The question of who would replace migrant farmworkers if they were deported—often followed by the suggestion that Black Americans would take their place—reveals more about the structure of American labor than about immigration itself. It is a question built on historical amnesia. The United States has already run this experiment multiple times, and each time the answer has not been reform, fairness, or higher wages, but the recycling of coercion.

American agriculture has never been organized around dignity or fair compensation. It has been organized around cheapness. From its earliest days, the agricultural economy depended on labor that could not bargain, refuse, or walk away. Slavery was not simply a racial crime; it was the foundation of a business model. After emancipation, that model did not disappear. It mutated. Sharecropping, vagrancy laws, convict leasing, and chain gangs emerged not because Black Americans were idle, but because the plantation economy required control after formal ownership of people became illegal. Freedom threatened profits, so the state intervened to restrain it.

When Black Americans finally began to leave agricultural labor en masse during the Great Migration, they were not abandoning honest work; they were escaping a system designed to trap them. Urban jobs, industrial wages, and union protections offered something agriculture never did: leverage. That exodus destabilized Southern farming, but rather than raising wages or improving conditions, landowners and corporations searched for a replacement workforce with fewer rights and less political power.

Migrant labor became the answer. Mexican, Central American, and Caribbean workers were recruited precisely because they were deportable, excluded, and vulnerable. Their labor reproduced the same conditions once imposed on Black Americans, but under the language of immigration rather than race. The brutality of the work remained, as did the low pay and lack of protection. What changed was the identity of the people expected to endure it.

This is why mass deportation schemes, particularly those associated with figures like Donald Trump, do not represent reform. They are acts of disruption without replacement plans, rhetorical performances that expose how fragile the system truly is. If migrant labor disappeared overnight, the agricultural economy would not suddenly become generous. Wages would not rise high enough to attract domestic workers, housing would not be built, and benefits would not materialize. Crops would rot, farms would fail, and food prices would climb. The political system would panic.

At that point, the pressure would not move upward toward corporations. It would move downward toward people with the least ability to resist. History shows where that pressure lands. When voluntary labor refuses exploitation, coercive labor fills the gap. Prison labor, probation work programs, workfare requirements, and so-called rehabilitation farms are not speculative futures; they already exist. Because Black Americans are disproportionately policed, incarcerated, and economically constrained, they become overrepresented in these pipelines—not as willing replacements, but as compelled ones.

The idea that migrants “took jobs” from Black Americans functions as a deliberate distraction. It pits two exploited groups against each other while leaving the underlying wage structure untouched. It reframes a corporate design choice as a cultural conflict. In doing so, it protects agribusiness and shields the state from accountability. The fields remain cheap because the debate never reaches the question of power.

What emerges is an unbroken pattern. When slavery became illegal, it was replaced with sharecropping. When sharecropping collapsed, convict leasing took its place. When that became politically untenable, migrant labor filled the void. When migrant labor is threatened, prison labor waits in the wings. The names change. The logic does not.

So the answer to the original question is not that Black Americans would replace migrant farmworkers. The answer is more uncomfortable. The system would attempt to reassert control over Black labor through indirect force while insisting that nothing racial was happening at all. Deportation would not create opportunity. It would recreate pressure.

The United States does not suffer from a labor shortage in agriculture. It suffers from a refusal to abandon a plantation logic that demands someone, somewhere, be cheap, disposable, and silent. Until that logic is dismantled, every debate about immigration will circle the same truth without naming it. The problem is not who works the fields. The problem is why the fields are still built on exploitation.