You go first. Set the example.FOX: I think American citizens are willing to do the jobs that illegal immigrants are willing to do.
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 9, 2025
LORI CHAVEZ-DeREMER: Americans *are* willing to do the job. What we have to give them is the opportunity to have those jobs. pic.twitter.com/X7xQEm5J55
Farmers already report crops in the fields are not harvested because “Americans” don’t want the work. It’s low pay, long hours, outside in the summer, and it lasts until the harvest is done. That’s the aspect Chavez-DeRemer and the other empty heads don’t grasp. Farm labor is migrant because it’s seasonal. Laborers are itinerant because they go where the crops are, and not too many crops are harvested by hand in the winter and early spring. This is what drew people out of the fields into the factories in the first place: year ‘round, steady work. Where’d the factories go? Capitalism went international and foreign countries had lower labor costs (and fewer labor protections), so American companies had to outsource, or go out of business. Because despite the internet yahoos who declare they’d pay $65 for a 🍑 picked by “real” American hands, nobody else in America will. Or will pick it, either. No one except the people here who don’t have other choices open to them.
The market rules. And now some don’t like the results; for the worst, most racist and xenophobic reasons possible. But we did this to ourselves. We have met the enemy, etc., etc., etc. And yes, this is still Omelas. Those people aren’t better off working as migrant farm workers. Nobody is. But nobody even hums Woody Guthrie’s “Pastures of Plenty,” or “Deportee,” any more. Even fewer know the lyrics.
So who’s surprised?
My first real job (not counting mowing lawns and such for cash) was as a field hand for Consolidated Cigar, picking tobacco in the Connecticut River valley at the age of 15. While other jobs required you to be 16, farm work only required an age of 14. We picked in the summer heat of Connecticut, in the 90's, under nets that held in the humidity, for farm wage. Farm wage was less than minimum wage, $2.83 versus $3.27 that they had to pay older workers. It was hot, filthy (after work you had to use a nylon brush to scrub the tar from the tobacco plants and all the dirt that stuck to the tar, from every exposed surface of skin. Your clothes were in even worse condition), we were poorly treated, and low paid. The kids from the nicer towns wouldn't do the work unless they were in the barns, but we can from a more blue collar town so we got to go into the fields. The adults were almost all immigrant field workers, Jamaican (and oddly, a group of local near elderly women who only spoke Polish, they somehow got started may decades before and still worked sewing the leaves which took some skill)
ReplyDeleteNo one worked picking once they were 16, even at minimum wage, there were far better jobs even in the lousy economy of the early 80's. I was a cook at a Dairy Queen and a janitor at a school the next summer and thought them significant steps up for the same money I would have made picking. To think that the average American is going to do that seasonal work under those conditions is delusional. None of the people suggesting this have the remotest idea about the nature of the work.
They just want to keep their privileges, and expel the brown people who so disturb their slumber. They all imagine they are princesses, and the brown people are the pea under their 98 mattresses.
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