Planning What to Do Starting on Day 1
As far as Planning ahead and what to do? Multiple organizations have this story up. I have linked to all of them I have seen as they may differ in version. It also adds detail which may have been missed by other sites. As far as Tom Homan Planning? Looks and commentary leave me the impression he is a big bag of wind strutting around with his boasts.
A little further down, you will read a comment by Joe Del Bosque. He believes, the removal of undocumented visitors who work in the fields will result in rising food chain costs. You know, those costs everyone blamed Biden for even though Corporations were largely responsible for the price increases. I tend to agree with Joe as few US citizens will work the fields for what the present labor force is making.
(Bit of Woody Guthrie: “Some of us are illegal and some are not wanted” . . . “They are just deportees”.)
Tom Homan called his Day 1 plan “shock and awe,” ABC News reported last month.
Last week, while appearing on Donald Trump Jr.’s podcast, the president-elect’s son asked incoming “border czar” Tom Homan what border and immigration-related action the public can expect to see on Day 1 of the new Trump administration.
“I’m excited. We’re already working on these plans,” he told Donald Trump Jr. on a podcast after the election.
France 24’s report cited Labor Department numbers showing that 44 percent of the 2.4 million farm laborers in the United States are undocumented migrants.
“There are few, if any, issues more important than food supply and public health. California is the largest producer of food in the nation. It’s vital to protect our food chain and its workers,” Joe Del Bosque wrote on X over the weekend.
“Without our people, our farms will come to a stop,” he told France24.
“We will not be able to harvest our fruits and vegetables and nuts,” he continued. “And that will interrupt the food chain for Americans. And it would possibly increase food prices tremendously too.”
The report cited farmers and ranchers who say that many low-paying jobs harvesting crops are not the jobs Americans are willing to do.
“If you wanted to say, okay, everybody’s going to get taken away—which I don’t think is going to happen, and I have to emphasize that—mechanization is coming,” Tom Barcellos, a dairy farmer, said in the report.
Mechanization, however, takes time to invent, produce, and distribute. For Barcellos, machines have taken over milking, but dairy farms haven’t needed a large workforce for quite some time. The first milking machine was invented and patented in 1879, and the first milking robot prototype appeared in 1992.
If Trump makes good on the promise of deportations, implements 25 percent tariffs on all imports from Mexico or Central America and issues a 10 percent tariff on all other imports, it will mean a quick and dramatic increase in food prices, CBS News said in a report at the end of November.
AB: I guess if Mr. Tom is able to pull his threats off, then the crops will mostly likely rot in the fields. Few, if any Americans will work in those fields. Food prices will rise due to shortage or due to wage increase.
In 1970, when the UFW went on strike in the Salinas Valley, I went out at 15 years old to harvest lettuce (which you cut by hand with a knife and put it in a cardboard box called a carton or case) at the farm of one of my classmates. I made it through the entire day but was too sore (in my lower back) to work the next. There are about 700 cases per acre if someone thinks that they will harvest a field by themselves. I quickly realized the hard work that they field workers did. The work has gotten a little easier due to improvements in machinery and ergonomics but it is still tough. Attitudes from farmers and others in the agribusiness community have changed a lot also. But at the time you would have thought it was a slave revolt in the Deep South pre-Civil War.