Dakota Beacon

It is interesting, isn’t it, that so many of the same people who are calling for “reparations” for today’s black people who might be descendants of enslaved blacks 150 years and more ago, are also demanding that we allow more migrants because we “need” their labor?  This extends also to those who find themselves enriched by this cheap labor, regardless of their position on “reparations”.  

It has been obvious to any thinking person for many years that the labor provided by migrant workers - usually here by way of Mexico - is nothing more than the reinstitution of a de facto form of slavery, one that our government, our industries and agriculture and most of our people have come to accept as “normal”.  The bare fact is that most Americans - black or white - couldn’t care less about slavery of disadvantaged populations, as long as they can get food or products cheaply enough.  

Growing up in the northern Midwest, I was always familiar with migrant workers.  Every spring our North Dakota communities expanded temporarily with farm workers from Texas or California, following the crop cycles.  Most of them, although Spanish-speaking in our experience, were citizens of those states, not Mexicans.  We knew a few of them briefly in public schools.  By mid-fall these kids left, going back to Texas and other parts southwest.   There were often publicly funded summer programs to help the kids whose education was adversely impacted by their families economic need to constantly migrate.

I admit that I knew nothing in those days about the agricultural labor system in our state or our neighborhoods, but things have evolved from what seems to have been American workers willing to travel for employment opportunities to the importation of foreign workers to benefit American industrial and agricultural interests.  

The current practice is that these businesses utilize the federal H-2A program to supply their labor needs, bypassing consideration of hiring Americans to do the work while basically enslaving those whose immigration they facilitate through this program.  The workers literally belong to these employers as long as they are in the United States under this program.  They cannot come in under H-2A and, if not happy, apply to work for any other employer.  They have been bought (or rented) by the importing company and their only recourse would be to be deported.  Many of these people support their families through the work they contract for under these rules.  Does this sound like “freedom”?  If they complain, if they attempt to organize, they are subject to deportation.  Would they feel free to file a claim with the Labor Department?  Not very likely.  

Supposedly these employers are required to treat these workers humanely under these programs.  They are also supposed to try to hire American workers before turning to H-2A, but this is easily skirted by the employers.  Last year we learned about the use of imported Haitian workers in Ohio, mostly for factory work.  It is similar.  The story put out was that the “locals” were too lazy to work, hence they did not apply for work.  Employers supposedly couldn’t find or hire local workers, American workers.  The truth came out that the jobs purportedly on offer were never advertised and people were kept unaware of any hiring.  So ultra cheap Haitian workers were imported for short term hiring.  They preferred dealing with this needy and dependent population.  We see this also in agricultural production.  Dealing with workers who actually have rights under our laws and Constitution is messy, it’s difficult.  Above all, it can be expensive.  Our country’s industrial and thus political leadership likes H-2A.  Trump thinks it’s a “great program”.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1COm0C73CKw.  

It is time we look at the moral issues here.  It always seems too “lofty” to those interested in the bottom line to care about morals.  But if we look at it that way, what was wrong with the slavery we tolerated in 1850?  What is wrong is wrong.  For the people who are being brought into the United States.  It is perhaps even worse, because once here many are trapped without any local support at all, no oversight, and often not even language skills.  They are literally pawns in a system which accepts no responsibility for their welfare or even survival.  

And what about the impact on our own native workers?  What about those American citizens from Texas and California who used to support their families through their honest hard work?  They at least had the rights of an American citizen.  What have these foreign workers?  Nothing but the prospect of de facto slave labor.  

Perhaps in the short term American consumers get produce a bit cheaper, but what of the moral cost?  Left wing advocates for open borders or legal programs like H-2A, as well as greedy and shameless users - agricultural and industrial employers and their beneficiaries - need to take off the blinders at least and acknowledge just what it is they want more of - slavery.  There is ultimately a high price to pay for moral degeneracy, and that is what this is.  It isn’t a “great program” as Trump has asserted.  It is a cancer.  It is robbing American workers, whether in Ohio or in the fields of Iowa or California or Texas or North Dakota.  It is enslaving, for all practical purposes, those who come here from foreign countries seeking opportunity to earn a living.  It is unmanageable from the standpoint of oversight, especially under a stripped-down bureaucracy.  (Not that the bureaucracy gave it more than lip service.)   And Congress is notorious for leaning toward its more powerful constituents.

This needs to be addressed.  We need to give employment opportunities to American citizens first.  The H-2A system robs Americans of employment, it creates a weird, un-American two-tiered system resembling the slavery we fought the bloodiest war in our history to end.  It creates economic problems.  We really do not need this.  An underclass is not a healthy pathway for America.  While we need to consider consumer costs, we must also realize that we absorb a lot of hidden costs not only morally but economically, when we put unskilled or low-skilled Americans out of work and off of the ladder to economic betterment while importing people who remain powerless in our economic, civic and justice systems.  It might look like a great program to short-sighted and grasping oligarchs but in the long run it is a disaster.  It is not only a bad economic policy, it is an immoral one as well. 

Alexis de Tocqueville is quoted as saying, :”America is great because she is good; If America ceases to be good, America will cease to be great.”  If we are to “make America great again” we must make America good again.

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