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U.S. farm industry groups want President-elect Donald Trump to spare their sector from his promise of mass deportations, which could upend a food supply chain heavily dependent on immigrants in the United States illegally.
So far Trump officials have not committed to any exemptions, according to interviews with farm and worker groups and Trump’s incoming “border czar” Tom Homan.
Nearly half of the nation’s approximately 2 million farm workers lack legal status, according to the departments of Labor and Agriculture, as well as many dairy and meatpacking workers.
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“The only moral abortion is my abortion”.
“The only moral undocumented workers are my undocumented workers”
Notice a pattern here?
They’re not looking at the big picture. When child labor laws get repealed they can hire 10-year-olds at the same cost as undocumented workers. Having 10-year-olds running heavy farm equipment also mitigates abortion bans on the back end.
The long abortion
Unironically that is a great slogan to use when these things become reality.
Don’t forget the blacks. The blacks will be jailed for being black and then they we have slavery with extra steps!
Hey now it won’t just be black folks, all sorts of non white shades of people will be arrested to work the fields against their will. Hell there will probably be some whites in there too, the ones infected by the ‘woke’ can’t be allowed to roam the streets spreading their blasphemy
No, they are. They’ll just use the immigrants they round up as actual slave labor.
use the immigrants they round up as actual slave labor
Of course. It’s a “smart” business move. Lock up folks in those profitable private prisons then farm out prison labor to work the fields. It’s a win, win financially where the rich make even more money.
The children crave the…. fields?
They don’t care that they’re hypocrites, it’s what makes them right wing conservatives almost by definition. That and lacking empathy, having main character syndrome, and generally being racist or bigoted.
U.S. Representative John Duarte, a Republican and fourth-generation farmer in California’s Central Valley, said farms in the area depend on immigrants in the U.S. illegally and that small towns would collapse if those workers were deported. Duarte’s congressional seat is one of a handful of close races where a winner has yet to be declared. Duarte said the Trump administration should pledge that immigrant workers in the country for five years or longer with no criminal record will not be targeted and look at avenues to permanent legal status.
Wow, it’s almost like when faced with the consequences of your profoundly cruel and destructive rhetoric, suddenly some form of tempered, compassionate approach seems like a good idea. 🙄
Assholes.
They’re admitting to using slave-like labor to generate their profits. It goes well beyond rhetoric.
So, I do think what they’re doing is shitty, and the way our government handles undocumented farm workers is shitty and immoral, but I also think it’s not quite right to call the arrangement “slave-like”.
The workers are getting paid, and they’re getting paid enough to make them willing to violate immigration law, and in the case of undocumented migrant workers enough for them to enter the country and travel around it, often returning to the same places to work again.
It is very much exploitative and taking advantage of the worse economic situation elsewhere and their willingness to eschew what we consider basic worker protections.
Equating the arrangement to slavery creates the impression that it might be worth it to crack down hard to alleviate the moral injustice of the entire arrangement, despite the impact it will have on everyone involved.
A better tactic that relieves the gross injustice without hurting the people being wronged or ourselves is to make it easier for farm workers to enter the country in a safe way that allows them to benefit from the protections we believe workers should get, as well as the services we provide, like WIC. Amnesty, a path to legal residency or the citizenship process, and a harsher crackdown on businesses that look to bypass those protections.Even the workers don’t want the arrangement to end, which tells me we need to bolster the protections they’re missing, not end the system entirely.
Even the workers don’t want the arrangement to end,
Children in coal mines also didn’t want child labour to end.
I would say there’s big difference between child labor, where the child can’t consent to work and we’ve societally decided that no child should be working at all, and an adult choosing to work and someone exploiting their need to deny them the worker protections they deserve.
To be clear, I’m not saying to continue allowing farms to hire undocumented workers and eschew worker protections and proper payments.
I’m saying that there’s clearly a need for farm workers that isn’t being met domestically. We should increase our efforts to ensure that the workers filling those roles are protected and not exploited, and are given the opportunity to become permanent citizens, since they clearly play an important role in our society.where the child can’t consent to work
We as a society have decided that to be the case and where to draw the line. That line is at a far older age than what nature might dictate.
Under that logic, the adult who is dependent on their employer to treat them fairly because they have no rights on their own can also not consent. Consent requires the option of a true viable alternative choice.
When you say the workers don’t want it to end, what they really don’t want to end surely is their ability to work and earn money in the country, not their status of illegality and their lack of enforceable rights. They just assume that an abolishment of the status quo would result in them not having work at all or in deportation. The question is what alternatives are presented.
We should increase our efforts to ensure that the workers filling those roles are protected and not exploited, and are given the opportunity to become permanent citizens, since they clearly play an important role in our society.
Agreed.
When you say the workers don’t want it to end, what they really don’t want to end surely is their ability to work and earn money in the country, not their status of illegality and their lack of enforceable rights.
100% what I wanted to make clear I was saying in my initial comment that I worried was not clear. The “arrangement” I referred to was “consensual farm work”, not “tacitly sanctioned ignoring of labor laws and worker exploitation”.
Purely for the discussion: I do think the comparison to child labor is off in this case, even though I agree about the point of needing a true viable alternative.
I would draw the comparison more to a worker in a criminal enterprise than to child mine workers.
The work they chose is their best choice, but they could have realistically chosen differently.
Within reason people can choose risky or dangerous things, as long as best doesn’t mean only.
Okay but there were alternatives to coal. There is no alternative to food. We need a better system, but the way to get there isn’t everybody starves while we figure it out.
Starvation isn’t the only alternative.
When child labour in mines was abolished we didn’t abolish coal with it (sadly).
I understand what you’re saying and under strict definitions it isn’t slavery. By the same token people working in sweatshops in Southeast Asia don’t fit the definition. Yet colloquially the word is still being used. I think because some of us think that freedom and compensation aren’t as much of a line in the sand as it appears at first glance. You could say that slaves in the US were compensated with food and shelter, and that they didn’t feel the deal was bad enough to mount a rebellion. I don’t think we should determine what the lowest standard for labor is by what some people seem to be okay with. Especially if those people aren’t given an easy path to organize. I’m not saying that’s what you’re saying. I’m merely exploring why I use the term.
BTW we have a lawful system for all of this in Canada. Working conditions aren’t great. Farmers and large corporations are happy to exploit workers in ways that Canadians aren’t willing to accept. Even when it comes to natural born citizens, deplorable working conditions have historically been common prior to workers organizing and literally fighting for better.
🤷
I really don’t think you could reasonably argue that the slaves in the US were compensated and okay with their conditions. For one, there were slave rebellions, and none of them asked to take part in the system or were given the option to leave.
I do get what you’re saying though, and we do seem to be in ultimate agreement.
We have a legal framework for it in the US as well, it’s just slow and inefficient with weird quotas that make people want to abandon the system. It undermines itself.
We do also have at least one prominent union for farm workers, including undocumented farm workers.
https://ufw.org/ The existence of a labor union with a history of real impact, as well as the workers seeking the work, is part of why I think the slavery comparison is misguided.Equating immigrant farm labor to slavery creates the notion that we should abolish it entirely, which hurts both us and them, when the problem isn’t “immigrants doing farm work”, it’s the massive exploitation hazard which leads to too many opportunities for farm labor to have said terrible working conditions.
Duarte said the Trump administration should pledge that immigrant workers in the country for five years or longer with no criminal record will not be targeted and look at avenues to permanent legal status.
Bwah hah hah! Sure, that’s something that’s going to be coming out of trump’s mouth.
Sorry, no, they steal American jobs and undermine society.
Seriously what is wrong with these people? Are they eight years old?
i hate foreigners and socialism, send me my farm bill subsidy and someone to pick my tomatoes at less than minimum wage
They have only one real belief, and that’s white supremacy.
That’s funny.
US farm groups want Trump to spare their workers from deportation - yet they likely still voted for him.
Pro Palestinian groups want to spare Palestinians from genocide - yet they likely helped to support the re-election of someone who has a concrete track-record of being anti-Muslim and heavily pro-Israeli with explicit statements fully supporting Netanyahu’s actions instead of voting for a party who at least meets at the table for peace talks and may be convinced by The People to take a stronger stance in support of peace.
The specific issues are irrelevant (don’t at me about Gaza). It’s how different people understand and act upon issues and politics differently.
None of that’s new though. The U.S. elections have been purely vibe-based for a few decades now. The policy platforms of a given candidate stopped mattering as soon as the electorate forgot how to read.
These nincompoops all think it’s the other people they’re voting pain on, not themselves. They’re welcome to everything they’ve brought upon themselves.
Oh wow you said “don’t at me about Gaza” 8 hours ago and no self-aggrandizing dipshit has stopped by yet to uhm ackshually you about how the Democratic Party was literally (read: figuratively) shooting Palestinian children in the face. I’d say that crowd might actually have collectively pulled their heads out of each others’ asses, but I think it’s far more likely that Rostelekom is having an outage today or something.
Folks, here’s what’s happening: fiefdoms and minor lords are the final goal of the GOP. Farmers will have workers who are protected from deportation as long as they are in the farmer’s good graces. Likewise, H1B visas already operate like this - as long as you are loyal and useful you are protected from the sanctioned cruelty of the justice system.
Right wing thought does not care or support democracy. They don’t want people to be free so much as “free”. They want to control other people. It doesn’t matter what the laws are when it comes to themselves - they exist outside that system. They have their own country club system. The right wants petty tyrants.
whoch relies upon them being here illegally
Wait what? Ok yeah if the system cant handle paying living wages then yeah fuck those farmers. People still dont deserve to get deported though
Imagine being so bad at running a business that it only works if you have near-slave labor.
Undocumented people who are paid cash don’t pay income tax, social security, or Medicare. That allows them to be paid considerably less money, which keeps food costs down nationwide.
And cheap, plentiful food is absolutely essential to the US. Its political stability has always been tied to the economics of farming.
The Civil War was absolutely about slavery, but it was also about economics and food security. The South depended on slavery to keep prices low. There were millions in the South who didn’t own slaves and knew slavery was wrong, but were so afraid that the economic impact from losing the free labor would prevent them from putting food on the table that they were willing to kill to keep the evil institution alive.
Look at all the most politically turbulent periods in American history (turbulent as in people were at or near to mass violent revolt), and you’ll find food insecurity.
A hungry crowd is an angry mob.
So the US has worked HARD to keep food cheap. While there are people in the US who struggle with proper nutrition and may not know where their next meal will come from, you don’t have many people literally starving to death. Food can always be found somewhere. For now.
Now we have an incoming administration that’s threatening the food supply. And unlike 1861, there’s no “greater good” to justify it. Trump just wants to deport the cheap labor specifically to hurt immigrants because he’s fucking evil.
If he goes through with this insanity, crops will rot in the field and grocery prices will quadruple while the prices of imports also skyrocket from tarrifs. We have some really hard days ahead.
Mostly agree but the Confederate states were more heavily invested in cash crops making slavery a purely economic issue not a good supply issue
I mean if the US will starve unless they suppress wages then… I didnt want to eat this week anyways
It’s not the suppression of wages as much as it is an effective tax break for the poor achieved through hiring undocumented immigrants and paying cash. By not withholding taxes, the workers are effectively being paid 30%+ more for their labor.
The solution, once again, it to tax the wealthy more to provide relief to everyone else.
Deporting half the farm workers is going to do wonders for inflation, for sure. I’m sure all the people who voted for Trump because of “the economy” will be thrilled.
Couple this with his stupid ass tariffs (which he doesn’t understand even a tiny bit) and we’re going to see massive Trumpflation. It’s going to a riot. Probably literally.
And people will be rioting against the Democrats, of course.
I just hope that when that happens, people don’t burn the cities. The cities did not vote for this.
The small towns, and the farmers did. I hope people remember that.
Yeah, this could cause a huge spike in food prices along with everything else. If that happens, its going to hurt a lot of people who cant even afford current food costs.
Especially when one considers that food prices alone have already increased over 20% from pre-pandemic pricing and wages have definitely not kept pace.
I should not have belly laughed the way I did at this. Have fun having your faces eaten and the face eating party. Unless your lobbyists are able to pay enough for the god kings approval.
I still lowkey expect that Cargills of this world with ear of emperor will soften that stance, because it cuts in their profits
The whole point is they want you to cut a “deal” with the right people. Appealing to their conscience isn’t going to work.
So they DON’T want to deport immigrants so that white people can have jobs picking vegetables for less than minimum wage?
🤣
Fuck that.
Get what you voted for.
(Yes I’m generalizing, but I’m pretty secure that the whole industry had a majority vote. Those in the industry that don’t support it should be active within their industries to avoid such nonsense in the future.)
(And if they voted majority blue, I’m sorry and exceedingly surprised)
Tough shit. You fucks voted for him, this is what you get. You’d think farmers of all people wouldn’t need to be told “You reap what you sow” but here we fucking are.
You don’t say.
Maintain the right to keeping slaves. They tried this awhile ago. It’s part of their culture.
Shoulda voted Democrat.
