ICE and Ag Labor

From the Ag Information Network, I’m Bob Larson with today’s Fruit Grower Report. Open border or ICE raids? We’ve tried them both and neither seems to be a practical solution for controlling who comes into our country legally, including those coming here to fill the dire need for an agricultural workforce.

Washington Post Columnist, Megan McCardle says both systems are excessive and neither seem to be popular or effective …

McCARDLE … “I think everyone is frustrated with it. We tried these two extremes, these two theoretical, oh well, we’ll just open the borders or, I really think with the Biden administration, we’re just not going to enforce it. We’re going to pretend that we have borders, but we’re not going to do the enforcement. And we get flooded and it overwhelms all of these border towns and are understandably angry. They don’t have the resources to deal with this volume of people moving.”

So, McCardle says since that didn’t work …

McCARDLE … “Now we’re trying the other extreme. Where, the joke I told was, anyone stands around Home Depot looking in his pocket or his keys, ICE swoops up. And I think we’re seeing, first of all, the results for farmers, for other people. But I also think people don’t like looking at it, when they see human beings being treated that way, they dislike it. And I think what we have learned is that the theoretical extremes are not going to solve our problems.”

The answer, McCardle says is doing politics the way we used to do politics. A lot of the old backroom deals, the smoke-filled rooms. She says there was a lot to not like about that, but it got things done in a way we could live with, and she thinks we need to get back to that.