The War on Immigrants, Farmers, and Consumers

by Jacob G. Hornberger
Jun. 21, 2011

The Los Angeles Times published an article last week about another travesty in the war on immigrants. Georgia farmers are having trouble finding people to pick their fruit crops. The likely reason is that Georgia’s new harsh immigration law, set to take effect in July, is scaring off illegal immigrants.

The travesty is not a new one. A few years ago, California farmers had to watch their crops rot in the fields owing to a scarcity of workers to harvest them. Again, it was the war on immigrants that was dissuading workers from coming in and harvesting the crops.

A statist would respond, “Oh, Jacob, you must be mistaken. Everyone knows that illegal aliens steal jobs from Americans. Now that Georgia’s anti-immigrant bill is set to go into effect, the Georgians who have had their jobs stolen from them are going to be rushing back to reclaim them.”

Well, not so, Mr. Statist. It didn’t happen in California and it isn’t happening in Georgia. Notwithstanding a high unemployment rate in Georgia, the Times article points out, “Few here believe that native Southerners, white or black, wish to return to the land their ancestors once sharecropped or tended in bondage.”

For that matter, it doesn’t appear that any Americans who support the war on immigrants or who purport to love the poor are rushing to help the farmers whose blackberry crops must be harvested right away.

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