henever Republicans talk about immigration enforcement, amnesty supporters chant the same tired line: What about picking crops? What about meat processing? Those are necessary jobs that Americans simply refuse to do.
That argument was used to justify dozens of House Republicans’ latest mass amnesty effort. Their proposal would give illegal alien agriculture workers a pathway to legal status through the H-2A program, even though they have broken multiple laws by being in the United States illegally and getting a job without a work permit. Their employer has also violated the law by hiring these illegals.
The bill — which covers everything from harvesting crops, to raising livestock, to processing agricultural products — is a workaround to avoid Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) from standing in the way of low-cost labor for agriculture operations.
“With the border now secure, it is time to address these shortcomings and provide fair and legal pathways for all of agriculture to obtain workers when they are unable to find U.S. citizens willing to perform these noble but arduous tasks,” a letter from bill author Rep. Glenn Thompson, R-Pa., chairman of the House Agriculture Committee, states.
This trope has been pushed for a long time. President George W. Bush parroted it in 2006, stating, “There are people in our country doing work that Americans will not do, and those people ought to be given a chance to have a tamper-proof card that enables them to work in our country legally.”
Democrats do it too, always taking the opportunity to signal some kind of American fragility for not wanting to do “backbreaking” work. They also want to import as many illegals into the country as possible, by any means necessary.
The reality is that these companies, and the lobbies that support them like the Farm Bureau, are only interested in a consistent flow of foreign illegal labor because this allows them to pay subsistence wages. They know, in other words, that Americans expect more from employers because they want to be able to have a family and raise children in their own country, and subsistence wages kill that possibility.
“At the same time as compensation deteriorated dramatically, the share of meatpackers who are immigrants has increased enormously… [A]ny suggestion that native-born Americans are not interested in this type of work cannot be taken seriously given the huge decline in average hourly wages for these jobs,” a journalist and Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) researcher wrote in a 2009 report. “[T]here is no question that the jobs paid a great deal more a generation ago when the vast majority of workers were native-born. There is also no question that as the foreign born share of this workforce has increased, wages have fallen significantly. The desirability of any job is heavily dependent on compensation.”
For illegal aliens, low wages are sufficient. They often live on the farms where they work, and a large portion of their earnings go back to their home countries as remittances (which are barely taxed), and go a lot further because of the lower cost of living. They also are willing to put many more people in a rental property than Americans will, in worse living conditions.
Some “American” farms are actually owned by foreign companies, or are forced to contract with them because of the pseudo-monopoly that exists in much of the agriculture industry.
The Trump administration has highlighted that the “big four” beef production companies currently control 85 percent of the market, noting that two of them are foreign. They act as a “cartel” and “mounting evidence shows this monopoly power has slashed payments to ranchers, reduced herd sizes, driven up consumer prices, and threatened America’s food supply chain.”
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