The White House is finalizing plans for a U.S.-Mexico border clampdown that would shut off asylum requests and automatically deny entrance to migrants once the number of people encountered by American border officials exceeded a new daily threshold.
No coincidence that most of these business owners are Republican.
That’s more a correlation than causation. Blue collar business owners tend to skew Republican because Republicans cater to the anti-union and anti-poc proclivities of socially conservative white nationalist land barons. When Dems were the party of the apartheid-era South, they dominated this same voting block.
But the brutal treatment of migrant workers has had a socio-economic impact on Gulf Coast states. Florida’s orange production has dropped from 240M pounds in 2004 to 16M in 2024. Supplies of meat and dairy produce have sagged as ranchers from Nevada to Alabama to Iowa are running out of cheap exploitable laborers. More and more businesses are turning to the carceral state to provide field hands, but even that doesn’t work well in states where people aren’t having kids to lock up and the existing prisoner base is aging past the point of functional field labor.
Even with the most sadistic and malicious attitude towards your fellow humans, this isn’t a profitable economic policy. It is being driven largely be the outright terror wealthier white land owners have of the young Spanish speaking migrants that dominate their workforce.
They do… kinda. This problem peaked under COVID, when you had fruit rotting in fields thanks to our sudden crack down on migrant travel. We saw a similar sudden drop in available farm labor back in 2017, when Trump was ramping up border enforcement against seasonal laborers.
That’s more a correlation than causation. Blue collar business owners tend to skew Republican because Republicans cater to the anti-union and anti-poc proclivities of socially conservative white nationalist land barons. When Dems were the party of the apartheid-era South, they dominated this same voting block.
But the brutal treatment of migrant workers has had a socio-economic impact on Gulf Coast states. Florida’s orange production has dropped from 240M pounds in 2004 to 16M in 2024. Supplies of meat and dairy produce have sagged as ranchers from Nevada to Alabama to Iowa are running out of cheap exploitable laborers. More and more businesses are turning to the carceral state to provide field hands, but even that doesn’t work well in states where people aren’t having kids to lock up and the existing prisoner base is aging past the point of functional field labor.
Even with the most sadistic and malicious attitude towards your fellow humans, this isn’t a profitable economic policy. It is being driven largely be the outright terror wealthier white land owners have of the young Spanish speaking migrants that dominate their workforce.