Live Lean or Breed: Creating a new American workforce

Mass deportation sounds like a pretty good deal to some people I know, but then they would like a sort of retroactive date going back to about 1620 when the Native American lack of resolve on immigration wound up dooming them as a people.

Remember the stories of Massasoit and Samoset, bigwigs of the Wampanoag tribe, teaching the greenhorn Europeans how to plant corn and other crops so the Pilgrims could survive. Pretty good of them. But you see how it turned out for then later – bad immigration policy!

Now the Heritage Society’s “2025 Plan” for mass deportation says it’s going to create jobs and make money for all Americans. I’ve just got a simple question, who’s going to pick the lettuce? Not me, I can assure you, and probably not anybody you know, either.

If this puts jobs like picking lettuce in high demand it stands to reason that people who are less interested in picking lettuce will have to be lured to the fields either with higher wages or shotguns. Take your pick, armed guards cost money and so do higher wages, so as far as I can guess the price of lettuce is going to go up.

That’s not to mention the price of tomatoes, strawberries, chicken, hamburger – you name it. Prices for goods will rise in industries that employ undocumented aliens. And according to a study done at the Carsey School of Public Policy at the University of New Hampshire (they’re the guys who have “Live Free or Die” on their license plates):

“Unauthorized immigrants make up a particularly large share of workers in several industries, accounting for 22 percent of all farmworkers, 15 percent of construction workers, and 8 percent of manufacturing workers (which includes food production).”

 Looks like a formula for inflation to me. In fact, years ago, George Orwell, the perennial optimist who wrote “1984”, said that if you wanted the people who picked the crops to get a decent wage, we wouldn’t be able to afford potatoes. Words to that effect, anyway.

So yes, plenty of jobs will open up, ripe for the picking (sorry) by native born Americans. But if I were a betting man, I wouldn’t count on plenty of good, red-blooded white Americans rushing to fill them.

Politicians are always telling us that things are pretty simple. There are two reasons they do that; one is because they think the American public is also pretty simple and can’t understand complex issues and the other reason is that the politicians themselves are pretty simple and can’t understand complex issues. At least those latter politicians are being honest about thinking things are simple. Wrong, but honest.

If mass deportation is a solution, it looks like the only problem it will solve is how to get more votes, because throughout American history there has been a disturbing lack of patriotism associated with working at grunt labor jobs. Undocumented immigrants have a couple of motivations that most Americans don’t have: hunger, desperation and a willingness to do menial labor.

But if the folks at the Carsey School are just a bunch of elite know-it-alls, the folks at the U. S. Chamber of Commerce aren’t. They say, as reported in the July 20, 2024, Miami Herald that there are nearly nine million job openings in the country, but only 6.4 million unemployed workers.

If we can’t hire undocumented immigrants, we’ve got to get busy creating more American workers. We’ve got to breed like gerbils. If we get serious about it, we can produce millions of native-born workers in 18 years and nine months.

And, if we get rid of child labor laws, we can reduce that to 10 years and nine months. Here is a job for the true, manly American man! And woman, too, of course.

And, there is another, even faster way – eat less. Americans are fat – visit Georgia if you doubt me. We could all engage in Patriotic Dieting to reduce the amount of jobs in the food industry. We would have a great slogan, like New Hampshire’s, “Live Lean or Breed”.

But, my friends, unless we are willing to pick the lettuce ourselves, we’ll still have to hire someone.

Montana Viewpoint has appeared in weekly and online newspapers across Montana for more than 30 years. Jim Elliott served 16 years in the Montana Legislature as a state representative and state senator. He lives on his ranch in Trout Creek.