Who needs guest workers on the farm when you can pay higher and higher food prices to the xenophobe's delight?

 

In today’s Seattle Times it is being reported even Republican politicians from Washington are demanding that Congress pass, in response to rising food prices, even a limited immigration reform bill that will help local farmers—who we might guess tend to vote Republican—be allowed the migrant labor they desperately need. Rep. Dan Newhouse was quoted as telling lawmakers that “The ball is in their court” and that there needs to be more “urgency” to “pass much, much needed immigration reform.”

Of course farmers have been complaining about this for a long time. The immigration reform being talked about is “difficult” to move for the usual xenophobic reasons, and prior immigration “reform” laws failed to address the labor needs of farmers and other occupations (food processing, forestry, construction) greatly dependent on migrant or immigrant labor that is allegedly “low-skill” yet impacts people’s pocketbooks—and life—more than “high-tech” desk workers or phone-answerers (when a human actually answers the phone).

The Trump administration under the direction of racists appointed to the Department of Homeland Security, and of course the likes of Stephen Miller and Jeff Sessions, made the already cumbersome guest worker visa program more onerous to use than it already was. As I have pointed out many times before, the border “crisis” was the creation of the failure to understand the cross-border economics of migrant behavior: when there was work, they came; when there wasn’t, they left. Beyond the border, immigration--legal or not--has mostly an existential effect on people; most can't even say how it "effects" them concretely, save to express their prejudices while conveniently being blind to their importance to the economy.

The  2009 documentary The Other Side of Immigration also tells us from the mouths of migrants themselves that they have two choices in life: come to the U.S. to work, or starve—well actually there is a third “choice”: stay and be killed by cartels fueled by the American greed for illegal drugs, or by U.S.-bred gangs. However, asking people around here if they feel any “empathy” for them is like asking them if they “empathize” with that Canadian goose someone  ran over while it was crossing the road: too bad, it shouldn’t be here.

So here we go around the merry-go-round of xenophobes and nativists who prefer to play politics with the issue and “work” on their constituents’ paranoia and prejudices. Yet in the distant past there was acceptance of the “status quo”: migrants from Mexico were tolerated as long as they were useful, and if a local politician needed an “issue,” local law enforcement and militias would play the game of gathering up the excess and “repatriate” them to Mexico to appease the masses—which happened on a mass scale, even to gathering up hundreds of thousands of U.S. citizens who at least looked “Mexican,” during the Great Depression. With labor shortages during World War II, the “bracero” program was instituted allowing migrants to enter the country to work, and the program continued when “real” Americans felt that “low” work like farm labor was fitted only for “Mexicans.”

Of course racism didn’t go away, and the Eisenhower administration’s “Operation Wetback” was a response to that. But the real problem with so-called “immigration reform” began with the laws passed in 1965, which for the first time put a “quota” on the number immigrants from Latin America legally allowed in the country, and the bracero program was ended. Since then, the so-called “reform” laws passed in the Reagan and Clinton administrations that sought to tighten immigration and guest worker rules only made things worse, giving migrants the “choice” of illegal entry or, well, illegal entry to work the jobs that American employers depended on them to do, one way or the other.

Current immigration and guest worker rules simply ignore reality. “Native” labor can’t be persuaded to move over to Yakima and other Eastern Washington locations for back-breaking seasonal work in the hot sun without the “carrot” of astronomical wages that would send food prices to heights that even the rich would complain about. There was the pilot program to fly-in farm labor from the Caribbean on the government dime, and that failed miserably. Notice how food prices have gone up lately? Don’t blame that on the war in Ukraine; that is the fault of not enough farm laborers and food processors (and to a certain extent a shortage of truckers).

But while a growing number of Republicans with farm constituencies have expressed support for a limited immigration bill that addresses the guest worker shortage, you have to deal with those politicians who have hyped the border “crisis”—like, naturally, Marjorie Taylor Greene—and far-right media such as the Tucker Carlsons and Laura Ingrahams of the world for whom anyone with the “wrong” shade of brown or has a Spanish name is a threat to civilization as we know it (as if acting “civilized” is part of  the xenophobe’s nature).

So while Rep. John Thune, the Republican Minority Whip, introduced bills helping states like his own, South Dakota (remember that the state’s governor, Kristi Noem, offered to send the state’s National Guard to the border) to obtain “desperately needed” H-2B visas according to the Times, then there are senators like John Cornyn and Joni Ernst, the likes of whom created this problem in the first place. There is no “raging border crisis” as Cornyn—and unfortunately the media as well—is claiming, but if this was a problem before, they have had many opportunities to “fix” it. Yet when they did "something," all they did was make it worse. Now they don’t want to “fix” it because it is too useful as a political weapon.

Which frankly proves my point: politicians like this created the border “crisis” because of their own ignorances and prejudices, and they are now in this “hole” of their own making that, because of the nativist propaganda they find useful during election time, they can’t or won’t dig themselves out of. The border “crisis” can’t be “fixed” overnight, and in the meantime, food prices continue to rise faster than wages in part because of the blind bigotry of politicians over the decades.