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“They Like the Mexicans Because They Are Scared and Will Do Anything They Tell Them To”

Posted By Daniel Greenfield On May 18, 2013 @ 9:22 am In The Point | 12 Comments

That quote could just as easily refer to the Democratic Party. A big part of the pitch for illegal aliens has been that American workers just won’t do the work. And that if you deport the illegals, the crops will rot in the fields because there will be no one to pick them.

Except American workers will do it. They just won’t be hired to do it. That’s true in the tech industry where the likes of Facebook scammer-in-chief Mark Zuckerberg is running fake conservative ads for Lindsay Graham and it’s true in the fields where migrant workers take the place of African-American workers.

As Congress weighs immigration legislation expected to expand the guest worker program, another group is increasingly crying foul — Americans, mostly black, who live near the farms and say they want the field work but cannot get it because it is going to Mexicans. They contend that they are illegally discouraged from applying for work and treated shabbily by farmers who prefer the foreigners for their malleability.

“They like the Mexicans because they are scared and will do anything they tell them to,” said Sherry Tomason, who worked for seven years in the fields here, then quit. Last month she and other local residents filed a federal lawsuit against a large grower of onions, Stanley Farms, alleging that it mistreated them and paid them less than it paid the Mexicans.

Some of the details from that lawsuit include charges that American workers were paid less than Mexicans.

The plaintiffs say Stanley Farms paid them less than minimum wage over the last three years and illegally cut their wages. The plaintiffs said they also worked alongside pickers who had work permits and who were paid more money than what American workers received

“We see this repeatedly,” said plaintiff’s attorney Dawson Morton. “Farms complain that no local workers are available. But when they do hire local workers, they don’t pay them fairly and don’t offer them the same pay as their foreign workers. It’s illegal and discourages American workers from continuing in agriculture.”

There is a pattern of these lawsuits going around.

The suit is one of a number of legal actions containing similar complaints against farms, including a large one in Moultrie, Ga., where Americans said they had been fired because of their race and national origin, given less desirable jobs and provided with fewer work opportunities than Mexican guest workers.

Even many of the Americans who feel mistreated acknowledge that the Mexicans who arrive on buses for a limited period are incredibly efficient, often working into the night seven days a week to increase their pay.

“We are not going to run all the time,” said Henry Rhymes, who was fired — unfairly, he says — from Southern Valley after a week on the job. “We are not Mexicans.”

Jon Schwalls, director of operations at Southern Valley, made a similar point.

“When Jose gets on the bus to come here from Mexico he is committed to the work,” he said. “It’s like going into the military. He leaves his family at home. The work is hard, but he’s ready. A domestic wants to know: What’s the pay? What are the conditions? In these communities, I am sorry to say, there are no fathers at home, no role models for hard work. They want rewards without input.”

Hard work is one thing, but American employees have a legitimate right to ask what he’s going to be paid and what the conditions of employment are. If you expect to hire employees who don’t care what the pay is, then your business model is destructive. If businesses want people who are willing to work for anything without regard for their families, then that’s a little too close to bringing back slavery.

“I am not arguing that agricultural work is a good job,” said Dawson Morton, a lawyer who focuses on farm workers’ rights at the Georgia Legal Services Program, a nonprofit law firm. “I am arguing that it could be a better job. If you want experienced people, train them. Just because people are easier to supervise, agricultural employers shouldn’t be able to import them. It is not true that Americans don’t want the work. What the farmers are really saying is that blacks just don’t want to work.”

To which J. Larry Stine, an Atlanta lawyer for Stanley Farms and other big farms, replied: “The farmers are not racist or against Americans. They have crops to be picked, and they see that domestics just don’t have their hearts in it.”

And here’s the other part of the problem.

This isn’t just a local labor dispute. When companies hire illegals who are willing to work for little, the taxpayers eventually end up making up the shortfall. The farms profit by paying less, but when Jose brings his family here and his kids and wife end up in the education system and getting free medical care, that is an expense created by the farms and passed on to taxpayers.

All this might be less of an issue if we didn’t have a welfare state, but we do. And bringing in more illegals only expands the political support for the welfare state. Many of the same businessmen who complain about the business climate in more liberal states are doing their part to transform conservative states into liberal states.

Slave labor ends up enslaving the taxpayer. The money saved on agriculture is taken ten times over to cover the medical costs and crime created by cheap foreign labor.


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