Automation can’t solve undocumented worker ‘problem’

In an apparent lightning strike of insight, U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins offered her solution to what she and her GOP colleagues see as one of America’s biggest problems: agriculture’s one million or so undocumented workers.

“Ultimately,” Rollins explained in a July 7 Washington, D.C. briefing, “the answer on this is automation.”

No, it’s not.

A machine will never pick ripe plum in California’s Central Valley, pull a calf on a snowy February night in North Dakota, restore an oxygen-starved river in Iowa, or close its eyes to the soul-nourishing aroma of fresh cut alfalfa in Wisconsin.

Only people with skills, families, values, hopes and consciences do these — and a million more — crucial tasks. No “automation” anything ever has or ever will.

And, yes, one-third — if not more — of America’s 2.9 million farmworkers are undocumented and illegally in the United States. The blame for that long, bloody stain on our dirt-cheap food bill shouldn’t be pinned on them, though.

That’s on us because we’ve done almost everything imaginable to encourage and normalize undocumented laborers and almost nothing to ensure that the work — as well as the workers — is safe, legal, fair and sustainable.

Boston College historian Heather Cox Richardson’s July 14 Substack post, Letters from an American, concurs.

The United States, Cox Richardson reminds us, has always depended on immigrant labor — legal sometimes, illegal most times — to build much of our critical infrastructure: railroads, bridges, canals, highways and, of course, farms.

Congress finally codified “the nation’s first comprehensive immigration law” in 1924 — to keep immigrants out.

Twenty years later, the infamous “Bracero” worker program was created. A decade after that came Eisenhower’s “Operation Wetback;” it deported more than a 1 million “illegal workers, only to have officials readmit most of them as braceros.”

And that’s pretty much how it went for the 70 years since. Congress and the White House would talk big, legislate little and agree on even less.

All the while fast-growing sectors of the American economy — agriculture, construction, hospitality and food service — were becoming more reliant on undocumented immigrant labor.

This “problem” isn’t a problem with most Americans. In fact, a July 11 poll that Cox Richardson cites shows “a record 79% of adults (say) immigration is good for the country, with only 17% (see) it as bad.”

Additionally, she continues, 78% of American adults “want laws to allow ‘immigrants living in the U.S. illegally the chance to become U.S. citizens if they meet certain requirements over a period of time.’”

So, what’s so hard about immigration reform when three out of four American voters not only believe immigrants are good for America, but also believe illegal immigrants should have a pathway to citizenship in the nation they build, feed and clean every day?

The hard part is that public opinion doesn’t matter to the right wing of Congress and the West Wing of the White House.

Their big, fabulous costly idea — deportation — is now creating massive problems in labor-intensive sectors like agriculture and food service.

Don’t worry, though; Secretary Rollins had another flash of insight to address the millions of job openings soon to occur due to the Trump-designed, GOP-financed deportation efforts: Medicaid dependents.

Or, as she explained July 7, “and … when you think about the 34 million able-bodied adults in our Medicaid program. There are plenty of workers in America.”

One commentator labeled Rollins’ idea as “objectively absurd.” Subjectively, too, I’d add.

But she is right on one count; there are plenty of workers in America. They’re here, they’re skilled and they want to do the hard, dirty work many Americans don’t or simply won’t.

Moreover, you’ve got three crucial reasons to let them. Breakfast, lunch and supper.