Florida farmer: "My Mexicans are great, the others ones suck"
“There is nothing more frightful than ignorance in action.” ― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
On May 10th, 2023, a Ron DeSantis press release celebrated his ‘toughest in the nation’ anti-immigrant laws.
“Today, Governor Ron DeSantis signed Senate Bill 1718 to combat the dangerous effects of illegal immigration caused by the federal government’s reckless border policies.”
DeSantis doubled down on “reckless.”
“The legislation I signed today gives Florida the most ambitious anti-illegal immigration laws in the country, fighting back against reckless federal government policies and ensuring the Florida taxpayers are not footing the bill for illegal immigration.”
The reaction from Florida farmers has been rapturous approval. These self-confessed conservative men of the land (I’m sure there are some women, but they have no speaking parts in this farce) are subscribers to the mindless orthodoxy that illegal immigration is an existential threat to the US.
However, they believe an exception should be carved out for their brown-skinned workers who, they proudly maintain, are “not here to play.” Presumably, they mean in contrast to other immigrants who do not work for them and are consequently shiftless bastards.
Unfortunately for Florida’s agricultural sector, Desantis’s anti-business legislation does not discriminate between good foreigners and peripatetic rapists. This lack of discrimination has caused consternation among Florida farmers, who have discovered that local workers do not have the knowledge or constitution to make them money.
One of these good old boys, a sweet potato farmer named Smith, had this to say after trying to run his operation with Anglos. (Video from Meides Touch)
“I’ve probably had three or four [citizens] out of 50 that is really worth anything as far as being a good worker. It’s just a lot of it is, is they’re not skilled and they don’t know how to do what we’re doing. And they’re not durable enough.
They come out, work two or three hours, and “Whew, I’ve had it and I can’t take this anymore.”
A voiceover on the video says that while Smith usually employs 40 workers, he is now down to 15. And those milksops are unproductive. According to Smith’s calculation, the average American picks 75 buckets of sweet potatoes daily, while skilled immigrants pick 200. The effects on profits are devastating.
Here is the math. For each of the 15 Americans vs. immigrant workers, Smith is down 125 buckets a day. For the other 25 unfilled positions, he is down 200 buckets. The total sweet potato bucket shortage is, therefore, 15 x 125 + 25 x 200. A loss of 6,875 buckets a day.
If we assign an arbitrary profit to Smith of $1 per bucket. That represents a loss of potential profit in a 6-day-week of $41,250. If we, again arbitrarily, say that the sweet potato picking season is six weeks, Smith is losing nearly $250,000 in profit. Note: This is a back-of-the-envelope calculation, and the number could be higher or lower. But I think the point is clear.
Two Florida melon farmers agree that immigrants are a boon to the community. One says,
“These guys are coming here for a reason. They’re coming here for serious work, to try and support their families in Mexico or wherever they come from. They’re not here to play.”
What these farmers cannot get their heads around — and what conservative politicians will not admit — is that almost all of the millions of undocumented immigrants in the US are not in America to lollygag on the taxpayer’s dollar. Do these farmers think they have a magical ability to attract the few ‘good Mexicans’? Or is it more likely that the typical undocumented immigrant is a go-getter?
So dire has this shortage of skilled pickers become that some Republican legislators who passed the punitive legislation are reassuring the Hispanic community that the law does not do what DeSantis claims it does. Here is what State Representative Brock had to say to a Spanish-speaking audience — through a translator.
“This [the new law] is 100% supposed to scare you. I’m a farmer. And farmers are mad as hell. We are losing employees. They are starting to move to Georgia and other states. It’s urgent that you talk to all your people and convince them that you have the resources, State Representatives, and other people who can explain the bill to you.
We had the best President in my life, the last 30 years. And I am still supporting Donald Trump. I love my Governor. He’s the greatest Governor, the greatest Governor.”
It is doublethink. A Florida politician is so deep in self-delusion he thinks that the targets of a law he voted to pass should find people to tell them it does not say what it says. He argues that immigrants should move to a state whose Governor makes political hay by demonizing immigrants. And this magical thinker supports an ex-President who launched his career by calling Mexican immigrants “rapists.”
A second speaker then adds to the insanity.
“But I agree with everything Rep. Brock said. This is a bill basically to scare people from coming to the state of Florida, and I think it has done its purpose. This bill really doesn’t have any teeth.
And even though we’re immigrants — I was born in Cuba and came here when I was 2 years old — we need to have immigration that is legal. We need to have legal immigration, and the federal government has completely left us you know. They haven’t done their job.
The simplest way to make immigration legal is to stop passing laws making it illegal. Problem solved. However, Republicans are not guided by common sense. If they thought it would get votes, they would pass laws making it illegal for water to flow downhill. America has been passing racist anti-immigrant measures since President Chester A. Arthur signed the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. Yet the US has had a significant undocumented alien population ever since. It is cynical politics to blame the current Oval Office occupant.
President Biden may talk about bipartisan solutions to problems. But there can be no agreement between two parties when one is motivated to do the right thing and the other is angling to get elected by appealing to self-injurious bigots.