That’s me in the above image spiking the first afternoon’s cutting of my 2016 dark air-cured tobacco crop. That was my last crop. I quit after 2016 because of the untenable labor situation. Tobacco is one of the most profitable commodities a small farmer can grow. One man can do most of the work in a crop large enough to earn a living. Most…. but not all. The choke point is getting those tobacco sticks, each laden with about 35 pounds of green weight tobacco from where you see them in this patch up to the 6 tier barn in the background, where each must swing freely with about 10 inches of space between sticks on each rail and 3 vertical feet between rail. A few weeks in the barn lets all that water weight evaporate into the atmosphere. One man can’t cut a crop and move it to the barn within the time frame that it must be done.
There was a time in the past when migrant workers would just show up at tobacco cutting time, help cut it, help hang it in the barn and then move on. Many tobacco farmers offered free or cheap housing to those who were willing to stick around and help with future crops. Those migrants who stuck around got other wage paying jobs for the off season, which for tobacco, means most of the year. Once they managed to acquire good enough wage paying jobs, they didn’t much want to help cut tobacco anymore. For a few decades, more new migrants trickled in at tobacco cutting time to replace those who could no longer take time off a steady job to work at a temporary job.
The powers that be didn’t like this situation of an ever increasing migrant population and sought to remedy it by coming up with the H2A system, whereby migrants could legally come into the United States for temporary work, then go back to their home country after the temporary work was done. This system requires the employer to pay round trip transportation for workers, provide them with government certified housing while they’re here, and provide them with a certain minimum amount of paying work for the entire duration of their stay. This system is similar to indentured servitude, but without an eventual option for citizenship.
Once this new system became firmly entrenched, the powers that be began cracking down on illegal immigrants and making it increasingly difficult to come here without an official work permit. The various administrative fees associated with the H2A system make it cost prohibitive for small farmers needing workers for only a few days and as a result, most small farmers no longer grow tobacco.
You’d think this sea change in the labor market would make tobacco farmers not so happy about the anti-immigrant rhetoric currently being used as a political tool by Trumpians, but no. Not a single one that I converse with has any problem with that sort of rhetoric, or seems to devote a single thought to what may have become of the migrant laborers they used to hire and often became friends with.
Just how blind to human suffering is it possible to be? Let me paraphrase portions of a recent conversation I had while helping strip tobacco. To give you a sense of the scene, here’s a picture of me stripping one of my recent crops.
Me — “I saw this story on The News Hour about homeless people living on skid row in Los Angeles. They tried putting up porta-potties for them but stronger homeless people would make weaker homeless people pay to use the porta-potties, so they had to take them away. They had to go back to peeing in buckets and pouring it in gutters.”
He — “That’s terrible, but if those people can’t do anything better than live in the street, I don’t see why they can’t just load em up and ship them out of the country like they’re doing with illegal immigrants.”
Me — “Ship em where? They’re U.S. citizens.”
He — “If they don’t want to work, they don’t deserve to keep on being U.S. Citizens.”
I had to think for a while after that, first to absorb the sheer magnitude of his completely unthinking callousness and then try to see if the fog could be penetrated. The work continued all the while, him pulling the lower stalk grade (lugs), and me pulling the upper stalk grade (leaf), just as I’m doing in the above picture. Classic rock and roll played in the background.
Then I took up where we left off. I attempted to explain how there’s all kinds of reasons why someone might be unfit to hold a job and it wouldn’t be right to drop such people off in somebody else’s country.
I seemed to have penetrated the fog enough for him to recognize that shipping them off would involve a destination for them to be shipped to.
We listened to a couple of more classic hits before he came up with a solution. Ship em off to an abandoned island and drop food in for them. The main thing for him was still getting them away from here.
Just another work day and another realization that there is no qualitative difference between a substantial portion of our citizenry and those of Nazi Germany, who gave no thought about the destination of the trains filled with Jews they must have frequently seen being loaded.