Bloomberg's Businessweek has a story on labor shortages on the farms and in the factories of southwestern Kansas where some of food you eat is produced.
The potential consequences of Trump's crackdown on immigrant workers should concern all of us, but I have no sympathy for local residents for reasons Businessweek helpfully illuminates.
“Two weeks ago, my boss told me, ‘I need more Mexicans like you,’” says a 25-year-old immigrant employed at a farm in the southwest part of the state, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he’s trying to get his paperwork in order. “I said, ‘Well, they’re kind of hard to find.’” [...]
“The threat of deportation and the potential loss of our workforce has been very terrifying for all of us businesses here,” says Trista Priest in Satanta, Kan. She’s the chief strategy officer at Cattle Empire, the country’s fifth-largest feed yard, whose workforce is about 86 percent Latino.
In Haskell County, where Cattle Empire is the biggest employer, 77 percent of voters cast ballots for Trump, compared with 57 percent statewide. But Priest and other employers interviewed for this story complained that the immigration policies emanating from Washington, 1,500 miles away, clash with the needs of local businesses.
Maybe they shouldn't have done that.
Representative Roger Marshall, a Republican whose district includes southwest Kansas, says immigration is the No. 1 concern he hears about from constituents. The freshman congressman says he’s confident that once the border is secure, “President Trump will look at this, too, as an economic problem.”
Yes, once Trump has created an economic problem, maybe he'll look into it.
This isn't just a matter of immigrants taking on jobs that Americans refuse to do, it's also a matter of taking on jobs for which there are no Americans available to fill them. We need and depend on an influx of young labor that isn't being replaced. Over 75 million baby boomers are at or near the retirement age, and a majority of them voted for Trump. They voted for a shortage in labor that is meant to replace them.
White Americans just love to fuck themselves over. What can you do?