Violent Xenophobia Has Long Ugly Roots In America
When Tom Homan, the Adolf Eichmann of the new Trump regime, boasted on Sunday to Mark Levin that federal funds will be slashed to any state that doesn’t help him round up undocumented workers for transport to camps, he was likely talking about California, Washington, Oregon, New York, Massachusetts, Maryland and other states that still buy into the Enlightenment. I doubt t he was thinking about red states like Iowa, Nebraska, Florida, Kansas. Rural agricultural counties are a key part of the MAGA movement and many of them depend on undocumented seasonal workers for their agricultural sectors.
Yesterday, Reuters reported that farm industry groups want Trump to spare their sector from the mass deportations that he has told Homan and Stephen Miller to get rolling with in January, deportations which will “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… 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.”
If Trump does include agricultural workers, he will be spiking inflation and driving the grocery prices he pledged to bring down, sky high. (And that’s just the spike caused by labor costs. Trump’s tariffs will also send the price of fresh fruits and vegetables towards the sky— especially tomatoes, avocados, bell peppers, strawberries— since we import about 60% of our fresh fruit and 40% of our fresh veggies from countries Trump is threatening to start trade wars with.) “Homan has said,” reported Leah Douglas and Ted Hesson, “immigration enforcement will focus on criminals and people with final deportation orders but that no immigrant in the U.S. illegally will be exempt.” The problem there is that MAGA defines any undocumented migrant in the U.S. as “criminals.”
Agriculture and related industries contributed $1.5 trillion to the U.S. gross domestic product, or 5.6%, in 2023, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
In his first administration, Trump promised the farm sector that his deportation effort would not target food sector workers, though the administration did conduct raids at some agricultural worksites, including poultry processing plants in Mississippi and produce processing facilities in Nebraska.
U.S. Representative John Duarte, a Republican and fourth-generation farmer in California's Central Valley, said farms in the area depend on immigrants in the U.S. illegally and that small towns would collapse if those workers were deported.
Duarte's congressional seat is one of a handful of close races where a winner has yet to be declared.
Duarte said the Trump administration should pledge that immigrant workers in the country for five years or longer with no criminal record will not be targeted and look at avenues to permanent legal status.
"I would like to hear more clearly expressed that these families will not be targeted," he said.
Farmers have a legal option for hiring labor with the H-2A visa program, which allows employers to bring in an unlimited number of seasonal workers if they can show there are not enough U.S. workers willing, qualified and available to do the job.
The program has grown over time, with 378,000 H-2A positions certified by the Labor Department in 2023, three times more than in 2014, according to agency data.
But that figure is only about 20% of the nation's farm workers, according to the USDA. Many farmers say they cannot afford the visa's wage and housing requirements. Others have year-round labor needs that rule out the seasonal visas.
Farmers and workers would benefit from expanded legal pathways for agricultural laborers, said John Walt Boatright, director of government affairs at the American Farm Bureau Federation, a farmer lobby group.
"We need the certainty, reliability and affordability of a workforce program and programs that are going to allow us to continue to deliver food from the farm to the table,” said John Hollay, director of government relations at the International Fresh Produce Association, which represents produce farmers.
For decades, farm and worker groups have attempted to pass immigration reform that would enable more agricultural workers to stay in the U.S., but the legislation has failed so far.
The risk of enforcement against farms is likely low because of the necessity of the workers, said Leon Fresco, an immigration attorney at Holland & Knight.
"There are some very significant business interests that obviously want agricultural labor and need it," he said.
But for farmworkers, the fear of enforcement can create chronic stress, said Mary Jo Dudley, director of the Cornell Farmworker Program, which is training workers to know their rights if confronted by immigration officials.
If there are again raids on meatpacking plants, immigration enforcement should take precautions to avoid detaining workers in the country legally, said Marc Perrone, international president of the United Food and Commercial Workers union, which represents some meatpacking workers.
Edgar Franks, a former farmworker and political director at Familias Unidas por la Justicia, a worker union in Washington state, said the group is seeing new energy from workers to organize.
"The anxiety and fear is real. But if we're together, there’s a better chance for us to fight back," he said.
California isn’t Trump country. He was crushed in anti-Trump landslides all 3 times he ran here:
2016- 31.62%
2020- 34.32%
2024- 38.24%
Given his penchant for revenge, it isn’t likely he’s too concerned that his mass deportations plans could, according to Capital & Main, cripple California’s economy. Mark Kreidler wrote that Jamshid Damooei, executive director of the Center for Economics of Social Issues at California Lutheran University, has been studying the economic impact of undocumented immigrants in the state for years. To Damooei, the numbers tell the story. According to the center’s analysis, undocumented immigrants are the source of more than half a trillion dollars of products in California, either by direct, indirect or induced production levels. Their work adds up to nearly 5% of the state’s gross domestic product, or GDP. And while 46% of the state’s agricultural workforce is undocumented, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. For example, the center’s report found that in Los Angeles County, 28.7% of the construction workforce is undocumented, along with 17.5% in manufacturing, 16% in wholesale trade and more than 15% in retail trade. ‘How could L.A. County function with a significant share of its vital workforce being deported?’ Damooei said. ‘In my county, Ventura, 70% of farmworkers are undocumented. In Santa Barbara it’s closer to 80%. Then there is construction, manufacturing, transportation. … Look, this is just incredibly powerful.’… None of this answers the larger questions of what Trump really wants or how his administration would achieve it. But even setting aside the sheer inhumanity of a mass deportation policy, the financial equation makes the idea untenable.”
Trump has been virulent racist his entire life. If he believes his ranting about immigrants poisoning our bloodstream, do these financial numbers matter? They certainly don’t to the racists in his administration like Miller and Homan. Normal Americans, though, might be wise to remember that “According to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, undocumented immigrants paid almost $100 billion in federal, state and local taxes in 2022. More than a third of those taxes went to fund programs the immigrants are barred from using, like Social Security, Medicare and unemployment insurance. Six states raised more than $1 billion in tax revenue from undocumented immigrants that year, the institute found. The leader of the pack? California, at $8.5 billion (followed by Texas, New York, Florida, Illinois and New Jersey). And in 40 states, including California, undocumented immigrants paid higher state and local tax rates than the top 1% of households. ‘Undocumented immigrants are not a source of depletion of our tax revenue— they subsidize our benefits,’ Damooie said. ‘They are not the takers of our tax revenue but the makers, who receive very little in return.’”
But, back to the idea that to racists swine like Trump macro-economics don’t matter, yesterday NPR reported that in the mid-1800s, after the Civil War, Chinese immigrants has reason to be hopeful that they might be treated like human beings in their new homeland. “Since they began arriving in America a couple decades before, they had been the target of discriminatory laws and violence. But now national news reports praised them as skilled and productive workers making invaluable contributions to America's economy. ‘The Chinaman is a born railroad builder, and as such he is destined to be most useful to California, and, indeed, to the whole Pacific slope,’ read one nationally circulated news report. The Daily Alta California, then the most popular newspaper in the state, declared that Chinese workers ‘do a better, neater, and cleaner job, and do it faster and cheaper than white laborers from the East.’”
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In 1870, U.S. Senator Charles Sumner (R-MA), one of America's leading voices for abolition and civil rights, fought to open up a pathway for Chinese and other non-white immigrants to become citizens. But Western politicians, including in Sumner's own more racially progressive Republican party, saw this proposal as politically radioactive.
In making his case against Sumner's bill to open a pathway to citizenship for Chinese immigrants, Senator William Morris Stewart (R-NV) warned that the West Coast would be "overpowered by the mob element that seeks to exterminate the Chinese" if it passed, and that "they will be slaughtered before any one of them can be naturalized under your bill."
The effort to expand citizenship and civil rights to Chinese immigrants failed to pass Congress. But the "mob element"— as Senator Stewart called it— would nonetheless make life miserable for Chinese Americans.
In an omen of the horrors to come, just one year later, a white mob in Los Angeles lynched 17 Chinese men and boys in a raid on Chinatown. It was one of the largest— if not the largest— mass lynching in American history. It became known as "the Chinese Massacre of 1871."
All of this was before "The Panic of 1873," a financial crisis that would plunge America's economy into a long and miserable depression. In the depths of despair, white working-class Americans on the West Coast would rally around a new populist slogan: "The Chinese must go!"
…As the economy cratered after the Panic of 1873, a scarcity of jobs led to a zero-sum mindset amongst white workers. Demagogues began to blame the labor competition posed by increasing numbers of Chinese immigrants for the miseries of white joblessness and meager pay. They painted Chinese immigrants as the servile tools of monopolistic corporations, which were becoming increasingly powerful in the rapidly industrializing United States. The mighty railroad companies— which now owned valuable land across the United States thanks to federal legislation that funded the transcontinental railroad— were a prominent example. Populists began to rail against big corporations for employing the cheap labor of Chinese immigrants instead of the labor of white people— many of whom, by the way, were also recent immigrants themselves.
…“[T]he Chinese Exclusion Act” [1882] banned both skilled and unskilled Chinese laborers from immigrating to the US for ten years. Symbolically and politically, this bill was a big deal: it was the first significant crackdown on immigration in American history, a message that the federal government opposed Chinese immigration, and a reaffirmation that Chinese immigrants already in America could never become citizens.
However, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was just one in a series of federal laws against Chinese immigrants— and, as Beth Lew-Williams makes clear in The Chinese Must Go, this 1882 law was actually quite ineffective. Basically, President Arthur and Congress threw a bone to the insurgent anti-Chinese movement, but they provided few resources for federal enforcement against Chinese immigration and introduced a bunch of loopholes that allowed Chinese immigrants to continue coming in.
In the years after the Act's passage, West Coast newspapers and populist agitators grew angry that Chinese immigrants were still entering the country and demanded that the government do more. This was the beginning of what you might call the national fight against "illegal immigration"— because before this virtually all immigration to the United States was legal.
But the growing discontent with the first iteration of the Chinese Exclusion Act wasn't just about its lack of enforcement and loopholes. For many white Americans, simply preventing the flow of new Chinese immigrants wasn't enough. They wanted expulsions and deportations of the Chinese people who already lived here— even though the vast majority of them were here legally.
And soon white vigilantes would take matters into their own hands.
By 1885, anti-Chinese forces in the West had become emboldened by the federal government's actions declaring that Chinese immigration was, in fact, a problem that needed to be solved. But they were also frustrated that Chinese workers seemed to keep coming into the country. Even more, they were angry about the continued presence of Chinese people in their communities and workplaces.
… Over the course of 1885 and 1886, more than 160 communities across the West Coast would expel their Chinese inhabitants. And they made it abundantly clear to national politicians: many Western voters were not satisfied with the 1882 law.
In 1888, President Grover Cleveland— hoping to carry Western states in his upcoming reelection battle— signed into law another Chinese Exclusion Act that had more teeth than the first one. This one prohibited all Chinese laborers from coming into the country— whether or not they had resided in the United States previously. It was a policy that was easier to enforce and administer. It was also quickly implemented, leaving thousands of Chinese immigrants who had traveled abroad stranded and unable to return. It was also a policy that angered China and marked the beginning of an age in which the United States set restrictive immigration policy unilaterally.
After President Cleveland signed this legislation into law, many white westerners took to the streets to celebrate. This was only two years after the unveiling of the Statue of Liberty, which proclaimed that America was a refuge for "your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free."
…The Chinese Exclusion Acts— and the mob violence, pogroms, boycotts, and other forms of expulsion— had their intended effect. In 1890, the US Census Bureau recorded 107,488 Chinese people living in the United States. In 1900, that number dropped to 89,863. And by 1910, it was 71,531. The restrictions on Chinese immigration would not begin to be lifted until World War II.
Historians have found that the economies of towns suffered after they kicked out their Chinese residents.
We might as well add that Jewish, Italian and Irish immigrants faced intense discrimination, systemic exclusion and violent hostility when they arrived in the United States during the 19th and early 20th centuries as well. Racists and xenophobes, fueled by fears of cultural and economic displacement, branded these groups as unassimilable threats to American identity. Jewish immigrants were demonized with antisemitic tropes, accused of secretive financial conspiracies, and often scapegoated for societal problems. Italians faced vicious anti-Catholic bigotry and were dismissed as criminals or anarchists, stereotypes weaponized to justify lynchings and exclusion from civic life. Irish immigrants, fleeing famine and oppression, were caricatured as drunken and lazy, relegated to the lowest rungs of employment and treated as barely human. These groups were routinely denied fair access to housing, education, and employment and were targeted by organized hate groups like the Ku Klux Klan. And as you already know, today’s MAGAts draw on this dark history, weaponizing the same fears of “replacement” to stoke hatred against today’s immigrants. They recycle the rhetoric of exclusion, portraying newcomers as criminals and threats to cultural purity, while pushing policies that deny them opportunities and dignity. Just as America once demonized Chinese, Jewish, Italian and Irish immigrants, Trump’s MAGA movement perpetuates the same toxic xenophobia, undermining the country's foundational promise of being a refuge for the oppressed. These historical injustices serve as a warning: the exclusionary politics championed by racists and MAGA ideologues are not only morally bankrupt but fundamentally un-American.
I’ll just throw in that this year, Señor Trumpanzee received 39% of the overall Asian American vote, an increase compared to previous elections. Among Chinese-American voters specifically, there's already credible evidence of a notable shift toward the Republican Party, a trend in recent years, influenced by issues like the economy, concerns over crime and opposition to “woke” policies.
Pragmatism is always the first casualty of rabid hate. Jews in Germany were a big driver of the economic engine there in the '20s and '30s.
You can get a puny mind to hate a lot easier than you can engender in it an epiphany. I know this better than most.
Nancy Pelosi's favorite South Texas Democrat is more than happy to pull up the ladder.
Texas Democrat thinks he can find ‘common ground’ with Homan
https://thehill.com/homenews/house/5011812-henry-cuellar-texas-donald-trump-tom-homan-immigration-plan/
Does NAFTA allow tariffs as a trade impediment? Not that either of our evil parties give one good goddamn about any laws.