Trump administration quietly tries to find a solution for migrant workers amid industry concerns
Trump administration quietly tries to find a solution for migrant workers amid industry concerns
As the Trump administration has doubled down on its hardline immigration agenda, behind the scenes senior Trump officials and the president himself have grappled with the consequences of that crackdown against a key portion of the workforce: migrant workers.
Wanna bet that he uses the immigrants in the camps? Meaning, slave labor.
That's the only way it's gonna work, because no immigrant is going to trust this Administration at its word. These poor folks can do everything correctly, by the book, and Trump can still say "Sike! Off you go to CECOT"
Trump already said he's going to make the farmers "responsible for these people" — Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8QqdLW8K8Jg&list=RDNS8QqdLW8K8Jg&start_radio=1
He even called the farmers "owners".
Duh. America was built on slaves and blood. It's the only way they know.
Exactly. Probably by design.
I won't take that bet because it was their plan from the start.
I bet it's slaves. It's always slaves with this lot.
Cant have slaves, yet? Oh well, criminals. Just take the people who would be slaves and find something to lock them up for, then slaves.
Capitalism is an open air prison and the rules are getting harsher for some. Then, for more. Soon, everybody else.
"Criminals" = slaves
Source: 13th Amendment
And with Trump, anyone can be a criminal with no due process.
According to the 13th Amendment:
Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
Arrest the migrant workers. Funnel them through a for profit prison. Rent the workers to the same farms as slave labor and pocket what would normally have been their wages.
Wish I didn't see this as a highly likely scenario.
It's pretty annoying to always see for-profit prisons mentioned like they're the majority. Only 8% of prisoners in the US are housed in them.
The fact is that government run prisons are just as corrupt, if not more, through contracts that include kickbacks for the people in charge, or contracts owned by companies the people in charge or their families own.
The concentration camps the immigrants are being sent to are where the labor will come from.
if over 90.000 prisoners held in private prisons (in 2022!) is "only" to you, than yeah, those couple lifes is prolly just a drop in the ocean
The duly convicted part will only slow them down. I'm sure they'll establish new immigration courts or appoint new, loyal judges who will render a verdict every 5 minutes if asked.
What's that you say, former citizen with no constitutional rights?
Silly you thinking that it could be limited to "immigrants".
It's gonna be children and slave labour isn't it?
Ain't no way like the American way
If by slave labor you mean prison slave labor which will include the aforementioned detained migrant prisoners doing their old jobs, then yes.
Wait, just hear me out, if we wait for the concentration camps to fill up with immigrants and political prisoners, they can provide the same labor FOR FREE while also providing a nice sum for the private prison firms that, in turn, grease the prison-to-profit machine!
All this with the added bonus that some of the labor will already be skilled. It's brilliant!!
This has literally been the plan from the start, it's not a joke.
Wait, just hear me out, if we wait for the concentration camps to fill up with immigrants and political prisoners, they can provide the same labor FOR FREE while also providing a nice sum for the private prison firms that, in turn, grease the prison-to-profit machine!
All this with the added bonus that some of the labor will already be skilled. It’s brilliant!!
I actually thought of this myself, non-sarcastically. Maybe this is some kind of attempt to push out the undocumented and replace them with prison labor, especially since the Constitution still allows for prisoners to be used as slaves. And given this country's history, a part of me was surprised that prisoners being used as farm labor wasn't already the norm. My guess is that it would simply be too much of a logistical nightmare to monitor the workers to prevent them from escaping, and if you've gotta pay the guards to watch the prisoners, that kinda defeats the point. At that point, might as well just pay regular workers instead of dealing with all the BS and risks associated with using convicted criminals. Using criminals involuntarily would also run the risk of one of them contaminating the food supply (which, according to some prison documentaries, is not uncommon in prison kitchens to the point where staff members won't eat food if it even if it came in contact with the prison kitchen due to the risk of contamination). A prisoner contaminating the food out of revenge or just for their own amusement wouldn't mean that C-Block won't get dessert today. It affects the food supply of millions of people.
That said, I'm sure Trump will try this. And then food costs will go up anyway because the overhead costs and the costs and risks associated with watching over the prisoners will exceed what the farmers were paying the undocumented workers, and Trump will still somehow tout it as a win.
Also I doubt farmers want prisoners with grudges going about their property. Best case scenario they damage something accidentally and don't say anything which could become quite expensive depending on the thing that got broken, for example a water valve. Worst case scenario they go out of their way to break shit and basically the same problem but intentional and coordinated. Also I doubt the guards would be much better.
When they find reasons to keep certain immigrants, deportations of others will increase to take up the slack. Every American, even multi-generation born and raised should be afraid. Trump and his Republican administration isn't constrained by either the law or the constitution. He has proven that the US has no mechanism for stopping him from doing whatever the hell he wants.
I bet I could be on the chopping block...I dunno how good their digital foot printing it is, but if it is good then they will know I really, really, really, really, really, really hate Trump.
I could see my citizenship being questioned because of how I was born. I could also see them passing a law that would force me choice between my dual nationalities.
FYI folks I was born to a US service member.
Here's the big problem. The elephant in the room that nobody is willing to talk about. The elephant that is and will forever prevent the issue from ever being solved.
Farmers aren't worried about the lack of immigrants willing to pick the crops. They're worried about the lack of immigrants willing to pick the crops at a wage that they are willing to pay. Very important distinction between the two. And that wage is often far below minimum with no benefits or employee protections. They could start hiring people at fair market wages, allow them to establish unions, and receive benefits. But that labor cost would be far, far higher than they're paying now, and would likely lead to a sharp rise in food prices that the general public would likely not be willing to accept. Farmers have to consistently dodge the question of why not just hire US citizens and legal immigrants because they can't answer them without admitting that they pay sub-minimum wages in violation of numerous laws and that paying regular citizens competitive wages would lead to huge spikes in food prices. This is because the vast majority of the public does not understand that the low food prices they're accustomed to is because the farm industry has been exploiting immigrant labor for decades if not centuries, and have never had to learn what food would cost if workers were paid competitive wages and benefits. So the idea that competitive wages would lead to higher food prices is literally a foreign concept to a lot of people, because they've never had to deal with it.
Which is where we end up in a catch-22. Actually, several catch-22s.
Someone has to pick the crops. Pick one. Do you want undocumented immigrants doing it under the table with sub-minimum wages, no benefits, and no protections? Or do you want legal immigrants and US citizens doing the work with full pay, benefits, and protections but significantly higher food prices? If there were a way we could get the best of both worlds, farmers would be doing it already.
And Trump himself also has a problem. By trying to find a "solution" to this, he's essentially admitting that the only way to keep food prices low is to employ (and allow farmers to exploit) the very undocumented immigrants he is trying to deport. He's essentially admitting that our entire agricultural industry is dependent on the US essentially willfully turning a blind eye and ignoring its own immigration, discrimination, and employment laws. He's tacitly admitting that enforcement of his own policies would lead to a spike in food prices that even he acknowledges would be unsustainable, either due to higher labor costs, lost crops, or both. He basically has to come off as looking ultra-tough on immigration while being forced to acknowledge the need of the very people he's trying to deport. This isn't exclusive to Trump. Any president would face the same dilemmas. It's why previous Presidents have largely avoided the entire subject like the plague outside of giving some political talking points that they never actually act on.
We, as a country, need to start to fully understand and decide what we want. Do we want the employment practices of the agricultural industry to be above board, even if it leads to significantly higher food prices? Or do we acknowledge that our agricultural industry is entirely reliant on a supply of immigrant labor willing to work at sub-minimum wages and that maybe getting rid of all the brown people isn't such a good idea after all. Because if that's the case, we need to adjust our immigration laws and employment guidelines accordingly. Maybe we need a special class of immigrants who get a work permit only to work on these farms, and their visas become revoked if they become unemployed. Maybe a path to citizenship where if they come and work on the farms for X years at sub-minimum wages, they become eligible for a permanent visa where they can work anywhere?
I don't know the solution. But I do know that as long as both sides keep tiptoeing around the reality of the situation, the problems will never get solved.
I think we all want to be paid a fair wage for our labor AND and fair price for food, with reasonable expectations of safety on both sides. 50+ years of wage stagnation and the expectation from major corpos that they can keep extracting more profits are two factors working against us, though. The problem isn't about what consumers are willing to pay for food.
We, the People, aren't going to be able to fix this if we don't start electing leaders that can resist big-dollar donors and lobbyists, because we need regulations around major markets that will be met with insane amounts of resistance by money-backed interest groups. We need labor reforms, we need housing reforms, we need finance sector reforms, and none of those are favorable for a Fortune 500 company's "Line go up" policy when implemented. But far too much money has flowed out of the hands of the poor and middle class while the ultra-wealthy are buying islands and yachts (and bugout bunkers in case of an uprising or whatever), and fixing that issue in both an acute and a systemic way is necessary and needs to happen before we get better.
The problem isn’t about what consumers are willing to pay for food.
This is how I can tell when people have either a fundamental misunderstanding of the problem or are severely underestimating the size of the problem.
For example, an apple costs around $0.20 right now. Which means that the supermarket is probably paying the wholesaler around $0.10, and the wholesaler is probably paying the farmer about four cents if he's lucky. Let's just say that $.02 of that is labor and $.02 is other costs not related to this discussion.
(Note that I do not have any clue about how much undocumented workers are paid, how much fruit they can pick, etc. I am making these numbers up for merely easy-to-understand illustrative purposes, But the underlying point would still hold if you plug the real numbers in instead.)
Let's save the farm employs one undocumented worker for $5.00 an hour. He picks 10,000 apples over the course of a week, which breaks out to 2 cents an apple. Now let's say he has to pay that employee a fair wage plus benefits. We're probably talking about $15.00 an hour in wages, and $7.50 an hour effective for benefits period that comes out to $22.50 an hour. If that employee is still only picking 10,000 apples a week, That comes out to a price of $0.09 an apple. Which means even if the rest of the farmer's costs stayed the same, he is now selling that 4 cent apple for about $0.11. The wholesaler is going to pass that cost onto the supermarket which means the apple they were previously selling for a dime now costs $0.22. The supermarket is going to do the same thing, so that means that the apple that you paid $0.20 for before now costs probably north of $0.40. So if you buy a bag of apples, you can expect the cost of that bag of apples to go up by around $3 to $4 per bag.
This probably doesn't sound like a lot. Maybe you'd be OK with paying 3 to $4.00 more for that bag of apples. But here's the thing. Now do that with oranges. Then carrots. Than every other fruit or vegetable you buy.
Then do the same with meats. Because they're getting hit with a double whammy: not only do they have undocumented workers that are now being paid significantly more than before, but the costs of their feed that they feed the animals also just doubled. Which means one way or the other the price of your meat is going to go up by a lot.
Now do the same thing with every other grocery item you buy that requires food grown on farms. That three to $4.00 per Item now adds up to a $100 to $200 spike in your grocery bill. And if you go shopping twice a month, you're talking about a $200 to $400 spike in the price of your food. At a minimum. I believe my estimates are conservative.
I am not a fan of all of the people who take copium by saying “This is it! This is the thing that will take Trump down!” with every passing day. But I believe if you tell people that they can expect the price of their groceries to go up at a minimum $200 to $400.00 a month, Even I think that might be enough to get his supporters to yank him out of the White House by the short and curlies. Remember the price of eggs at their peak? Imagine telling people that that's now the new floor. Imagine the impact when restaurants have to start doubling their prices. Imagine the elderly, who in some cases already are foregoing medication to pay for food, only to find out that they still wouldn’t be able to eat. When the price of a McDonald's value meal starts at 20 bucks just for their basic 2 burgers and a fry. And that's only the beginning. I cannot begin to describe what kind of unforeseen side effects we could also expect throughout the economy.
People in the US have literally never had to pay a price for food that would be based on paying the workers a fair wage. We have been exploiting the undocumented for literal decades if not a century, and before that we had literal slavery. This has lead to a Society of people who have no idea how much their food would cost if they were paying the workers a fair wage, and would not accept it if they did because the price would be so high that it would seem unrealistic even if you could prove it to be mathematically correct. A shift like that would have an impact on literally every aspect of our economy in ways that I do not think our economy would be able to withstand, even if it is the morally correct thing to do.
Why can't the government subsidize food prices or farm wages? I mean it beats wasting it on tax breaks for billionaires and weapons for Israel.
Why indeed.
That's socialism in a nutshell.
Regardless of your opinion on socialism overall, the GOP would cheer Marjorie Taylor Greene leading an LGBTQ parade in honor of black gay atheists across the entire state of Alabama before they allowed that to happen.
You're very right, but one important caveat is that US-born citizens do not want these jobs. They literally think it's beneath them and won't do it.
I'm serious; I've worked with migrant farm laborers for 12 years. Citizens will choose exploitation over and over and over rather.
US-born citizens do not want these jobs.
They don't want these jobs at a price farmers are willing or able to pay.
Of course US citizens don't want these jobs. They'd make more money as a Wal Mart greeter. I wouldn't want them either at that price. Offer $30 an hour, fair working conditions, and benefits to people and you'd have a lot more people willing to stand out in the sun and pick crops all day.
The problem is that people would refuse to pay the price for that fruit that the farmers would have to charge. That's where the issue is. Start offering people $30 an hour and watch how fast those jobs get filled........until people see the new price of groceries. Then they'll drive down to Mexico and start dragging the workers back to the US themselves.
I feel it's necessary to point out a lot of these farmers are contacted to major brands, both food and pest control, who take the majority of profit, often leaving the farmers themselves without much.
We literally used to have Farm worker visas but then Americans got too racist against the workers who pick our food and then they stop giving them out it's so frequently so now we have the undocumented labor problem
checks notes
The USA has about 20% of the world's prison population and only around 4% of the world's population.
Looks like we found our solution!
Round them up, then make them work the same jobs for free. Just like they planned. Just like we predicted.
Fuck America and their industry
Like, a final solution?