There is hardly any food that is known – or American – is the cheeseburger. It is a staple food of fast food culture and grill parties in the garden, soldiers are issued as meals and president served on silver tablets. Politicians use it as a symbol of abundance, nostalgia and even patriotism. Its components – beef, cheese, salad, tomatoes, onions, rolls – are so familiar that you hardly think that they have to be grown, bred or transported.
Americans consume an estimated 50 billion burgers a year. Together, these billions of burgers stand for a huge system that extends over thousands of kilometers and encompasses millions of migrant workers, most of which can never be seen in advertising.
In order to understand how dependent on the American agriculture of workers with a migration background, you only have to look at the ingredients of a cheeseburger: onions from Idaho, lettuce from Arizona, beef from mast companies in Kansas, cheese from dairies in Wisconsin.
Complete burger production dependent on immigrants
Each ingredient provides an insight into the people they grow, process and deliver – and into the immigration policy that threatens to destroy this system.
“More and more of our farmers are facing the needles in relation to workers,” says James O’Neill from the American Business Immigration Coalition. “There is no area of agriculture that is currently not affected by the shortage of labor.” He adds: “If half of the workforce falls away, the production drops by half. The offer halves, but the demand remains the same.”
Latino immigrants provide the majority of agricultural workers in the United States. Federal data from 2021 to 2022 show that almost seven out of ten farm workers were born outside the country and worked about 42 percent without a legal work permit.
At the same time, the districts dependent on agriculture in the last elections Donald Trump, whose immigration agenda provides extensive deportations, supported with an overwhelming majority. In April, Trump signed a number of implementation regulations that oblige local authorities to cooperate with the federal immigration authorities.
One of the first areas on which the government focused on is agriculture. The Ministry of Homeland Security has started with large -scale raids at workplaces, including on agricultural areas, which caused many agricultural workers to stay at home. The result is a system that is under pressure. Or, like Shay Myers, one of the largest onion farmers in the country, puts it: “Without immigrants, we cannot grow food in this country. Point.”
Onion
From the air, Myers’ Owyhee Produce – a extensive onion in Idaho – looks like a patchwork of dusty rectangles: more than 1,600 acres onions, lined with dripping hoses. On the ground it is a dance of precision and coordination: trucks drive backwards to conveyor belts, automatic sorting machines in the warehouse, and a workforce of 150 workers, almost all immigrants, is distributed over the farm.
Myers is not a silent farmer. On Tikkok, where he has almost 700,000 followers, he publishes genuine videos in baseball cap and flannel shirt, in which he criticizes immigration policy as directly as a storm on the horizon.
“There is no one in our company that is not brown,” he says. “Fifteen years ago, tractor drivers were retired white men or the owner themselves. Today? They all come from Mexico. Everyone.”
Its farm produces around 200 million onions annually – enough to supply 10.5 million people. This corresponds to about five percent of the total onion consumption in the United States. If there is an onion slice in her burger, the probability is great that it comes from Myers’ dandruff.
Those who made it possible belong to Veronica, 31. She came to the United States as a toddler from Mexico and started working on the farm at the age of 18 when she was already a child’s mother. Over the next ten years, she learned to operate machines, to manage deliveries and finally lead entire businesses. “It was long working hours, six days a week,” she says. “And I already had three children at the time.”
But the pressure she feels is not just a professional nature. Veronica’s immigration status is still uncertain. “I’ve been here since I was second,” she says. “I come from Mexico, but I don’t know Mexico. We have no home there. We have nothing there.”
Generally speaking, she says, mass deportations would leave a huge gap in the food system. “That would be a disaster,” she says. “I don’t think there will be people who want to take over the work of the immigrants. There will simply not be enough people who are willing to do this work and to feed everyone.”
Cheese
Antonio came to the United States for the first time in 2008 after crossing the border without papers, desperately looking for work. On a milk farm in Wisconsin, he worked almost without interruption – he says that he had no more than three days in two years – and sent money home to support his family in Mexico. Finally he returned home. But economic instability drove him to try again. This time he legally arrived with a tourist visa together with his wife and two sons.
When the visa went, they stayed. “We have built up a life here,” he says. “We had to do it.” Today Antonio leads the daily operation of a milk farm in Wisconsin. He started as a milking, then switched to animal care, maintenance and finally to management. His day begins at 5 a.m. when he gets in with the night shift, distributes tasks and provides sick animals.
In the meantime, he leads a team whose members, according to their own information, have largely have a story similar to him. “Only a few are born here,” he says. “The others are like me – people who try to survive.” The figures show this: According to a report by the University of Wisconsin Madison from 2023, 70 percent of all employees in the dairy industry in Wisconsin are without papers.
Hans Breitenmoser works on his farm, whose family business produces five tractor loads a week – a large part of it is processed into cheese and disc cheese for gastronomy – in good faith.
“When someone comes to my farm, they present their papers,” he says. “And as an employer, I am obliged to check these papers and assume that they are real.” But he also knows that many agricultural workers probably live without legal residence status. “Everyone understands that.”
Beef
Jeff Georges Mastbetrieb in Finney County, Kansas, produces 100,000 cattle or more than 55 million pound beef every year. This also includes the minced meat, which can be found in fast food chains, school canteens and private kitchens across the country.
The facility itself is huge – more industrially than rural. Rows of powers extend over several hectares, lined with long feed troughs and access routes. Water wagons roll past bunkers stacked with silage.
“This process runs seven days a week,” says George. “It doesn’t matter whether Easter or Christmas is. There is always someone here on the facility.”
Of the 52 employees, 44 immigrants are. They appear at 4:30 a.m., drive the animals into the stables, monitor feeding, check the water supply and provide sick animals.
After the mast, most cattle are transported to nearby meat processing companies, where they are slaughtered, sorted and packed for national sales. These companies are also dependent on workers with a migration background. George estimates that up to 85 percent of the workforce in the beef industry of Kansas consists of immigrants with different residence status.
In total, Kansas exports beef every year worth almost $ 2 billion. But despite the size of the industry – or perhaps precisely because of this, like Matt Teagarden, head of the Kansas Livestock Association, says the labor reservoir. “There is no scope for workers,” he says. Mast companies, dairies, meat processing companies and oil and gas companies all fall back on the same pool of workers, which leads to a constant “trade” with workers, as they call it. The consequences of a mass deportation or visa cuts would be quickly noticeable and extensive, according to Teagarten. “We can import workers or import more food,” he says. “That is the choice we are standing.”
lettuce
In Yuma, Arizona, Kristen Smith Eshaya leads a spacious Romana extension. Around 2,000 acres are grown on your farm. From October to March, almost the entire Romana consumed in the USA comes from the desert fields in this region.
Each 30 hectare plot is its own, quickly working machine: tractors form beds, irrigation teams regulate the water flow from desert channels, and field workers walk along series to weeds and harvest. A single 30 crew can edit a field in one day. Weeten alone requires speed and experience. Most of Eshaya’s workers are Latinos – some were born in the USA, others come from Mexico across the border. Many have a limited H-2A visa. “You have to look quickly and know which plant looks healthier and then take out the other with a hoe,” says Eshaya. “This is qualified work.”
Eshaya adds: “Everyone observes us. If raids take place and people no longer come to work, we cannot replace them.”
Bread rolls
The bun may be a minor matter in cheeseburgers, but it is often made industrially. All over the country, large bakeries and frozen food factories produce millions of hamburg rolls for fast food suppliers and supermarket chains every day. These companies are strongly dependent on workers with a migration background: In the US food industry, migrants make up almost 34 percent of employees in commercial bakeries.
Tomato
The Farm of the Briana Giampaoli family in California produces £ 45 million tomatoes annually. In view of the lack of local workers and increasing costs for guest workers’ visa, the future of American agriculture depends on an immigration reform. Without this reform, farms in the fourth generation like theirs will not survive.