[nilkn]

> Trump’s border crackdown is supposed to help U.S. citizens. For California farmers, it’s creating a desperate shortage of help.

I'm immediately skeptical. What has Trump even done on the border that would have any effect on this at all right now?

Trump has done almost nothing on this front. Even his controversial travel ban (which is completely unrelated to Mexican immigration) has been shot down three times.

[dragonwriter]

> What has Trump even done on the border that would have any effect on this at all right now?

The series of highly-publicized immigration raids and deportation actions targeting, in many cases, categories of persons who.were previously not deportation priorities.

[nilkn]

Immigration raids? Those have been going on forever now. Deportation is not new under Trump. I assume they must be happening on mass scale starting months ago to have had any effect on this already. He's barely been in office 50 days.

[dragonwriter]

> Immigration raids?

Yes, as the most concrete direct action; though simply signaling intent previously since his election has probably also.had an effect.

> Deportation is not new under Trump.

No, but targeting immigrants who were not targets in the latter years of Obama's Administration is a change with Trump.

> He's barely been in office 50 days.

He's been President-Elect for a lot longer, and signaling animosity and hostile intent toward Mexicans specifically since literally the speech in which he announced he was seeking the Republican nomination.

Voting isn't​ the only way people react to signals like that.

[nilkn]

The article itself, despite its headline, seems to acknowledge that blaming everything on Trump is not quite correct:

> Already, fewer Mexicans had been willing to risk border crossings as security and deportations escalated under the Obama Administration. At the same time, Mexico’s own economy was mushrooming, offering decent jobs for people who stayed behind.

Many of the specific anecdotes occur before Trump even ran. For instance:

> Indeed, Chalmers R. Carr III, the president of Titan Farms, a South Carolina peach giant, told lawmakers at a 2013 hearing that he advertised 2,000 job openings from 2010 through 2012. Carr said he was paying $9.39, $2 more than the state’s minimum wage at the time.

> He hired 483 U.S. applicants, slightly less than a quarter of what he needed; 109 didn’t show up on the first day. Another 321 of them quit, “the vast majority in the first two days,” Carr testified. Only 31 lasted for the entire peach season.

Another one:

> In the last five years, he has advertised in local newspapers and accepted more than a dozen unemployed applicants from the state’s job agency. Even when the average rate on his fields was $20 an hour, the U.S.-born workers lost interest, fast.

Five year period.