Why are beef prices up? Hint: It's not migrants

Trump officials try to deflect blame from the true causes: tariffs, drought, disease.

- MICHAEL HILTZIK COLUMNIST

It has become routine practice to turn to Trump administration spokespersons to learn how Democrats and illegal immigrants are the source of all our problems.

The high price of beef? Check.

Here, for example, is Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent explaining for Fox News on Sunday why beef prices have been soaring: "This is the perfect storm," he said, "something we inherited." (That's the blaming the Democrats part.)

"Also," he continued, "because of the mass immigration, a disease we'd been rid of in North America made its way up through South America as these migrants, they brought some of their cattle with them. So part of the problem is we've had to shut the border to Mexican beef."

As is sometimes the case with Bessent, there's a tiny nugget of truth in his words, surrounded by a bodyguard of misrepresentation.

The truth nugget is that the U.S. Department of Agriculture shut the border to Mexican cattle in March, in order to block the spread to the U.S. of the New World screwworm, a gruesome parasite that has been found in Central and South American herds.

But Bessent's image of immigrants smuggling their infected beeves across the border is transparent fantasy. The USDA's announcement of the blockade didn't tie the screwworm peril to immigration, illegal or otherwise, but to commercial imports. The agency also stated that the infestation hadn't yet penetrated farther north than Oaxaca and Veracruz, 700 miles from the U.S. border.

The Treasury secretary's spiel can properly be seen as standard Trumpian deflection.

That's because at least some of the run-up in beef prices at the supermarket can be blamed on Trump policies, including his tariff on beef imported from Brazil, which has been a major exporter to the U.S. Trump himself implicitly acknowledged this Friday, when he announced that he was scrapping tariffs on beef and other foodstuffs to bring prices down.