Crackdown on illegal immigration won't hurt ag economy
Crackdown on illegal immigration won't hurt ag economy
Sen. Mike Regan3:50 p.m. ET June 18, 2017
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In the June 10th edition of the Wall Street Journal, an opinion piece entitled “Fiestas and Apple Orchards: Small-Town Life Before Trump” offers a romanticized view of illegal immigration in Pennsylvania.
The author, Dickinson College professor Crispin Sartwell, paints an idyllic image of the “vibrant, intersectional culture” of York Springs, PA, where the streets are purportedly lined with “Mexican food trucks and children playing fútbol” and a bona-fide real estate revival is well underway thanks to “townspeople [fixing] up old houses.”
That is, until Donald Trump was elected President.
According to the author, “stringent enforcement of immigration law” by the Trump administration has precipitated the destruction of a “rich, new rural culture” and has sent York Springs “spiral[ing] into a local depression that is personal, cultural and economic.” He cites only 15 documented cases of immigration enforcement in the area but assures readers there have been “many more.”
Central to his narrative is the fact that Adams County is a national leader in apple production, and that York Springs’ 70 percent Hispanic population plays an essential role in the growth and harvest of Galas and Granny Smiths.
The thesis of Mr. Sartwell’s narrative, of course, is that the lawful detainment of unlawful migrant workers will devastate the local economy, to the detriment of all residents, legal and illegal. Sartwell goes on to explain how the devastation transcends economics:
“This is separating families, and people are living in fear,” he writes. “Children aren’t playing out in the yard any longer. Parents are afraid to leave their homes…the food truck is gone, and it’s been a while since I heard Mexican pop music.”
Unsurprisingly, the narrative propagated by Mr. Sartwell aligns closely with the left-wing orthodoxy on this topic. It is rooted in the common misconception that American agriculture cannot function without illegal immigrant labor and that the concerted enforcement of federal immigration law will result in the collapse of the farming industry altogether.
According to the Pew Research Center, the U.S. civilian workforce includes 8 million unauthorized immigrants, but only 4 percent of that population is employed in agricultural jobs like farming, fishing, and forestry.
While illegal immigrants do comprise a larger share of the agricultural labor force compared to other industries, the vast majority of the American farming workforce is composed of legal workers, foreign and native-born.
This fact alone calls into question Mr. Sartwell’s assertion that the removal of unauthorized immigrant labor (not to be confused with legal immigrant labor) will have an adverse impact on the domestic farming economy.
It also goes far in discrediting the leftist cliché that illegal immigrants are needed to perform the dirty, blue collar jobs American citizens are allegedly “unwilling” to do.
Sure, labor-intensive fruit-and-vegetable farming does attract illegal immigrant workers, but those commodities constitute a relatively small part of the overall U.S. farm economy. Bigger crops – wheat, cotton, and corn, for example— account for a far greater share of total agricultural output. The production of these major crops is largely automated and can be performed with minimal human inputs.
Bottom line: The modern agriculture economy is diverse and dynamic. Most farmhands are working legally and agribusiness in general is becoming less reliant on manual labor. The enforcement of federal immigration law will never stop Americans from engaging in one of the oldest forms of organized economic activity known to the human race.
Mr. Sartwell, and others who share his worldview, use scary rhetoric about vanishing children and food trucks to obfuscate economic reality and perpetuate the wink-and-nod immigration policies of the Barack Obama administration. In doing so, they defend a broken system that has bankrupted taxpayers and endangered American communities.
Laissez-faire immigration enforcement has resulted in dramatic population growth, not only in our cities but in rural pockets of America like York Springs. Costs in public education, health care, social welfare programs, and the criminal justice system – all borne by American taxpayers – have increased correspondingly.
The American opioid epidemic, which claims the lives of 10 Pennsylvanians each day, has been fueled in part by the unmitigated trafficking of heroin across the porous southern border.
Sartwell observes in his column that the migrant labor community of York Springs has been quick to adopt “rural American values…which are instinctively traditional and oriented toward family and hard work.”
Before authoring opinion pieces that decry the enforcement of federal immigration law, he should be reminded that an abiding respect for the rule of law is another value rural Americans hold dear.
Illegal immigration is not a victimless crime.
Sen. Mike Regan, a Republican serving parts of Cumberland and York counties, is a member of the PA Senate Agriculture & Rural Affairs Committee and previously served as U.S. Marshal in the Middle District of Pennsylvania.
http://www.publicopiniononline.com/s...omy/407179001/
