Get ready for higher food prices

NEW YORK– One of Donald Trump’s key campaign promises was to combat perhaps the most painful aspect of inflation rising grocery costs . Many pundits have cited  “egg flatiron” as one of the reasons Trump won.

When Americans went to the polls last week, they wanted cheaper food. Groceries really are more expensive than they used to be, and grocery costs are how many Americans make sense of the state of the economy at large. In September, Pew Research Center reported that three-quarters of Americans were ‘very concerned’ about them. And this month, many of those people voted for Donald Trump, the candidate who touted his distance from the economic policy of the last four years, and who promised repeatedly to lower prices.

If Trump fulfills his campaign promises to deport millions of people who entered the country illegally and slap sweeping tariffs on everything the US imports, Americans could see their grocery bills explode.

Undocumented immigrants are heavily involved in US food production from the very beginning of the supply chain on farms to the tail end at grocery stores. “If there are mass deportations, it would create labor scarcity and it would bid up prices,” said Leo Feler, chief economist at Numerator, a consumer insights company. That’s because it would put upward pressure on wages for workers in all walks of food production, which would instantly get passed on to consumers.