Gravelbourg & District Tribune

Last editorial for 2024.

Have a great Christmas and Happy New Year.

 

Recently I met someone who said he would have voted for Trump had he been living in the U.S. I believed him. He was the type who would vote for a rapist and convicted felon. He claimed the US was built on capitalism and Trump is a true capitalist. I reminded him that the US was built on slavery. Once laws started interfering with local slave markets big business shipped production to China and other low wage countries where people are still slaves under quasi dictatorships. The slave economy is still striving.

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Trump will be a dividing force. Many policies from education to immigration will be affected. The immigration file could be the most damaging. If they plan the biggest deportation of illegal immigrants it will have consequences. Agriculture executives and farm industry officials predict that groceries will become more expensive. In 2018-2020 just 36% of crop farmworkers were US citizens and 23% were authorized (illegal?) immigrants. The rest – 41% -- held no work authorization according to the USDA. What does ‘held no work authorization’ actually mean?

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“Nearly 300,000 undocumented immigrants work in the farming and agriculture industry as of 2021, including almost 200,000 in crop production and 66,000 for animal production, according to a 2021 analysis by the Center for American Progress.” Source CNN.com

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If no one is picking crops that means they will rot in the fields. Right?

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You can add roughly 206,000 undocumented immigrants working in food production. They do everything from animal slaughtering and seafood processing to fruit and vegetable preservation etc. That puts about 1.7 million undocumented people working across the food chain. In Idaho about 90% of the on-farm jobs in the dairy industry are filled by foreign workers according to Rick Naerebout, CEO of the Idaho Dairymen’s Association.

We no longer call them slaves. We call them undocumented immigrants.

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Good luck with your planned deportation Mr Trump (president elect).