On the eve of the American Civil War, Democratic Sen. James Henry Hammond of South Carolina warned his Northern colleagues not to mess with slavery. Otherwise, the South’s plantation grandees could grind the global economy to a halt by refusing to plant cotton.
Today, both economic blackmail and the arrogance once associated with landed aristocrats come in many forms and from many sources.
For instance, on Tuesday, the French state-owned international news network France 24 published a video report featuring comments from a California farmer named Joe Del Bosque, who, like the plantation grandees of old, warned that President-elect Donald Trump’s mass deportation plan would deprive farmers of cheap labor, thereby requiring farmers to pass along increased agricultural production costs to consumers.
Of course, Del Bosque did not say it quite that way. But he meant exactly that.
“You know, we can’t have deportations here because it would disrupt our food supply for the country. We really don’t think that anybody wants that,” the farmer said.
Moments later, the France 24 report acknowledged that “undocumented migrants” constitute 44 percent of U.S. agricultural workers.
Rather than denouncing this fact as a shameful betrayal of American citizens, Del Bosque treated it as justification for blackmail.
“Without our people, our farms will come to a stop,” he said. “We will not be able to harvest our fruits and vegetables and nuts, and that will interrupt the food chain for Americans. And it would possibly increase food prices tremendously, too.”
US Farmers Fret Over Trump’s Deportation Planshttps://t.co/MdQyas1AVF pic.twitter.com/ebiK7drB8S
— Channels Television (@channelstv) December 31, 2024
In other words, allow us to maintain our current profits by continuing to employ the cheap labor of illegal immigrants. Otherwise, you will pay the price.
Will the American agricultural sector prosper under Trump?
Yes: 100% (3 Votes)
No: 0% (0 Votes)
The good news, of course, is that the playbook for those who make this argument has never changed.
“[W]ould any sane nation make war on cotton?” Hammond asked his colleagues in a speech delivered on Mar. 4, 1858. “Without firing a gun, without drawing a sword, should they make war on us we could bring the whole world to our feet.”
The speech’s full context made clear that when Hammond said “make war,” he meant “attack slavery.” Like most Southern politicians of his day, the senator represented perhaps the most privileged class of men in American history.
Speaking of aristocrats in their own minds, then-President Barack Obama visited Del Bosque’s California farm in 2014.
Admittedly, Del Bosque’s comments do not merit quite the scorn now reserved for those of antebellum slavery apologists. The difference, however, is a matter of degrees, not of kind, for the argument is essentially the same.
Moreover, that attitude toward cheap labor prevails across modern American institutions, often hiding in plain sight.
For instance, when the Bureau of Labor Statistics revised its employment numbers downward by more than 800,000 jobs for the period between March 2023 and March 2024, a Goldman Sachs economist called the revision “erroneous” and “misleading” because BLS’s methodology did not account for strong job growth among illegal immigrants.
And yes, the economist framed this as good news overall.
Likewise, when the myriad problems associated with mass immigration begin to manifest in one community, as they did during the 2024 presidential campaign, when the nation momentarily turned its attention to the small town of Springfield, Ohio, we can always count on the establishment media to run stories touting mass immigration’s benefits to employers and landlords.
Happily, Trump’s victory in the 2024 election signaled that Americans have had enough of the exploitation. We will take our communities, our jobs, and our country back, and we care nothing for shopworn threats.
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