HALF OF FARM WORKERS ILLEGAL
By now, if you're up on the news, you know about the undocumented farm worker who killed Miss Tibbetts while she was out jogging. Today's headlines are digging deeper into the situation and wringing hands about half of all American agriculture workers are undocumented, or illegal immigrants.
Of course, all the solutions I've seen are related to easing H2A temporary worker paperwork to let more in. I'm certainly in favor of legal immigration rather than illegal immigration. Iconic sustainable agriculture guru John Ikerd once did a speech about the importance of maintaining communities and used a functioning cell as his jumping off point.
The only way for a cell to stay healthy is to keep in what's supposed to be there and keep out what's not supposed to be there. The cell wall is both a security and protection, the first place of defense, for the internal cell community. With that in mind, I would suggest that over running a community with anything foreign is a risky procedure. I've always said that a business that can't or won't hire its neighbors is fundamentally dysfunctional.
Interestingly, nobody wringing his hands about this murder and the tragedy of the undocumented worker is mentioning America's cheap food policy as the fundamental paradigm that starts the domino effect. A cheap food desire drives policy throughout the culture.
When you couple that with a welfare state that takes from workers at the point of a gun and gives hard earned income to folks unwilling to work, the dysfunction simply compounds. The orthodoxy is that Americans won't do this kind of work. I say that if Americans couldn't get a free ride on the backs of the workers, they current parasites would do that kind of work and would be grateful to get it. I'd like some of these welfare parasites (not all of them are, but enough are to taint the whole system) to follow me around for a day. The last week as I've been prepping this new property to receive cows tomorrow morning, I've been tackling brambles, osage orange, honeysuckle and multi-flora rose with a chainsaw. And I've sweated enough to make my pants wringing wet all the way down to my knees. And someone thinks the increase of that effort should go to some lazy American? I beg your pardon?
One of the reasons the food from our farm carries a higher sticker price than what's at the grocery store is because we pay enough to ourselves and staff to keep toxins out of our community cell. That's a stability and security benefit in which our customers invest.
What's wrong with that?