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When Elites Slip Up and Say What They Really Think
While speaking before an audience of wealthy oligarchs in Dubai, George W. Bush opened his yap and told us what he really thought about illegal immigrants.
“Americans don’t want to pick cotton at 105 degrees, but there are people who want [to] put food on their family’s tables and are willing to do that. We ought to say thank you and welcome them.”
Gee, it’s almost as if he thinks illegal immigrants are just cheap menial laborers who can perform the work that is beneath him and his class. Although they may wrap it in sob-story rhetoric about compassion, or vacuous “we’re a nation of immigrant” platitudes, ultimately it’s about exploiting a source of cheap labor. (Leaving aside that a single operator in the air conditioned cab of a cotton harvester can pick more cotton in a day than a hundred indentured illegal servants.)
He’s not alone in this. This attitude is common among both Democrat and Republican elites. Bush’s successor described the role of illegal immigrants as mowing lawns and emptying bedpans. A Democrat candidate for the governorship of California similarly said that illegal immigrants were here to clean toilets and make up hotel rooms. A person who referred to illegal immigrants as “lettuce pickers” would be accused of using a racist slur; unless that person were Republican Senator John McCain defending cheap labor.
The people who have already secured their position at the top of the socio-economic hill are quite detached from the concerns of middle and working class Americans. No one in the Bush family is ever going to have to worry about losing out on a college placement because the Admissions Department prioritizes minorities. No one in the Bush family will ever lose out on a job opportunity because an illegal immigrant was willing to work for less. Nor are there any MS-13 cholos stalking the kind of neighborhoods where the Bushes live.
And what possible logic could there be behind insisting on importing tens of millions of unskilled third world laborers at a time when 30% of jobs are going to be replaced by automation unless the actual, literal goal is to create a permanent underclass?
Farm laborers in Washington State aren’t often paid the minimum wage.
“Who will pick your lettuce? If immigrants aren’t allowed into the country the price of lettuce will rise.”
I’ve heard this argument from Latinos and other open-borders advocates. Lettuce is in or on the ground. Cotton is not of course. Therefore, lettuce is harder to harvest and requires manual labor. So the story goes.
But I did a little research awhile back and found that there are machines that can pick lettuce. I believe mechanical harvesting of lettuce is done in Europe. So how come no investment in such technology here? My theory is that it’s cheaper to hire 3 illegals to do the work.
If anyone has better intelligence on this subject please chime in.
Bush is absolutely correct on this subject. I have lived in farm country all my life, even worked on the family farm. Farmers face many problems but two stand out to me in this context. First there are labor laws that make it difficult for them to procure labor cheaply. One example, from my home town, has to do with topping onions, as I’ve mentioned before. Used to e a job that high school kids did. Then “they” passed a law saying you had to be 18 to do that particular job. The onion farmers can’t afford to pay someone top dollar for that work, so they took to giving the job to migrant workers. The second problem is the attitude among young people. More and more they are unwilling to do those menial tasks that migrant workers are willing to do. A local berry producer where I live now, who used to hire kids predominantly, quit doing so one year, saying she got more out of migrant workers and had less trouble. She cited kids who showed up and didn’t want to work, parents coming down and creating problems, and child labor laws as reasons for her decision.
Of course it is. And if you were running a family farm that was constantly under attack by the left and their policies around taxation, land use, water rights, as they are here where I live, you’d do whatever you could get away with to keep the farm running.
This link is wrong. It’s a duplicate of the Obama bedpans link.
We have lots of cotton fields around here, and all of them are large. Small-scale cotton farming is a thing of the past. If you don’t own or rent machinery, you can’t make a profit.
I wonder how many inner city youths would jump at the chance to live and work somewhere else, even if it was seasonal. I’d rather work in the field than live in a crime-ridden neighborhood overrun by gangs . . .
Brilliant point. The left ruins everything. But, while ruining the country they get elected and get rich, too.
Is agricultural work in 105 degrees really worse than *roofing* in summer, in temperatures that may be considerably more than 105 degrees?
Yet there seem to be a lot of non-immigrants working as roofers.
Mike Rowe is a national treasure.
That’s exactly right: I read a VDH piece on this recently. He also points out that only about ten percent of immigrant labor is agricultural.
More importantly, this “Americans don’t be pickin’ cotton” meme is totally undercut by the huge drop in unemployment coinciding with the huge drop in illegal immigration under Trump.
Yuh, turns out it wasn’t that “there are jobs Americans just won’t do”, It was that Americans wouldn’t do’em as cheaply as what is, essentially, a slave population.
A slave population that has, incomprehensibly, been brought up to love its chains. Mexico, till very recently(see above) had a much lower unemployment rate that the US . It is, by all accounts, a nice place to live. It’s got two seacoasts, good climate, oil, and it is a neighboring democracy. So why not work at home? Because here, wages are higher, and the US govt colludes in allowing them to avoid taxation, which the Mexican govt assuredly would not do.
So it’s not just Bush’s embarrassing condescension and yuh, racism, in saying these brown folk can stand the sun better, that should make us cringe. It’s the fact that this masks what should be the greater embarrassment: our country is being fleeced by these wolves in sheeps’ clothing. That this suits the foreign government is not surprising; that our own government connives st it is scandalous.
You mean, like, forever? Just go on legalizing everyone and his family who wants to come in to do the work of a combine? Cuz guys who work like that don’t live real long. Or at least they don’t have very long working lives. So when these laborers become invalids at 45 or so, what then? Bring in a new crop of 20somethings and work them till they drop?
Wow what is this? First of all you propose country changing policy off a made up story. Who are these farmers? Who can’t find laborers?
I picked strawberries during the summer in the hot sun as a teenager. All jobs are jobs Americans will do. Do you plan on living in the same neighborhood as you’re illegal friends? Or will you enjoy the increase in home value as large previously livable neighborhoods are converted into the worst of Latin America. I guess you get cheap lettuce right? I guess the made up farmer you posited in your short paragraph. I’ll list the real neighborhoods that now have alcoholic criminals laying about the central parks of US cities.
New Brunswick, NJ
Elizabeth, NJ
Union, NJ
Utica, NY
Elmira, NY
The state of California outside the rich neighborhoods.
These places now border on the third world. Bilingual education, without the education.
Maybe the farmer should go out of business. Creative destruction.
Ok so your first issue sounds like the only solution is illegal work for if they have access to legal resource they would now longer be as cheap as the farmers need them to be.
Bush was wrong about alot of stuff and this is another one.
Does everyone want to live in Brazil?
I love it when the argument of legalizing something to make the problem go away comes up, as is often done for illegal aliens in this country. It’s so easily countered by saying if we legalize murder, those crimes will disappear overnight.
Legalizing the illegals in the eighties didn’t work then, and it won’t work now.
Pass that $15 per hour minimum wage that the lefties want, and the whole problem of cheap illegal labor will go away. You would have to actually enforce it, of course. Get some cops out to Malibu and start checking ID’s and paycheck stubs on the people cleaning the toilets there.
Heh. As if that would ever be enforced.
Yep, that’s what they think. They should know the attractiveness of illegal workers in the first place is you don’t have to pay them minimum wage, give them benefits, etc.
Yup. Once they’re legalized, they’re not cheap labor anymore.
So after all the ones already here get legalized, we’ll get the next wave of illegals. Yay!
That’s only one flavor of illegal immigrants. The other is that they provide fake/stolen identification, have taxes withheld (maybe). The benefit is still that these guys don’t complain (or else), don’t have to be paid much (less than others would work for), and benefits are not really utilized.
Government is a chinese finger trap. The further in we get, the harder it is to get out.
I have no idea what you are saying.
Oh, it worked, just not the way we hoped. On the day before Reagan’s amnesty, we had 3-4 million illegal immigrants here. On the day after, zero. And now, we have about four times as many as we had in 1986 before amnesty.
(i don’t know if anybody remembers who the majority of illegals were then: Irish. Every construction site in the country was staffed by illegal Irish workers. )
Pea and bean harvesters are quite common throughout the USA and the world. They are even used in China because the cost of labor makes manual harvesting uneconomical.
Technology is on the verge of a radical transformation of agriculture, especially traditional “produce.” Starting in the Netherlands, much of the traditional produce growing is moving indoors. The yields are dramatically higher, quality is better for many of the crops and soon will be for nearly all, disease and pest prevention is simpler and the harvesting increasingly is automated to one degree or another.
(Full disclosure – my company makes environmental controls for industrial sized greenhouses and grow-rooms)
An acre “under glass” with sophisticated hydroponics systems produces the same amount of tomatoes as 15 to 30 acres in the field. Today over 40% of the US tomato consumption is grown in Ontario and British Columbia with the majority being “under glass.” One common misconception is that the tough, ripened in transit with ethylene tasteless tomatoes are hothouse grown when in actuality they are often field grown and picked green, especially the ones used in food service….
A few days ago I was in the produce section of a grocery store in New England and overheard a man and wife talking. The woman told the man not to get a particular type of tomato because it was awful and hothouse grown and pointed him to a very popular bright red, tasty tomato and told him that these are better because they are grown the right way! In actuality, both came from the same place in upstate New York and were grown and harvested automatically in a computerized hydroponic grow room…….(client of mine)
The future is going to be very interesting indeed..
Great information, @bigfoot. Thanks.