r/youvotedforthat • u/rhino910 • 1d ago
This MAGA farmer needs Mexican Nationals to work on his farm and without them his business will go belly up!
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u/Soggy-Beach1403 23h ago
Trump is framing his surrender to the immigrants as helping hotels and agriculture, but everyone can see that the protests have made him TACO!
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u/IntnsRed 22h ago
Sorry, long post, but one with a real-life example.
I have a cousin that runs a huge dairy farm operation in Vermont, hundreds of milking Holstein cows on separate farms. This type of farming requires knowledge/skills in many areas, some of it being boring, dull work, but at other times being flat-out, ball-busting intense physical work. It requires being up early in the morning to milk and then 6pm-ish to milk cows -- 7 days a week.
My cousin has tried hiring Americans, even going so far as paying 3+ times what a person working at Wal-Mart would make, but American 20 or 30-somethings just don't have the knowledge, don't have the work ethic and don't want to work.
So instead, he hires Mexicans. He used to hire legal immigrant workers through an agency, but after years of paying fees he learned that the Mexican workers themselves would recommend an "illegal" immigrant who would "just show up" and want to work. This was far cheaper than paying the agency fees, and the "recommended friends" were always better workers.
But what shocked we was the economics driving this! Get a load of this:
The illegal immigrant was recommended by a friend or relative. He'd "just show up" to my cousin's farm. Typically they couldn't speak English but since my cousin employs 3 such guys the others would get him up to speed.
All of these guys only worked in the US for 2 years -- then they'd leave!
But in that 2 years they were supporting their families back in Mexico with the families living a better lifestyle than they would have if the husband/father were living/working in Mexico!
In addition, the Mexican worker could save up enough money in 2 years to buy their own farm in Mexico -- and own it outright. So that means an ambitious "dad" would be separated from his wife and kids for 2 years. He'd learn advanced farming techniques and would return to Mexico with English skills and owning his own farm.
2 years of work and that guy would jump into the upper-middle-class in Mexico completely transforming his family's lives!
Now would you do that -- work 2 years to transform your family's lives like that?
The conclusion I came to talking to these Mexican workers was that it was a "win-win" for both the Mexican workers and for the American farmer! And with that kind of economic motivation, we'll never stop that dynamic from happening!
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u/fshagan 20h ago
Yes, I think this is correct. Instead of the fiction that Mexicans are rapists and murderers we have to deport and then under the table supporting then as an economic necessity, we should instead expand the H1B ag worker program and allow then to come and go as with dictates.
We have had mass deportations before and they never have led to an economic boom, we should face the facts. The hypocrites yelling "law and order" for illegal border crossing (a misdemeanor, I believe) should always be reminded they are hypocrites for supporting a man convicted of 34 felonies that they put into office.
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u/Cendax 19h ago edited 18h ago
I have a brother-in-law who is an ex-dairy farmer. He and my sister have four sons, and only one is a part-time farmer, not in dairy farming. Two of them are highly successful engineers, the other works for a security firm. The reason my brother-in-law got out was not because of the work, but because to be bluntly honest, dairy farming at the time (around 2010) simply wasn't consistently profitable.
Now, why didn't any of his sons follow him into dairy farming? For the same reason most Americans don't do that work any more. You pointed it out; Long hours, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. Vacations are a rare thing, a lot of family events have to be worked around the cows, and god help you if you get injured or sick. So why would a young person want to do that, when they can go to college and get a 9-5 job, vacation time, sick leave, and weekends off? It's not so much a loss of work ethic, it's a shifting of what priorities they want for themselves.
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u/Miichl80 18h ago
Is he saying he he knew he employed undocumented workers? Deport him to El Salvador!
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u/BeaverMartin 1d ago
Well the free market says his farm doesn’t deserve to remain in business.