President Trump has made it widely known that he will not tolerate sanctuary cities like Baltimore, Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York. Since taking office, he has threatened to slash federal funding to cities who do not comply with federal immigrations laws, along with ICE agents circumnavigating local authorities in a nationwide federal operation to arrest undocumented immigrants.
In the latest immigration raids, ICE agents targeted a Swiss supplier of hamburger buns for McDonald’s Corp., who said it’s Chicago bakery lost 35% or about 800 of its workers at the Cloverhill Plant.
The company is owned by Zurich-based Aryzta AG, who makes baked products for fast-food chains and supermarkets.
ICE agents pinpointed the Chicago bakery after its job placement agency went under federal investigation earlier this year.
Kevin Toland, Chief Executive Officer of Aryzta said on a call with analyst, “it’s proceeding very, very slowly because it’s like having a brand new factory and a brand new workforce. That’s presenting a lot of challenges, as you can imagine.”
According to Bloomberg, President Trump’s immigration raids are a major headache for U.S. companies who employ undocumented works. The challenges that Aryzta faces are likely to cause short term economic pain for the company, but on the longer end could cause its end products to increase prices directly impacting the consumer.
The raid on workers at Cloverhill is one of the biggest U.S. employment headaches reported by a European company so far as President Donald Trump has made curbing undocumented immigration a centerpiece of his presidency. Aryzta said it faces challenges in retaining staff in the U.S. and pressure to raise wages.
For employers, the loss of illegal immigrants can be expensive. Training a new workforce of American hires can increase the cost of labor and certainly cut into margins.
But in Cloverhill’s case, the cost of labor is relatively inexpensive not because of the illegal immigrants, but each of their factories (2) have highly automated production lines that involve minimal human interaction. Future wage pressures are not expected to threaten profitability too much due to automation, but in the intermediate timeframe a severe loss in margins is due to volume loss.
According to RT, the Chicago Immigration Court has never been busier since President Trump entered office. Across the United States, there are an estimated 11 million illegal immigrants, which signals immigration raids are just getting started.
The Chicago Immigration Court has 24,844 pending cases in its system as of this spring, according to the DOJ’s Executive Office for Immigration Review. That is up from 13,000 pending cases in 2010. Nationally, the pending caseload has doubled since 2011.
According to EOIR, total orders for removal between Trump’s inauguration and the close of the fiscal year hit 63,634. At the end of fiscal year 2017, some 1,940 people were detained in Chicago, up from 1,669 at the end of the prior year. Most of them are of Mexican descent, statistics show.
The Trump administration set in motion sweeping changes in how the federal government dealt with those living in the US illegally. It is estimated there are 11 million immigrants living the US without legal status.