politics @lemmy.world RememberTheApollo_ @lemmy.world 2w ago

Immigration raids leave crops unharvested, California farms at risk

www.reuters.com reuters.com

ICE raids on farms risk food supply chain disruption
Farmworkers illegally in the US are in hiding
Crops are unharvested and rotting

21 comments

Manufactured crisis to enact a police state.
- Don't forget that it's also bankrupting farms which will allow corporations to buy up the land for pennies on the dollar. Land which they can then work with prison labor (AKA slaves). Trump really is making America great again for white oligarchs, anyway.
  
  Not that it was not great for them before.
- IT'S THE TRANS IMMIGRANTS FAULT
  
  MAGA likes to call the immigrants, "rats" but the truth is far more sinister! They're transgender mice! Too dangerous to even study in a lab!
  
  The crops stood no chance!
  
  Our only hope is to get rid of accurate hurricane forecasting and health care for the poor and elderly! If by some miracle a few billionaires get a tax break then maybe we'll make it through this crisis!
NOBODY saw this coming.
can't wait for conservatives to blame the incoming food crisis on immigrants
I'm sure the private prisons will offer their services.
- https://www.hcn.org/articles/agriculture-farmers-turn-to-prisons-labor-to-fill-labor-needs/
  
  Prison inmates are picking fruits and vegetables at a rate not seen since Jim Crow.
  
  Convict leasing for agriculture – a system that allows states to sell prison labor to private farms – became infamous in the late 1800s for the brutal conditions it imposed on captive, mostly black workers.
  
  https://www.texasstandard.org/stories/texas-plantation-prisons-history-forced-labor-tdcj-farms-convict-leasing/
  
  Today, 24 Texas prison units still have agribusiness operations. Nine are located on former plantations. Incarcerated workers harvest many of the same crops that slaves and later convict laborers did from 1871 to 1910. Like the previous owners, the Texas prison system still compels captive people to work its fields without pay. Guards on horseback monitor those who labor under the sun in fields of cotton and other crops.
Grapes of Wrath with extra fascist steps, jfc
Well, yes. That's what Americans voted for.
- Well, the Stupid-Americans did.
  
  They are the majority of those who went voting.
  
  The rest of you vote for it every day with your cowardly inaction (making a sign and going to a parade doesn’t count).
How soon before citizens are press ganged into doing the jobs that immigrants (legal and otherwise) have largely done without much of a fuss? Because I fear that’s what’s coming.
- https://lemmy.world/comment/17978093
  
  Prisoners are citizens.
  
  Prisoners can’t fill every need. Also, they aren’t typically used as janitors, which is also largely filled by immigrants. Or wait staff at restaurants, or car wash attendants.

21 comments