Illegal immigrant farm workers are getting more praise from The New York Times in the newspaper’s latest puff piece.
In a piece headlined One Ohio Town’s Immigration Clash, Down In The Actual Muck highlights the town of Willard, Ohio’s, large-scale illegal immigrant workforce, despite never asking questions of how those working in the region are able to falsely claim they are in the country legally.
Instead, the Times glosses over the question, burying the fact that the Ohio farm profiled uses illegal immigrants:
Their descendants — the Wierses, Buurmas and Holthouses — now grow more than three dozen kinds of vegetables sold through Kroger, Meijer, Walmart and other retailers.
For decades, the farmers have relied on migrant labor from spring to fall. Depending on how quickly they work, field workers can earn up to $18 an hour, compared with Ohio’s $8.15 minimum hourly wage. Many return year after year to do the strenuous seasonal work, sometimes in temperatures that soar to 100 degrees. (Local residents largely steer clear.)
Seven in 10 field workers nationwide are undocumented, according to estimates by the American Farm Bureau Federation. In Willard, it is probably no different.
As Center for Immigration Studies Fellow Ronald Mortensen has written, illegal immigrants in the U.S. regularly commit felonies in order to work, by using stolen Social Security numbers, fraudulent Green Cards, birth certificates, and identity theft.
The farmers hiring the illegal immigrants in seasonal jobs say they rely on the illegal workforce to grow their crops. Although the New York Times mentions the wage of the illegal immigrants, they only note the highest wage that a worker could be paid – $18 an hour – not necessarily reflecting reality.
The New York Times also blames President Trump’s enforcement of federal immigration law for the Ohio farm having to deal with not getting a constant flow of illegal labor, rather than having to recruit Americans by raising wages and work conditions:
But beefed-up border enforcement has slowed the flow of workers who enter the country illegally. Last year, a shortage forced Mr. Wiers and the other growers to leave millions of dollars’ worth of produce in the fields.
This year could be worse. The Trump administration has encouraged local law enforcement across the country to help identify deportable individuals for the federal authorities, making long-distance travel risky for those already in the country without legal status.
The New York Times did not stop at praising the Ohio farmers’ illegal immigrant workforce. The piece went further to paint a negative picture of Trump supporters in the region for their objections to illegal immigrants taking the farm jobs and potentially driving wages down.
Judy Smith, a longtime resident of Willard, told the Times “I’m a compassionate person. I believe people who come here have to come here the right way. It makes me angry when I hear people talking about harboring illegals.”
Smith’s husband, Dave, also spoke with the paper. Instead of including a quote from the resident, the piece simply mentions that the man for said “he didn’t like hearing that everyone in the country, legally or not, is protected by the Constitution.”
The open borders, big business, and agricultural lobbies have long claimed there simply are not enough Americans willing to do the hard work that illegal immigrants and foreign nationals will do.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart Texas. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.
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