For JD Vance, the Republican candidate for vice president, immigrants with TPS or parole are “illegals” who would also be removed from the country under the mass deportation plan that Donald Trump wants to implement if he is elected to a second term on November 5.
In addition to falsely accusing Haitian immigrants of eating the pets of residents of Springfield, Ohio, Vance labels them as “illegals,” even though they are covered by these programs.
Speaking in Raleigh, North Carolina, Vance also dismissed the idea that mass deportations would harm the economy because undocumented immigrants work in key industries such as agriculture and construction.
“If you talk to farmers, farmers are just as upset about open borders as almost anybody else. So I think farmers — and I certainly reject the idea that the only way to have a productive agricultural economy is to allow 25 million legal aliens into this country — that doesn’t make enough sense,” Vance said.
What doesn’t make sense is his response, which seems to ignore that farmers support immigration reform that would allow them to alleviate labor shortages by lowering production costs, which in turn reduces food prices. Or that these undocumented workers already work in agricultural fields and Americans don’t want those jobs, as the United Farm Workers (UFW) “Take Our Jobs” campaign proved. Or that the temporary agricultural worker visa system needs urgent transformation.
Nor does it acknowledge the devastating effect on the country’s economy of deporting 5% of the U.S. workforce, the percentage of workers who are undocumented. That’s 22% of all farmworkers, 15% of construction workers and 8% of manufacturing workers.
On May 12, 2008, there was a massive raid at a meatpacking plant, Agriprocessors, in Postville, Iowa, under President George W. Bush. About 400 workers were arrested.
Nearly 300 were charged with aggravated identity theft in order to force them to plead guilty to lesser crimes and expedite their deportation. Many of those deported took their U.S. citizen children with them.
America’s Voice visited Postville in 2009, one year after the raid, and the town, which had been brought to life by the presence and work of immigrants, was still dealing with the humanitarian and economic aftermath.
Postville’s largest employer, Agriprocessors, lost a third of its workforce and filed for bankruptcy. The company was under federal investigation for several labor violations.
With no residents able to afford to buy, businesses lose customers and close. One resident told us that within a year of the raid, “a Guatemalan restaurant and bakery, and a Mexican clothing store and restaurant had closed.”
In 2018, under President Trump, there was another raid in Tennessee, at a meat processing plant, where 100 employees were arrested. ICE was sued for racial profiling, among other things, because they focused solely on Latino employees. As in Postville, there was chaos, citizen children stranded in schools, families separated, the economy affected.
And in 2019, another raid was carried out in Mississippi, in which 680 workers were arrested, repeating the same pattern of citizen children separated from their undocumented parents, the family economy destroyed and consequently the economy of the community and the state because they are consumers who stop buying and paying taxes.
An analysis by the Center for Migration Studies in August of this year concludes that “the events in Jackson demonstrate that mass detentions and deportations impact American communities with minimal benefits. Replicating such an event in multiple cities across the country may satisfy certain views, but there are economic and humanitarian considerations that should accompany those views.”
He adds that past experiences with mass deportations should discourage attempts to do so on a large scale. “The costs would be exorbitant. It would leave large swaths of American communities decimated. Local and national economies would take a hit. Families and loved ones would be separated…Immigration must be addressed and the rule of law respected. But the solutions must also be practical.”
If only there were a way to match supply and demand for labor in a regular, orderly manner, where both parties benefit and it is a process free of drama and, in the most extreme cases, free of death. There is. It is called legislative immigration reform, but politicking, demagoguery, extremism and racism prevent it from becoming a reality.