On food and immigration

Hi, I'm Adam Reagusia, another chronically oaced food YouTuber. So maybe you shouldn't listen to anything I say about something serious. But if you do listen to me, I've written a thing here where I am going to try to explain why the US food and agriculture industries employ so many people illegally. And my wording there is careful. Why do US companies employ so many people illegally? Yes, the people in question are also by definition lawb breakakers either present in the country or working in the country illegally, which may be a civil or criminal infraction depending on the details. Sure, the people working are also breaking the law. But if we're going to get angry at anybody over illegal immigration, I do think we should all be a little more angry at the employers, the often deep pocketed employers who create an economic incentive for desperate people to break the law. The employers whose business models depend on exploitable people. people who will do extremely physically demanding, dirty, dangerous, seasonal, and often migratory work for modest money. I try to use language that like centers the employers who are generally not being rounded up by masked police right now. Their workers are. If you support President Trump's recent mass deportation efforts, or even if you just kind of sympathize with those efforts on some level, this essay that I've written here is really for you. I'm not going to lecture you any more than I just did. I'm going to give you some useful facts and stats, and I'm going to make some like personal, practical, and moral arguments that I think that you might find really persuasive or at least interesting. So here's a report from the center for migration studies. It is three years old and things have been changing rapidly in the last few months. So consider this like a snapshot of the pre-sec Trump administration status quo. The vast majority of US agricultural workers are foreignborn 86%. Most people who work on farms or in meatacking plants are foreignborn. Of those foreignborn workers, about half have historically been living or working in the country illegally. Of that half who are employed illegally, most are from Mexico and about half are working in one state, California. Why is that? Is that just because California is on the Mexican border? Well, partly sure, but Texas is also a huge agricultural state on the Mexican border and only 5% of illegally employed farm workers work in Texas. In California, it's half of them. Is that because California is more politically friendly to immigrants than Texas is? That's probably a marginal effect, right? These desperate people go where the work is available regardless of legal risk. The main reason so many of these farm workers are in California is because so many of the farms are in California. Specifically, so many of the farms that grow the stuff that you see in the produce section at the grocery store. More of your fresh fruits and vegetables come from California than from anywhere else. the kind of fresh food that we should all be eating more of and that we can eat more of thanks to the convenience of factor sponsor of this video. Yes, I benefit from the immigration status quo as a person who buys food and also as a person whose work is supported by sponsorships from food companies. This is one reason I feel obligated to speak out about immigration. I work a lot. I want to eat fresh, healthy food. I'm not going to cook each of those meals myself from scratch. So, a few meals of the week are factor meals. Fresh, never frozen, dietitionian approved, ready to eat after a couple minutes in the microwave. I don't know how they're able to send cooked salmon that juicy to my door in a box, but they make it happen. It's pretty remarkable. 35 meals to choose from each week with keto options, calorie smart, vegan and veggie, whatever you need. For me, I'm looking for a piece of lean protein and some vegetables fast. Factor is owned by HelloFresh, and they've really perfected the art of making tasty, ready to eat meals. Like, these are a major leap forward in the field of microwavable meals. I'm telling you, a protein shake is something I have to choke down. These meals I savor and they are instant. Imagine what I would be eating instead on long editing days. Probably garbage out of a bag, right? Head to factor75.com or click the link below and use code 50 regusia to get 50% off plus free shipping on your first Factor box. That's code 50 Regusia at factor75.com. Get 50% off plus free shipping on your first box. Thank you, Factor. Anyway, so why does so much of the food come from California, specifically the fresh produce? Well, because California's central valley has this magical Mediterranean desert climate where you can grow that kind of stuff really well all year round as long as you are using totally unsustainable levels of irrigation. And here's the thing about growing produce, it requires way more human hands. the big like commodity crops that we grow in the middle of the country, the corn, the soy, the wheat, those crops require a lot of inputs. They require a lot of equipment, but hardly any people anymore. You need a guy to drive a combine harvester. You need a guy to finance it. And you need a guy who knows how to fix it. There, that is the very short version of the Midwestern farm economy. To bring in stuff like lettuce and tomatoes and melons, you generally need a human being to bend over in a blazing hot field, pick it delicately with their hands, and then do it again and again and again. Hard jobs. And what makes them even harder is that they are seasonal. There's parts of the year when you're working constantly, and there's parts of the year when there's no work at all. And in California especially, these jobs are often migratory. You don't get to live in one place. You may go on a circuit around the central valley planting or picking whatever the season demands. Something is pretty much always in season in California. These farm laborer jobs are so damn tough that typically the only people who want them are people for whom that is their best economic option. Most nativeorn Americans simply have better economic options, even if their options still suck. Most nativeborn Americans can get a job where they at least get to live in the same place all year, live with their kids while their kids attend the same school all year, etc. As the cliche goes, Americans don't want these jobs. With a geographically approximate supply of foreignb born labor, California for decades has turned south for talent. And the mostly northern Mexicans who migrate up for that work to work on US farms, those people are big boys and girls with agency to choose among their best economic options. And for some of them, the migratory nature of farm labor can be more of a feature than it is a bug. Even modest US money goes a lot further in northern Mexico. And so a lot of farm workers might not want to live a settled life. They they want to work part of the year in the US, save money, and then bring it back to Mexico for part of the year. Or maybe they live in the US full-time, but they're sending remittances back home to their family and the money goes a lot further for them in Mexico. There's lots of scenarios, but those are honestly like the pretty rosy scenarios. Frankly, the hard truth is that these jobs are hot, dirty, physically brutal, and insecure. And a person who is in the country illegally is even more insecure. They have even fewer economic options, making them all the more likely to need work that is this undesirable. When you're in the country illegally, you are effectively an underclass. You cannot enjoy the full protection of the law because the law is a constant threat to you. Especially when like normal city police and county sheriffs are collaborating with immigration police. When they do that, you can't go to the authorities for help. So, you are more exploitable. This labor pool of immigrants and seasonal migrants, mostly from northern Mexico, is what makes the California produce machine go, and also other industries in other states, particularly the meatacking industry. Without this labor pool, fresh food would cost like four times more. like at the bougie farmers markets where you pay for the privilege of having a white kid with a liberal arts degree pick your kale. Without this labor pool, fresh food would be even more expensive than it already is. Or more likely, the US would simply import even more of its meat and produce from other countries with cheaper labor. We'd grow less of our own food ourselves. I will let you decide which of those scenarios is less desirable. So, imagine you're a northern Mexican farm laborer. You're probably always going to make bad money, but you can make slightly less bad money in the US. You'll be less likely to die horribly in cartel violence in the US. And the US has this gigantic crucial economic need that only you can fill for the right price. But for all that, you may still not be able to migrate or to immigrate legally to the US. The legal process is so insanely hard and long and slow, and there are weight lists and maximum annual quotas. And in practice, there simply aren't enough legal slots for all of the Mexican farm laborers who are manifestly needed by the US agricultural industry every year. So, I think if you're a northern Mexican farm laborer with a strong back, a strong work ethic, an acute need for cash or safety, but no green card, no H2B visa, if you're that person, you look north and you see people just like you getting farm jobs without authentic papers. So, you figure to yourself, "Oh, okay. I see what the deal is here. I see the US will let me in. They will practically invite me in to pick their berries as long as I agree to live without the full protection of the law. As long as I live in the shadows as a member of an underclass. That's the crappy deal the US is offering. And because it's the best economic opportunity available to me, I'mma take it. Imagine making a deal like that. Imagine signing that social contract. You give up your full civil liberties in exchange for a really hard job. Imagine you sign that contract and you uphold your end of the bargain. Season after grueling season, you uphold your end of the bargain and then suddenly the other party in that contract renegs on the deal. Imagine how you would feel. I picked your peaches. I lived in the shadows. I probably even paid a lot of taxes for government services I'm not fully able to access. I did all those things. And now you want to round me up like an animal. You want to cram me into a hot oversted ice detention center thousands of miles away. You want to hold me indefinitely or even send me to a foreign black site without having my case reviewed by an independent authority. If I'm lucky, you won't dump me in Sudan. If I'm lucky, you'll dump me back in Mexico with none of my money or property and where I might not know anybody anymore or have anywhere to stay, let alone work, and where I may be in danger from cartels that are funded by your voracious appetite for fentinol and cocaine. Imagine being that guy. Imagine how you would feel. You know, I get the argument that rule of law is important. Widespread law breaking. Millions of people living in the US illegally and being employed illegally. This is a threat to rule of law. I get that argument. And I also think that rule of law is really important because the alternative is an arbitrary capriccious corrupt personalist regime. Rule of law is really important. But it's also the case that we have lots of laws we routinely ignore. Right? Almost everyone operating a motor vehicle in the US at this moment is driving above the speed limit. The feds are still letting people in lots of states buy and sell weed even though it's still federally illegal. And immigration laws similarly are laws that we have all decided to selectively ignore for the sake of expediency. We need this labor pool, but it's politically unpopular to increase legal immigration from Mexico. So, we just tolerate the illegal immigration that our system depends on. That is what you and I have been doing in the US for decades. Even if you've been politically opposed to it, even if you voted for every single candidate who promised to crack down on illegal immigration, you still voted with your wallet to tolerate this under the table guest worker program that we have going here. If you buy this food, and you almost certainly do, you voted for the status quo with your wallet. And that may be even more powerful than your vote down at the polling place. We are all responsible for this intolerable situation we are all wedded to. We're addicted to it. That that sweet, sweet, exploitable farm labor that flows into our neediest growing region. It has been fun to watch President Trump figure all this out in real time. He's doing a speedun like he always does, figuring out why the status quo got to be the status quo in the first place. There were often really good reasons for the status quo. Our immigration status quo allowed us to get the labor that we need without having to actually compromise with each other on immigration reform. real bipartisan congressional legislation that would legalize and reform the system that we already have, but which we are too cowardly to confront with intellectual honesty. If Donald Trump had listened to all the career civil servants there to advise him, they would have told him that his mass deportation policy would risk draining the US food system of labor on which it dearly depends. President Trump says he wants to deport a million people a year. And he says he wants to focus on dangerous criminals or layabouts living on benefits. Problem is, there aren't enough of such people in existence for Trump to deport and still meet his numbers. Lots of criminology research using lots of different methodologies has come to the same basic conclusion that people who are in the country illegally are actually far less likely than nativeborn citizens to commit crimes once they get here. Nativeorn citizens are something like four times more likely to commit serious crimes. This makes sense. Most people who are in the country illegally are here to work and to keep their heads down so that nobody notices them. There are legit scary criminals who cross the border illegally, but there aren't as many of them as people think. And the problem with real criminals is they tend to make themselves hard to find. You know who's easy to find? Otherwise law-abiding, hardworking, churchgoing immigrants. ICE has been raiding Spanish language services at churches. President Trump has given ICE minimum deportation quotas. ICE officers are struggling to meet those quotas. Trump has fired at least one ICE administrator for refusing to discipline officers who don't meet their quotas. They have to snatch a minimum number of people in order to keep their jobs. And criminals are hard to snatch. You know who's easy to snatch? People on the path to citizenship who are showing up at their court date as ordered. They're snatching them there. Guys at the Home Depot looking for day labor construction work. That's like shooting fish in a barrel. Construction employs more people illegally than any other industry in the US. Meat packing plants. Lots of deportation targets all in a confined space. And then there are the farms. The easiest people to deport are the people we need doing the jobs that we need doing. If you focus on deporting alleged troublemakers, you end up deporting a few hundred,000 people a year, which is what we have been doing the last many years under Republican and Democratic administrations. President Obama deported about 3 million people over his eight years in office. Trump in his first four years deported a million and a half people, proportionately the same as Obama. Biden deported almost as many. And here we are in Trump 2. This time he's promised mass deportations. He has loosened all the old constraints. He's taking people without due process of law. And to what end? According to the administration's own estimates, they've maybe doubled the normal deportation rate, like at most. And ICE has already burned through its whole budget in half a year. There just aren't that many criminals in layabouts to get, and the scariest criminals make themselves really hard to get. So, ICE raids the farms. And finally, big Aggra business got through to Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, who reportedly got through to Donald Trump a couple of weeks ago. And Trump last week seemed to order a pause on all immigration enforcement within the agricultural and hospitality industries, hotels, restaurants, other industries that are also hooked on this exploitable labor. The president made public comments to that effect. And we know that a directive went down to ICE agents telling them to stop raiding these crucial industries, at least for now. This was a stunning reversal for Trump. So, it's not surprising that he now seems to have reversed his reversal, at least as of this recording. It was reported Monday that ICE sent down another directive saying that farms and hotels are back on the menu, boys. Reportedly, this was due to the influence of White House Deputy Chief of Staff Steven Miller, who is the administration's like real immigration hardliner. When you have rule by a man rather than a system, one result of that is that US policy is often determined by whoever spoke most recently to Donald Trump. Personalist rule tends to be highly capriccious, the whims of the king, etc. You've read about that in history. In a normal democratic administration, there are expert advisory boards and career civil servants who work with political appointees to develop policy recommendations that the president usually mostly accepts and implements. That's not how Trump works. So, we swing from position to position. Let me tell you, businesses love unpredictability. There's good reasons why the status quo was the status quo. And there's good reasons why the techniques of martial law are generally reserved for like true national emergencies, the kinds of policing techniques being used by ICE and allied agencies to hit these probably unhitable deportation targets. masked plain clothes officers who refuse to identify themselves, snatching people up off the street, whisking them into unmarked vans, denying people due process of law where they can make their case to a judge, detaining people indefinitely, sending them to other countries prisons where they have no idea how many years they will be held or in what conditions. These are things you only do when you absolutely have to because they are so damaging. Not just to the people being snatched, but to all of us. All of us now have to think twice. If we see guys in masks pulling a screaming mother away from her child on the street, is that ICE or is it some gang? There's no way to know in the moment. And so do you intervene? The entire law enforcement system breaks down when people lose faith that they may be treated fairly within it. As a relatively light-skinned, wellto-do US citizen, I can have a reasonable amount of faith that if I'm arrested, I will be able to talk to a lawyer promptly. plead my case before a judge and even if I lose, my punishment will probably be reasonable and proportional and predictable. So that means that when the cops come knocking, I'm more likely to cooperate. I'm more likely to submit to them in the moment instead of running or fighting because I have some idea about what will happen to me. When you get picked up by immigration authorities in the US right now, you have no idea what is going to happen to you. You don't know if they will use your social media posts to justify taking you off your path to citizenship. You don't know if they will revoke your temporary protected status. Imagine somebody revoking your driver's license and then arresting you for unlicensed driving before you can even get off the road. That's what it's like to have your temporary protected status arbitrarily revoked, which is something the Trump administration is doing a lot right now. They're illegalizing people in order to arrest them. When you're snatched up by ICE right now, you don't know where they will take you. You don't know for how long. You don't know if you'll get to see a judge. You don't know if they'll take you back where you came from or if they're going to take you to some random third country like Sudan or if they'll take you to an El Salvadoran cartel prison where supposedly no one gets out alive. If those are the stakes, then it's logical for people to resist being taken. Basic self-preservation supersedes all. Right? And when it becomes logical for people to resist law enforcement, then the situation becomes way more dangerous for everyone involved. You only resort to that kind of policing when you absolutely have to. When you're facing an actual armed takeover by a foreign power, when you're in a red dawn situation. That's just not what we're in with illegal immigration right now. We have an underthet guest worker program, not an invasion. When people in the country illegally are being denied their due process rights, that means I could be denied my due process rights because due process is how we determine whether someone is actually in the country illegally. Due process is where the cops have to prove their allegation to a judge. At least if they never have to prove it, then that means I could get swept up on accident. Or someone in the administration who doesn't like what I say on the internet could make up a lie about me to snatch me up and I would never get a chance to plead my case to a third party. Imagine if you're a Republican, imagine the Democrat you hate most wielding that kind of power against you because that's where you're headed. when non-citizen legal permanent residents are being deported or denied re-entry on the basis of articles they've written in newspapers or political opinions they've posted online. That makes me think twice before I post my political opinions online. I mean, they say they're not doing it to citizens yet, but Trump has established a pattern of steady escalation, like a reality show producer constantly raising the stakes of the drama. I'm going to be traveling out of the country soon. Do I really want to risk getting hassled at customs on the way back in based on an opinion that I posted online? I've got kids to take care of. I can't take those kinds of risks. So now I'm just less free than I was before. These kinds of heavy-handed state actions to maintain order are necessary in some situations of immediate grave emergency. There's a reason we don't use them the rest of the time. It's like treating a disease with chemo or a really invasive surgery. The cure is going to hurt you a lot. So you only take it if you have no other choice to stay alive. We have lots of other choices in the United States. Rather than doing this, we could choose to make the grand political compromise on immigration, the one that we've almost made many times before. We could compromise. We could recognize and accept the reality on the ground. Lots of people are here illegally, but they're doing jobs we need done. They're literally feeding us on the farm and in the kitchen. So, we compromise. We provide a doable, expedited path to citizenship for most people who are here already. We increase the legal immigration and seasonal migration necessary to get those workers from where they live now. And at the same time, we massively crack down on future illegal border crossings and visa overstays. We spend whatever we need to spend on drones and satellites and in some places walls to better secure the southern border. And maybe we adopt an Australia-like policy where we say, "Look, if you come in here illegally, you will never get a path to citizenship unless you are an asylum seeker with a really legit claim who immediately presents themselves to the authorities." We could do that like Australia does. We could lock down the border while we also let more people move through that border legally so that we don't have to get them illegally. That's the grand compromise. Are there things that you don't like about that? Me, too. There's lots I don't like about that deal. But my opinion isn't the only one that matters. This is the only deal that the US body politic is ever going to make on immigration. So, let's stop fapping around and actually do it. The grown-ups aren't going to do it for us. I regret to inform you that we are the grown-ups. Some people don't want to increase legal immigration because they don't want their society to change. They don't want their culture to change. They don't want their political balance of power to change. I get that. But there's three things I would say in response that I think such people might actually find persuasive. So let me give it a go. Okay. One, yes, people in the US of Latin extraction have historically voted heavily for Democrats, but if you haven't heard, they have started breaking for Republicans in huge numbers. If Republicans would just stop snatching up their friends and family, probably even more of them would vote for Republicans. Most of them are conservative Catholics after all. Two, without lots of immigration, the US is going to have way too many old retired people relative to the younger working people needed to support them. We're not having near enough babies. The only reason that we're not in a demographic death spiral right now like Russia is is because we live in a country people actually want to come to. Unlike Russia, nobody wants to smuggle themselves into Russia. They want to come here. It's what you call a good problem to have, right? Good problems are real problems requiring real solutions, but they are better than the alternative. Imagine living in a country that no one wants to come to. Imagine living in a country where immigration police keep you in instead of keeping other people out. In the short to medium term at least, immigration is the only way that we can save social security and so many other systems. Otherwise, we won't have enough working people to support the retiring boomers. The main reason things were so great economically in the '9s is that the boomers, the largest generation ever, they were at the peak of their productivity in the '90s. Now they're old and retired and taking their money out of the markets to pay for assisted living. The only way that isn't going to destroy us is if we keep letting in immigrants to work. Final point, point three. If you like your culture, if you want to keep your culture, remember that the culture you have now, the culture that you love and want to protect, remember that your culture is itself the result of constant change, constant migration and assimilation. You wouldn't have what you have now without the kind of change that immigration brings. The only way available is forward. So maybe don't fight it or at least pick your battles a little more selectively. So there you go. That's how I think about illegal immigration on a practical and moral level and why I am so deeply opposed to the Trump Miller mass deportation effort. I take solace in my belief that their effort is likely to fail for all of the reasons we've discussed. I wonder how much longer ICE agents are going to be willing to do this work when they are met with hostility in the field and hostility back at the office from managers who expect them to meet these unmeatable quotas. You can be in favor of law and order without being in favor of this this dangerous inhumane effort that risks quadrupling the cost of your salad at best. What you do instead is support a comprehensive immigration policy compromise like we've almost passed several times before we politically chickened out. Maybe Trump could be the one to sign it into law. There is an old Vulcan proverb, only Nixon could go to China. Make good choices. Stay safe out there.