We know that Trump’s anti-immigrant doctrine is red meat to all those Trump-ites who believe that ripping millions of hard-working women, men, and their children away from friends, families, homes, jobs, and schools is absolutely essential to making America ‘great again’.
Does anyone believe that Trump and his anti-immigrant pals have thought to ask a fundamental question: “How will purging millions of immigrant workers impact America’s ‘great again’economy?”
It’s not like Trump and friends can’t look around to see that the anti-immigrant thing has been done before.
In 2011, Alabama’s embattled Governor Robert Bentley tried to do what Donald Trump is now trying to do . . . arbitrarily get rid of undocumented workers by implementing draconian anti-immigrant laws, effectively driving thousands of agricultural workers out of the state.
How did that work out for the good people who live and work in Alabama?
Not well, it seems.
Alabama farmers, unable to find enough field workers to plant crops, care for crops during growth, and harvest crops, now sit on their front porches each fall and watch crops rot in their fields and give up hundreds of millions of dollars a year in lost revenues.
If that isn’t bad enough, the honorable Governor Bentley and his Republican devotees in the Alabama state legislature failed to consider the undeniable fact that missing field workers would no longer contribute millions of dollars to state and federal treasuries and would no longer create and sustain thousands of collateral jobs by purchasing millions of dollars in products and services.
In a nutshell, no pun intended, the overall negative impact on Alabama’s economy has been devastating.
Evidently failing to learn anything at all from the Alabama anti-immigrant caper, Georgia’s Republican legislature and governor thought it would be a splendid idea to make the Peach State ‘great again’ by cracking down on undocumented workers and wound up cutting the state’s agricultural workforce in half while costing Georgia farmers nearly $150 million a year in lost revenues.
Like it or not, agriculture across America is critically dependent upon migrant workers because Americans typically are unwilling or unable to perform physically challenging work for minimal wages.
Even parolees, as farmers in Georgia found out, couldn’t or wouldn’t cut it as field workers.
Beyond the farms of America, undocumented workers care for our children, clean our homes, manufacture, warehouse, and ship our products, operate our cash registers, stock our shelves, and wash our cars while contributing hundreds of millions of dollars more each year in taxes and consumer spending than they take out of the economy.
While Trump seems to be having lots of fun pandering to his base by tearing apart the lives of millions of immigrant workers who understandably came to America to make life better for themselves and their children, one wonders how Trump and his Republican cronies in Congress plan to offset the staggering losses America will undoubtedly suffer.
That is . . . if Trump and Republicans in Congress even care.
What do you think?