff, but pointed out that another major Trump initiative — deporting millions of immigrants in the U.S. illegally — could seriously deplete his and other farmers’ labor forces.

Fourteen percent of 25-year-old men are not in the labor force, a statistic that has been on the rise for decades.

The construction labor force has already been shrinking for various reasons, he said, and now “many of these would-be workers are scared by these high-profile deportations.”