The problem isn’t about what consumers are willing to pay for food.
This is how I can tell when people have either a fundamental misunderstanding of the problem or are severely underestimating the size of the problem.
For example, an apple costs around $0.20 right now. Which means that the supermarket is probably paying the wholesaler around $0.10, and the wholesaler is probably paying the farmer about four cents if he's lucky. Let's just say that $.02 of that is labor and $.02 is other costs not related to this discussion.
(Note that I do not have any clue about how much undocumented workers are paid, how much fruit they can pick, etc. I am making these numbers up for merely easy-to-understand illustrative purposes, But the underlying point would still hold if you plug the real numbers in instead.)
Let's save the farm employs one undocumented worker for $5.00 an hour. He picks 10,000 apples over the course of a week, which breaks out to 2 cents an apple. Now let's say he has to pay that employee a fair wage plus benefits. We're probably talking about $15.00 an hour in wages, and $7.50 an hour effective for benefits period that comes out to $22.50 an hour. If that employee is still only picking 10,000 apples a week, That comes out to a price of $0.09 an apple. Which means even if the rest of the farmer's costs stayed the same, he is now selling that 4 cent apple for about $0.11. The wholesaler is going to pass that cost onto the supermarket which means the apple they were previously selling for a dime now costs $0.22. The supermarket is going to do the same thing, so that means that the apple that you paid $0.20 for before now costs probably north of $0.40. So if you buy a bag of apples, you can expect the cost of that bag of apples to go up by around $3 to $4 per bag.
This probably doesn't sound like a lot. Maybe you'd be OK with paying 3 to $4.00 more for that bag of apples. But here's the thing. Now do that with oranges. Then carrots. Than every other fruit or vegetable you buy.
Then do the same with meats. Because they're getting hit with a double whammy: not only do they have undocumented workers that are now being paid significantly more than before, but the costs of their feed that they feed the animals also just doubled. Which means one way or the other the price of your meat is going to go up by a lot.
Now do the same thing with every other grocery item you buy that requires food grown on farms. That three to $4.00 per Item now adds up to a $100 to $200 spike in your grocery bill. And if you go shopping twice a month, you're talking about a $200 to $400 spike in the price of your food. At a minimum. I believe my estimates are conservative.
I am not a fan of all of the people who take copium by saying “This is it! This is the thing that will take Trump down!” with every passing day. But I believe if you tell people that they can expect the price of their groceries to go up at a minimum $200 to $400.00 a month, Even I think that might be enough to get his supporters to yank him out of the White House by the short and curlies. Remember the price of eggs at their peak? Imagine telling people that that's now the new floor. Imagine the impact when restaurants have to start doubling their prices. Imagine the elderly, who in some cases already are foregoing medication to pay for food, only to find out that they still wouldn’t be able to eat. When the price of a McDonald's value meal starts at 20 bucks just for their basic 2 burgers and a fry. And that's only the beginning. I cannot begin to describe what kind of unforeseen side effects we could also expect throughout the economy.
People in the US have literally never had to pay a price for food that would be based on paying the workers a fair wage. We have been exploiting the undocumented for literal decades if not a century, and before that we had literal slavery. This has lead to a Society of people who have no idea how much their food would cost if they were paying the workers a fair wage, and would not accept it if they did because the price would be so high that it would seem unrealistic even if you could prove it to be mathematically correct. A shift like that would have an impact on literally every aspect of our economy in ways that I do not think our economy would be able to withstand, even if it is the morally correct thing to do.
