Is a stark philosophical divide growing between President Donald Trump and his zealous supporters over the massive deportation operation? While the Trump administration has expressed a reluctance to round up the millions of illegal aliens who work on large-scale farms and in the hotel industry, much of the Make America Great Again base is pushing for the White House to go even further and start arresting the business owners who willfully employ illegals.
Trump alarmed his loyal core of grassroots backers on June 12 with a jarring Truth Social post. “Our great farmers and people in the hotel and leisure business have been stating that our very aggressive policy on immigration is taking very good, long time workers away from them, with those jobs being almost impossible to replace,” Trump wrote. “This is not good. We must protect our farmers, but get the criminals out of the USA. Changes are coming.”
Amid an immediate wave of criticism, administration border czar Tom Homan soon walked back the notion that any reprieve was being granted to these employers. Yet in doing so, he continued to accentuate the White House’s main talking point that it would “prioritize those [illegal aliens] who have a criminal nexus.” This is decidedly not what many MAGA voters want to hear. To them, rooting out illegal aliens from all facets of the American employment field is an essential component of the mass deportation plan.
‘The Honest Man Will Never Have a Chance’
“It’s time to go after the employers of illegal immigrants. The honest man will never have a chance until the cheaters are held accountable. They should be fined to the amount it takes to deport their illegal employee(s),” self-described MAGA X poster B. Nakee wrote June 20 in a typical social media post on the controversy. It speaks volumes about how Trump supporters feel and why they have every reason to be deeply concerned that the White House is apparently not on the same page with them.
For America First advocates, it isn’t just about deporting “criminal” gangbangers and others convicted of serious offenses, as salutary an effort as that is. The mass deportation operation is also fundamentally about toppling a corrupt edifice that has been constructed inside this nation at the expense of its own people. For them, the illegal alien shadow economy must be torn down in order to create a country that functions on behalf of its citizens.
Trump, in his Truth social post, referred to “our great farmers” who have told him they need illegal alien labor. The blunt truth is that too many of these big farmers are not great people. In knowingly employing illegals, they are engaging in deeply immoral behavior.
Liberty Nation News on June 1 previewed an upcoming civil trial in Michigan in which a farm contractor in the state was being sued by five men from Guatemala who accused it of gross exploitation and wage theft. The trial has now concluded, with the jury awarding the men $500,000 in civil damages. “Much of the verdict – $450,000 – was in the form of punitive damages against Purpose Point Harvesting for violating an antitrafficking law,” CBS News reported June 11.
The allegations against Purpose Point Harvesting that a jury found convincing are grave and disturbing. The men stated they would work 20 hours a day, from 2 a.m. to 10 p.m., even resorting to using headlamps so they could pick fruit and vegetables in the dark. They would work 100-hour weeks only to be paid for 60 hours, they also claimed. The men also say they were charged a $2,500 recruitment fee to get into the US under the H-2A visa system, a grotesque abuse of the process. They thus became beholden to their employer, the very definition of indentured servitude.
If space permitted, we could list countless more examples of proven and alleged big-farm abuse of illegal alien labor. We all know it happens every day. The key takeaway here is the obvious malevolent intent displayed by the farm owners in these instances. There is only one word for it, and it is the same word the Trump administration constantly leans on while insisting the “most dangerous” illegals must be deported first. That word is criminal.
Numbers Don’t Add Up for Trump Administration
Beyond the cruelty of this corrosive shadow economy there lies a simple fact: Trump is not going to solve the illegal alien crisis merely by deporting gangbangers and convicted rapists and murderers. The majority of illegal aliens in the US today are in the employment pool. They are often hired by well-heeled American corporations and business owners who crave their cheap, desperate, and compliant labor.
According to a 2022 Pew Research Center analysis of US Census data, “there were an estimated 8.3 million [illegal aliens] who were part of the workforce, out of 11 million total in the country at that time,” CBS News reported June 19. Never mind for the moment that that 11 million statistic is woefully short of the true number of illegals in the US today. Going with those figures means 75% of illegal aliens in America are in the workforce, taking jobs away from and lowering the earning power of lawful citizens. “These workers made up 4.8% of the overall US workforce, according to Pew, but they were a much larger share of the workforce in several essential industries,” CBS notes.
“Nearly 1 in 5 household workers and landscapers, 16% of crop workers and meat processors, 14% of apparel manufacturing workers and 13% of construction workers were [illegal aliens], Pew estimated.”
Contrary to the cheap labor-loving US Chamber of Commerce blather about the “jobs Americans won’t do," it doesn’t have to be this way. If American business owners offer good wages and decent working conditions, they can and will have Americans applying for jobs.
“From 1972 to 2022, real corporate profits per capita rose 185%. GDP per capita rose 141%. Productivity rose 135%. The average hourly wage for production and nonsupervisory workers rose 1%. How is that even possible?” conservative website The American Compass asks. Illegal immigration into the US just so happened to explode over that same 50-year period. Imagine that. Millions of indentured servants working in hellish conditions for slave wages tend to depreciate the earning power of all non-managerial class Americans.
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