On September 30
Esquire posted a
fascinating
article by reporter Ryan Lizza about the Iowa farm
operated by the family
of California Congress member Devin Nunes, a major Trump supporter. The family
quietly moved most of its California dairy operations to this farm, located in
the small town of Sibley, more than a decade ago. Lizza wondered why they had
been so careful to avoid publicity about the move, so he went to Sibley to
investigate.
His investigation quickly turned into something out of the
old hardboiled detective genre, with sources suddenly clamming up and
mysterious vehicles tailing Lizza as he drove around town. Eventually the
mystery was solved: dairy farmers and others in the area seemed to be heavily
dependent on undocumented labor to carry out their operations. Lizza was unable
to establish anything about the Nunes family’s farm, but the presumption is
that they too relied on unauthorized workers.
Rep. Nunes himself appears to be a moderate on immigration
issues, but he’s been an important enabler of the Trump regime, which is
committed to a ferocious anti-immigrant agenda. Sibley farmers seem to maintain a
similar duality: they disagree with Trump and their Congress member, white
supremacist Steve King, about immigration policy, yet they vote overwhelmingly
for these men. “There is massive political hypocrisy at the center of this:
Trump’s and King’s rural-farm supporters embrace anti-immigrant politicians
while employing undocumented immigrants,” Lizza writes.
Lizza’s reporting is great, but his analysis isn’t
especially deep. He notes that Iowa’s dairy farmers use undocumented labor to
save money—“workers start at fourteen or fifteen dollars an hour, the first
farmer said. If dairies had to use legal labor, they would likely have to raise
that to eighteen or twenty dollars”—but he doesn’t explore how “illegality”
forces these workers to
accept
lower wages. And he fails to ask who ultimately benefits from the
exploitation of undocumented farm workers.
Following the Money
It’s actually not the farmers, Lizza notes: “many dairies wouldn’t survive” if they had to pay authorized workers. In other words, the farmers
underpay their workforce because they are being squeezed by the large food
processing and distribution corporations, which pocket the extra profits. So an
obvious question would be whether these corporations or their CEOs make
contributions to anti-immigrant politicians like Trump and King. Unfortunately,
Lizza doesn’t raise this.
He also seems uninformed about guest worker programs. As
Iowa’s farmers see it, the best option is bringing in H-2A workers; farmers
can exploit these laborers just as easily as the current undocumented force but
without the risk of fines or jail sentences for violating immigration law.
However, dairy farming requires year-round employees, while the current H-2A programs only allow seasonal hiring. The farmers want to remove
this limitation.
Lizza dismisses the idea as “a fantasy in the current
environment; Trump, King, and their allies describe such policies as
‘amnesty.’” Apparently Lizza hasn’t been paying attention. It’s true that King
opposes the H-2A expansion, but
Trump’s
all for it. “Guest workers, don’t we agree?” he ranted at an April rally.
“We have to have them.”
