Imagine that you elect a president who promises to deport all (illegal) immigrants and then does so. And imagine that you elected him precisely for that reason, but then realize that those deported immigrants work in your fields or on your construction site, and now your crops are rotting in the fields and your construction site has no labor force. At the same time, you don’t believe in climate change and you criticize those who sound the alarm, then you struggle with extreme weather conditions, droughts, and floods that destroy your work in the fields, and against rising interest rates and tariffs that make construction materials and machinery unaffordable, while people are reluctant to buy real estate due to economic uncertainty and rising interest rates.
This is the current situation in the United States, where, for example, farmers, who are mostly conservative and therefore vote for Trump, are being hit hard and ruined by government measures that they themselves chose. But there are still many voters who refuse to see the connection and scratch their heads wondering how this is possible. As if that weren’t enough, farmers are now also facing the tariffs that Trump has chaotically imposed on his trading partners.
Red states, i.e., states governed by Republicans, are particularly dependent on agriculture—and on immigration. Forty-two percent of harvest workers do not have a residence permit for the US, and even those who do stay away from the fields because they are afraid of being deported by mistake. While California and New York have much more diversified industries and are therefore less affected by tariff disputes and deportations, states such as Nebraska, Idaho, Wisconsin, and South Carolina are being hit really hard.
Nebraska’s GDP, for example, fell by 6%. Agriculture is the most important industry there, and with the tariffs and the dissolution of USAID, which purchased hundreds of millions of dollars worth of grain each year to send to crisis zones around the world, agricultural yields are collapsing. Added to this are higher interest rates, which make production itself more expensive. No wonder that in the first seven months of 2025, there were already more bankruptcies among farmers than in the whole of 2024.
Soybean sales fell by 50% in the first half of 2025. This was mainly because China, which buys more than half of US soybean production, did not place a single order this year. After the US under Trump set tariffs for China at 35%, the Chinese government instructed importers not to place orders in the US and to import soybeans from South America instead, even though they are slightly more expensive there.
Even people who were immigrants themselves and suffered from poor working conditions, and still do, don’t understand the world. How does my political preference directly affect me? The best example is 64-year-old Irma Arredondo, who worked in the fields for years as a harvest worker and now suffers from several chronic illnesses. The monthly cost of her medication amounts to thousands of dollars. And her daughter, who suffers from cerebral palsy—probably also caused by Irma’s work in the fields with lots of pesticides—needs medication worth thousands more dollars per month. Irma’s sister is also disabled; she suffers from Turner syndrome.
Trump is now trying to cut social programs related to healthcare. Medicare and Medicaid are health insurance programs for retirees and low-income groups. The lives of many Americans literally depend on these programs, and among them are a disproportionate number of Trump voters.
So why did Irma Arredondo vote for Trump? Because Trump is against abortion. Arredondo is therefore a voter who is concerned with a single issue and fails to recognize how other campaign promises and their implementation would affect her personally. Americans call this a single-issue voter. Arredondo does not seem to understand the bigger picture and consequences. Because the issue of abortion was so important to her, she ignored other campaign promises and did not concern herself with them, let alone their personal implications for her. While she wanted to “protect life” here, she sacrificed the life of her own family. In the end, however, she shows no real insight. If she had understood this beforehand, she says she would not have voted for either Donald Trump or Kamala Harris.
Many immigrants also work in other industries. I have already mentioned construction, but many people who were not born in the US also work in nursing and healthcare. And foreigners are one of the most important sources of income in real estate. Many Canadians buy second homes in Florida to escape the harsh Canadian winters. Now they are pulling back, and the real estate industry in Florida is sinking into a deep crisis.
No wonder Republican politicians who support Trump are confronted with extremely angry voters at town hall meetings, and many politicians are reluctant to schedule such town halls. There is nothing more embarrassing than being torn to shreds by your own voters. And this is currently happening in many constituencies with conservative majorities.