Donald Trump said on Friday that farmers may be able to keep employing undocumented migrant workers without fearing enforcement raids under a system in which they would take “responsibility” for them.
Undocumented immigrants make up 4.6% of the U.S. workforce— more than 7 million people. Many of them work in agriculture, hospitality and construction, The Guardian reports.
Shay Myers, who runs Parma, one of the country’s largest onion farms, warned that “we will not feed our people without these workers,” considering that the Department of Agriculture estimates that over 40% of industry workers are undocumented.
If the labor that is necessary for feeding people can’t exist without undocumented workers, then perhaps the system itself is fundamentally broken if there is no easy path to citizenship.
You cannot have it both ways, Trump. Either it’s easy to come here and get papered up and nobody gets deported (and he loses his ultimate scapegoat), or it’s just as hard as it is now and we deport everyone working the fields and starve.
He can have it both ways. He is just going to say the farmers are heros for “taking the risk” and “protecting us all” from the violent cohort that is required to get our food to table now. Immigrants can be the enemy even more than ever, his base gets to eat up a new form of cognitive dissonance like a brain tumor, all will be well this time next year for them.