Fear of ICE raids keeps California farm workers on edge
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A Thursday jobs day and a three-day weekend? Doesn't get any better than that, now does it? From American Public Media, this is Marketplace.

I'm Kyle Risdell. It is Thursday today, the 3rd of July. Good as always to have you along, everybody. The good people at the Bureau of Labor Statistics get the day off tomorrow, say they delivered to us the June jobs report this very morning. And I think it's a fair thing to say the 147,000 jobs this economy added last month caught nearly everybody a bit surprised. So we're going to talk about that and a couple of other things with Heather Long. She's a chief economist at Navy Federal Credit Union. Hi, Heather.

Hi, Kai. So a quick take, 147,000 new jobs. The unemployment rate actually goes down to 4.1%. What do you think?

Wow. I mean, that's what I said as soon as I saw it. Wow, look at this. Like you said, way better than expected on all the headline numbers, more jobs added than expected, unemployment rate going down. Even the revisions for April and May went up, not a lot, but a little bit. That's certainly better than what we've seen the past few months.

I will say when I started to dig into the details, you know me, I like to get in the data. I did see two things that made me uneasy. You want me to say what those are? Please do. That's why we called you. All right. The first is most of the jobs were just in two sectors. Seventy five percent were in government or health care. And you're probably saying, wait a minute, government.

And that's state and local government, specifically education jobs. So if you're looking for a job that's not in health care or not in K-12 education, it's been slim pickings lately. And that makes me a little uneasy. The other one, the labor force participation rate, the fancy way of saying labor supply, hit the lowest level since December 2022. So that's part of the reason that the unemployment rate went down.

And so those things, not the best. So solid but is what I hear you saying. I think that's a pretty fair characterization. Another way that I would put it is the labor market is mostly frozen if you're not in education, health care or maybe social assistance. We are still waiting, though, Heather, for and I don't you know, you don't want this to come, but we're all expecting the tariff hit to come. And yet we keep not seeing it. What do you suppose is up with that?

Well, you do and you don't. I mean, it's what we were just talking about, right? Manufacturing had a decline in jobs in the last couple of months. Same thing with a lot of the white collar jobs. Are they being impacted by AI or tariff uncertainty? Probably a bit of both. So most of the hiring that's happening is very far away from anything that's tariff or uncertainty influence. All right.

I know you hate it when I play my favorite game, what is Jay Powell thinking in five words or less, but I'm going to ask you what Jay Powell's thinking. Take all the time you need, because he's gotten squeezed not just by the President of the United States, but there's a lot of pressure on Powell now to start cutting rates, and one imagines that this gives him a little ammo to say, you know, not yet.

Yeah. Yeah. It feels like he probably did a mic drop today. I tried to tell you, uh, I think he's thinking, see you in September. Uh, the interest rate cuts probably not happening until September, not feeling a lot of pressure now. Uh,

Yeah, we'll get a couple more reports here for July and August, but they'd have to be really extreme, you know, big rise in inflation or a big drop off in July or August jobs report to want to see anything before September. All right. Let's talk about the economy yet to come. As probably everybody who's listening at this point knows, the House passed its big tax cut bill. It goes to the president. He's going to sign it tomorrow.

It's not like it goes into effect tomorrow, but it's going to start impacting this economy in some measure of reasonably soon-ish, yeah? Yeah.

I think that's a good way of saying it. I mean, in some ways, we're all going to wake up next week and it's not going to feel that different because a lot of this is extending the existing tax cuts. But you're right that some things start to take effect right away. And then things like the additional benefits for seniors or the expanded child tax credit or a little bit of extra tax deduction for tips. And some of that stuff will start to people start to feel it probably early next year when you file your taxes. I think we'll also see a little bit of stimulus.

here, right? This is a huge bill and the economy is expected to pick up later this year and early next year. But the big but is it's costly. I mean, at least $3 trillion here added to the debt, probably more than that. You see a little bit of reaction even today in the bond markets. We're going to have to pay for this. Well, yeah, but let's talk about super quickly here, like in 30 seconds, let's talk about that bond market reaction, because honestly, we are adding almost 10%

on our existing debt, right? It's going to be $3.3 trillion extra dollars. And yet the bond market reaction and equities too has been really muted.

I agree. It's slow so far. I mean, it seems like everybody's asleep at the wheel. But all you have to do is look across the pond this week at the UK. And boy, when when the bond market finally wakes up, it can be it can be I think we're nasty or scary or whatever your favorite adjective is. But nobody wants to be in that situation. And it feels like one day it'll come. But picking what that day is. Yeah.

Not easy. Heather Long, doing her best for us here on a Thursday. She's at the Navy Federal Credit Union. Thank you, Heather. Thanks. Happy 4th. You too. Wall Street on this last day of a holiday-shortened week. Traders only worked until lunchtime. They did like what they were seeing, though. Details, numbers when we get there.

Okay, Heather took a very quick pass at this, where the jobs were last month. Government, of course, is the answer. Obviously not the federal government. Elon Musk and his operatives saw to that. The federal workforce lost people in June for the fifth month in a row. State and local governments, though, on the other hand, went on a hiring spree from the looks of it. But as Marketplace's Sabri Benishul reports, looks can be deceiving.

The federal government has been losing jobs, that is for sure, 69,000 of them gone since January, seasonally adjusted. One might be tempted to think these workers are moving headlong into jobs with different governments, state and local. They sure would be welcome. The federal government might say you're fired.

But here in New York, we say you're hired. That's New York's Governor Kathy Hochul in an ad campaign to attract laid-off federal workers. 10,000 applied, 112 have been hired. Brian Levine co-founded FormerGov.com, a platform where former government employees and prospective employers find each other.

Both state governments, local governments, and private sector employees are tripping over each other to try and get some of this talent if they can. But in an economy with a labor force of 170 million people, federal workers aren't so far much moving the needle. Something else is.

This month saw an increase in state and local hiring, specifically related to education. Education. And here is where things get weird. That's Eric Winograd, by the way. He's chief economist for Alliance Bernstein. The seasonally adjusted numbers say we gained 40,000 education jobs.

It's just that in truth, we didn't. There wasn't actually an increase in hiring. These numbers are seasonally adjusted to make up for predictable annual patterns in jobs. If they weren't, we'd see massive swings when it's back to school time or when the holidays are over. And it would be hard to tell. Is the economy going through something right now? Or, oh, wait, no, school's just out. So in this case, what we actually got was fewer job losses than normal in education annually.

for the summer. You know, June could be a tricky month. Nancy Vandenhouten is lead economist at Oxford Economics. Surveys are fussy. Samples change. Schools get out at different times. It can make the seasonal adjustment math not math so well sometimes.

So we think that the strength in job growth at the state and local level was overstated by these seasonal quirks. Which is why you do not want to put all your economic eggs in one month's basket of data. Instead, you look at the trend, which, by the way, still says the labor market is doing OK. In New York, I'm Sabri Beneshour for Marketplace.

We mentioned on the program earlier this week, I think, that President Trump has been bandying about some kind of, and I'm quoting him here, free pass for agriculture workers from immigration raids. That's of particular interest out here in California because farming here is massive. California grows about a third of this country's vegetables, three quarters of its fruits and nuts, and it employs almost 900,000 people. The mood amongst those farm workers right now, though,

is fearful. And the thing about fear is that it doesn't just stop, free pass or not. And that could affect California farming for years. Marketplace's Matt Levin has this one.

Ever since those June immigration raids came very close to where she worked, strawberry picker Itzel and her three daughters have tried to avoid leaving their home. She lives just north of L.A. Itzel isn't her real name. We're not using that because she fears being deported. She didn't come here legally. I'm afraid to go out. I haven't gone to do laundry for two weeks now. I haven't gone to bring lunch for my girls. I've had to cancel appointments.

Itzel has lived in California for almost 20 years. Her daughters are citizens and she has a temporary work permit. She says she skipped work at a local berry farm right after the raids, but just for a couple days. As a single mother, she says she's had no choice but to report back to the farm. She needs the money, but plenty of her co-workers aren't taking that risk.

Well, almost half the people, let's say 20, were working in total. In just one day, only eight of us showed up. A lot of them have completely stopped going to work. They're no longer working. According to government surveys, 55% of California crop workers self-identify as undocumented. Experts say the real percentage is likely significantly higher. And like Itzel, most have lived in the U.S. for a while now.

Allie Hill is an agricultural labor economist at UC Berkeley. We're not getting an influx of new young workers. So what's really happening is most of our workforce has been here for a long time. I think that the average years in the U.S. is upwards of 10 years. Most California farm workers make minimum wage, $16.50 an hour. The H-2A guest worker visa program requires employers to pay nearly $20 an hour.

then you also need to take into account that employers have to pay for H-J worker housing, all of their food, all of their transportation costs from their home country. Hill says many California farm workers are instead exploring labor-automating machinery or considering switching to labor-saving crops like tree nuts or corn, which means in the future you may see less labor-intensive California crops like strawberries and tomatoes in the grocery store and at higher prices.

Any dark red tomato here, all these down here in the middle are 100% ripe. I'm standing in a 40-acre tomato field with a farmer in California's northern central valley. You can just rub a little dust off them. I eat them out of the field all day long. It doesn't bother me. We're not using this farmer's name either because he fears reprisals from the Trump administration.

He says of the 40 or so farm workers he employs, he thinks about five or six are probably undocumented. Beyond tomatoes, they help cultivate his almonds and rice and sunflowers.

I have a whole bunch of really intelligent, hardworking people, you know, working here on this farm that, you know, I'm proud to have them. And I know them, know their families, you know, for a long time. He says the argument that he should just pay legal workers a higher wage instead of hiring undocumented immigrants ignores the economic realities of farming in the 21st century. If I pay

pay people more. If I even could raise the price of my tomatoes, there would be big companies in this country that would look overseas to get their products. I mean, it's happening already. Mexico may actually be the biggest beneficiary of any agricultural immigration crackdown. Mexican farms already supply 70% of the vegetables and 50% of the fresh fruit imported to the United States. I'm Matt Levin for Marketplace.

That jobs report this morning sucked all the air out of the business and economic room, as it tends to do. But there is indeed more data to discuss foreign trade in particular. According to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, imports to the United States in May were basically the same as they were in April. But April imports, if you happen to remember, were the same as they were in April.

No, I know you don't, and that's OK. They were a huge drop from March as importers pulled back on some of the front loading that they'd been doing to get ahead of tariffs. Turns out, though, there is some of that front loading still going on. Marketplace's Justin Ho has the story. Imports are still way down for lots of goods. Categories like furniture, kitchen appliances.

Jason Miller at Michigan State University says most of those products come from China. And while the Trump administration has reduced tariffs on stuff from China, they're still sitting at around 50 percent. So many importers are basically saying, forget it. Imports of those type of goods are down 20 percent in May from where they were just a couple of years ago.

But there are categories where imports have picked up again. Cars, for instance, and also computers. Megan Schoenberger at KPMG says many importers are worried that tariffs on computing equipment could rise, especially if the Trump administration slaps new import taxes on chips.

New rounds of semiconductor tariffs could include derivatives of semiconductors, which would include electronics. So that could be part of the reason why we're seeing this big jump.

The upshot is there's still plenty of fear and uncertainty around tariffs that could be causing some importers to frontload again. But other importers simply need to stock their shelves. There are certain cheeses, there's olive oils, olives that, you know, agricultural products that just don't grow in the United States. Pat Whalen is president of Sahadi's, a grocery store in New York City that carries a lot of products from the Middle East. He's

He says he's not stockpiling extra goods just in case tariffs go up, but he says he's still got to import what he needs. That is going to go on regardless. I mean, obviously, if they're 200% more expensive, you'll sell a little bit less of them, but there'll still be people that want them. Still, between tariffs, elevated interest rates, and the weak dollar, Whelan says he's anticipating some pain. I'm Justin Ho for Marketplace. ♪♪

Coming up... We were like, that's interesting. How do you lease a burnt building? The various plans for public lands. Straight ahead, but first, let's do the numbers. ♪

Well, closed early today, as I said, in advance of the holiday. Dow Industrials increased 344 points, about three quarters percent, 44,828. The Nasdaq up 207, a bit better than 1%, 20,601. S&P 500 up 51 points, eight tenths percent, 6,279. For the four days gone by, the Dow found 2.3%. The Nasdaq up 1.6%. S&P 500 climbed one and seven tenths of 1%. Chipmaker NVIDIA

accumulated one and a third percent. Today, it's on track to become the world's most valuable corporation at a hair under $4 trillion in market cap, just ahead of the record set by Apple late last year. Apple, by the way, now in third place. Bond prices down. Yield on the 10-year T-note rose to 4.34%. Was talking about this with Heather. That's up about six basis points, about six one-hundredths of a percent since yesterday. Talking about debt. You're listening to Marketplace.

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Applications are open now through July 6th. Visit marketplace.org slash board to learn more. Thanks for your consideration and thanks for listening. This is Marketplace. I'm Kyle Rizdahl. We were promised, as you might remember, 90 trade deals in 90 days. As we sit here less than a week out from the end of President Trump's 90-day pause on those tariffs he announced back in April, the grand total comes to three, maybe two and a half.

If we're being serious about this, there's the UK. That's an actual deal. China, which is a framework to talk about a deal. And then yesterday there was Vietnam, a 20 percent tax paid. I'm required here to remind you by American consumers on all Vietnamese goods coming into this country. Now, 20 percent is certainly a lot lower than the 46 percent that Trump announced for Vietnam back in April. But as Marketplace Smith Fields reports, lower tariffs still aren't no tariffs.

Compared to the 145% tariff Trump briefly put on China and the 46% he threatened for Vietnam, 20% almost sounds like no big deal. But Adam Hirsch at the Economic Policy Institute says it's still significant, as is the 10% tariff Trump announced for the U.K. It still puts us at the highest that tariffs have been in more than a century. And he says it's still going to be hugely disruptive to the U.S. economy.

Erin McLaughlin at the conference board says tariffs will drive up costs across the economy. A tariff is a tax on the goods that come into the U.S., and ultimately that tax has to be paid by someone. By U.S. importers and retailers, and eventually by us, the consumers. And even if most tariffs just end up being 10 or 20 percent... I do think that we will still see this be inflationary for the U.S. consumer...

How much we'll notice the coming tariff-related price increases will likely depend on what we're buying, says Bill Reinsch at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. If you're buying a $10 t-shirt with a 20% tariff, it's going to be $12. Are you going to stop buying the t-shirts because it's $12 instead of $10? I don't know. But if you're buying an appliance or a car, it could increase the price by hundreds or thousands of dollars, which might make you think twice.

What 10 or 20 percent tariffs may not do, he says, is get companies to spend lots of money to move manufacturing back to the U.S. If you're going to move here because the tariff is too high for you to export here, then if you lower the tariff from 46 to 20, that alters your economics. And then you have to think about, well, you know, is it still worth it to move? Or can I just eat part of the 20 percent tariff and still be competitive? I'm Samantha Fields for Marketplace.

One of the things not in that giant GOP tax cut and miscellany bill that the president's going to sign tomorrow is a proposal from Utah Republican Senator Mike Lee to put a for sale sign on millions of acres of federal land in the American West.

So the idea is dead for now. But Lee's plan, or something like it, has been kicking around Washington for years by politicians from both parties looking to see whether public land sales might help alleviate the housing crisis. Marketplace's Savannah Peters has more.

A couple of years ago, Miriam Hicks was driving down Route 66 through Albuquerque's International District when she spotted a for-lease sign on a property that was in pretty rough shape. We were like, that's interesting. How do you lease a burnt building? A burnt building surrounded by an empty lot. It was a defunct mobile home park that had been acquired by the state and was now sitting vacant. We contacted the state land office and they had had this sign

posted for at least three years for lease and no commercial developer had been able to make it work. Hicks is with the non-profit affordable housing developer, Soul Housing, which was willing to take on the cost of tearing down the old structure and abating the asbestos pipes. So it took a year, but we negotiated a lease with them. And got to work on a brand new 92-unit apartment complex. Hicks and I are chatting in the courtyard. The local community asked us to...

really pull in the history of Route 66 as part of our development. So they kept some of the retro mid-century flair from the old mobile home park and the turquoise color scheme. Now, the Luminaria senior community offers affordable one- and two-bedroom apartments to low-income people 55 and up.

Albuquerque's fastest-growing demographic of unhoused people. It's close to public transit, jobs, and services. The developer pays rent to the state. Which helps support health care, public schools. At the end of the 60-year lease, sole housing is responsible for demolishing the Luminaria. And New Mexico retains ownership over the land and can decide to build more affordable housing or something else. We may need something completely different.

And I think that's a more responsible use of our land. More responsible than, say, selling it outright to private developers and losing control over how that space is used. The housing shortage in the West is a sticky problem. And Danya Ramori, a professor of city planning at the University of Utah, can understand why public lands are floated as a solution. That's

That's not totally or inherently a bad idea, but we just aren't really approaching it, in my opinion, in the right way. Rimori says one of the problems with selling public land is that private industry can use it in ways that actually drive up the cost of housing.

You need to be very careful about how the land is purchased and managed and the rules and regulations because otherwise it can be available for the workforce initially, but then very quickly become market rate. Rimori says local leaders need to be involved to make sure public land transfers actually benefit their communities.

and choosing the right parcels is key. A recent analysis by Headwaters Economics found that half of federal lands close to existing communities are at high risk for wildfire. We want to make sure we're not putting more people into harm's way. Says Headwaters economist Megan Lawson. And

In many of these places, land really isn't the issue. We need to be looking first within our communities because a lot of homes could be built on land that's already available if we can focus on density. Like at this 82-unit apartment complex going up just across the street from the Luminaria in Albuquerque.

Miriam Hicks says this is another parcel of leased New Mexico state land. It's a drop in the bucket in terms of the need, but for 82 households, it's going to be a life changer for them. And at the end of the extended lease, the state of New Mexico has the flexibility to decide its next best use. In Albuquerque, I'm Savannah Peters for Marketplace.

This final note on the way out today in which I'm going to indulge my inner nerd. Don't judge me, please. One of the things I like to do on jobs day is to remind people that the monthly unemployment report has a margin of error. That in and of itself is not a big deal. But when I went to the BLS website this morning to see what the June confidence interval was, that's fancy talk for margin of error.

I saw it was plus or minus 136,000, which, fine. The U.S. labor force is like 168 million or something like that. That margin bearer is fine. But when I first started checking more years ago than I care to count, the confidence interval was 105,000. We've talked before about falling survey response rates and the BLS stopping data collection in some cities because of resource constraints. Less accurate data is what you get.

Our daily production team includes Andy Corbin, Nicholas Guillaume, Maria Hollenhorst, Eru Ekbenobi, Sarah Leeson, Sean McHenry, and Sofia Terenzio. I'm Kyle Risdahl. We will see you tomorrow, everybody. This is APM. Hey, everyone. I'm Rima Kheys, and I'm excited to join Kimberly Adams on Make Me Smart.

Together, we'll unpack the day's news, whether it's a tariff switch up, the latest on Trump's immigration policy, or the future of clean energy. Join us each weekday so we can make sense of it all together, because none of us is as smart as all of us. Listen to Make Me Smart wherever you get your podcasts.