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Farmers across America are sounding the alarm about the devastating impact of President Donald Trump’s ongoing war on immigrants.
According to inside sources, Trump recently hosted a closed-door meeting in which farmers said the administration’s deportations and border security projects are threatening the agricultural community’s ability to find workers. Despite those pleas, Trump’s war on immigrants has continued in full force.
There are huge negative consequences to the Trump agenda and we are seeing them come to light more and more each day.
During the roundtable conversation about agriculture, farmers and representatives of the sector brought up labor and immigration, the details of which have not been previously reported. Some farmers told Trump they often cannot find Americans willing to do the difficult farm jobs, according to interviews with nine of the 14 participants.
They said they were worried about stricter immigration enforcement and described frustrations with the H-2A visa program, the one legal way to bring in temporary seasonal agricultural workers.
… About half of U.S. crop workers are in the country illegally and more than two-thirds are foreign born, according to the most recent figures from the U.S. Department of Labor’s National Agriculture Workers’ Survey.
During the roundtable, Luke Brubaker, a dairy farmer from Pennsylvania, described how immigration agents had recently picked up half a dozen chicken catchers working for a poultry transportation company in his county.
The employer tried to replace them with local hires, but within three hours all but one had quit, Brubaker told the gathering at the White House.
Throughout Trump’s presidency, industry leaders from many different fields have warned him about the negative impact of his policies, but Trump has moved forward anyway.
Luckily, there’s now a movement in Washington D.C. to sidestep the president and implement some more reasonable immigration rules.
The farmers at the meeting said they stressed to the president the need for both short-term and permanent workers. They said there should be a program to help long-time farmworkers without criminal records, but who are in the country illegally, to become legal residents.
Last Tuesday, Democrats in the House and Senate said they would introduce a bill to give farmworkers who have worked illegally in the country for two consecutive years a “blue card” to protect them from deportation.
It is refreshing to finally see both Republicans and Democrats coming together to try and fix the mess Trump has created.
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