U.S. farm industry groups want President-elect Donald Trump to spare their sector from his promise of mass deportations, which could upend a food supply chain heavily dependent on immigrants in the United States illegally.
So far Trump officials have not committed to any exemptions, according to interviews with farm and worker groups and Trump’s incoming “border czar” Tom Homan.
Nearly half of the nation’s approximately 2 million farm workers lack legal status, according to the departments of Labor and Agriculture, as well as many dairy and meatpacking workers.
I would say there’s big difference between child labor, where the child can’t consent to work and we’ve societally decided that no child should be working at all, and an adult choosing to work and someone exploiting their need to deny them the worker protections they deserve.
To be clear, I’m not saying to continue allowing farms to hire undocumented workers and eschew worker protections and proper payments.
I’m saying that there’s clearly a need for farm workers that isn’t being met domestically. We should increase our efforts to ensure that the workers filling those roles are protected and not exploited, and are given the opportunity to become permanent citizens, since they clearly play an important role in our society.
We as a society have decided that to be the case and where to draw the line. That line is at a far older age than what nature might dictate.
Under that logic, the adult who is dependent on their employer to treat them fairly because they have no rights on their own can also not consent. Consent requires the option of a true viable alternative choice.
When you say the workers don’t want it to end, what they really don’t want to end surely is their ability to work and earn money in the country, not their status of illegality and their lack of enforceable rights. They just assume that an abolishment of the status quo would result in them not having work at all or in deportation. The question is what alternatives are presented.
Agreed.
100% what I wanted to make clear I was saying in my initial comment that I worried was not clear. The “arrangement” I referred to was “consensual farm work”, not “tacitly sanctioned ignoring of labor laws and worker exploitation”.
Purely for the discussion: I do think the comparison to child labor is off in this case, even though I agree about the point of needing a true viable alternative.
I would draw the comparison more to a worker in a criminal enterprise than to child mine workers.
The work they chose is their best choice, but they could have realistically chosen differently.
Within reason people can choose risky or dangerous things, as long as best doesn’t mean only.