Guest Post: Who is going to pick the fruit?

My conclusion yesterday: 

"The limit on Trump's behavior will not be the law or religion or the Constitution. He will stop doing things if they become unpopular, especially in red states."

Trump is on-again, off-again on how he is carrying out his plan of deportation.

Yesterday I wrote about the dilemma Trump faces doing what is popular in developing policy on foreign students at our universities. Today the subject is immigration. 

Trump is inconsistent on immigration because the MAGA voters who elected him want contradictory things. They want immigrants out and an America reserved for the benefit of established American citizens like themselves. But they also recognize they need the work that new immigrants do.

Herbert Rothschild describes these cross-currents in the public will. Rothschild (Harvard, PhD 1966) taught English literature at LSU and later at the University of Houston. All his adult life he has also been active in justice and peace work, beginning with the Civil Rights movement, the subject of his memoirs, The Bad Old Days, and later nuclear disarmament. He has continued such work since moving to the Rogue Valley in 2009. In 2021 he helped found Ashland.news after the city’s commercial paper folded. He writes a weekly column for it. With his permission I’m reprinting his latest.

GoodReads

Guest Post by Herb Rothschild

Worker Shortages force Trump to scale back deportations.

Department of Labor photo

Despite its name, reality TV isn’t reality. That truth keeps hitting Donald Trump upside his head. It changes his behavior even if it doesn’t change his personal perception that the world is still his show.

There are the failures Trump has simply ignored and moved on, such as his inability to end the fighting in Ukraine, which he boasted during the campaign that he could accomplish in 24 hours, and in Gaza (more than ever, Israel is the tail wagging the U.S. dog). Then, there are failures he has tried to depict as successes, such as his tariff negotiations and the attendance at his military parade last Saturday. Lastly, there is one he has had to acknowledge—ridding the country of undocumented immigrants.

On Thursday of last week, Trump wrote on social media, “Our great Farmers and people in the Hotel and Leisure business have been stating that our very aggressive policy on immigration is taking very good, long time workers away from them, with those jobs being almost impossible to replace.” The next day, according to The New York Times, Tatum King, a senior ICE official, via email told regional leaders of the ICE department, “Effective today, please hold on all work site enforcement investigations/operations on agriculture (including aquaculture and meat packing plants), restaurants and operating hotels.”

With the most likely worksites off limits to raids, ICE won’t be able to make the 3000-per-day quota that White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller had pressed the agency to meet. Responding to that pressure, ICE quickened its pace early this month, with arrests topping 2000 on both June 3 and 4. Those numbers were well above the daily average of 660 arrests during Mr. Trump's first 100 days back in office. That big push precipitated the crisis that persuaded Trump to rein in the agency.

Note: After I wrote this column, CNN reported that Homeland Security, the department that includes ICE, rescinded that guidance. We’ll see what happens next.

That Trump didn’t anticipate the labor shortages mass deportations would cause says a lot about the narrowness of his conceptual horizon. Republican lawmakers in Florida could have told him. In anticipation of a crackdown on immigration, last year the state legislature passed a bill allowing 16- and 17-year-olds to work 30-hour weeks. This year, there were bills to allow them to work full-time, to remove employment restrictions for certain 14- and 15-year-olds, and to allow 13-year-olds to work in agricultural jobs during the summer of the year they turn 14. Those bills, however, failed to pass.

Last June I published a column titled, “Dare we say it? We need immigrants.” Its scope was much broader than the concentration of immigrant workers in sectors like farm work, food processing, and hotels and restaurants. I discussed the demographic reality—a declining and aging population of U.S. citizens unable to constitute the needed ratio between workers and retirees. The current birth rate of all Americans is under 1.7 per woman. To avoid population decline, it must be at 2.1.

Actually, the birth rate has fallen throughout the industrialized world, with South Korea reaching the lowest rate—0.72 in 2023. In addition to the general concern the declines have caused, they are of special concern to Nativists everywhere, because immigration is the obvious fix for the problem.

For many decades, starting with a guest worker program in 1955, Germany rejected the extreme racism of its Nazi era and chose that fix. With first generation immigrants now making up 18% of its 83 million people and second-generation immigrants another 5%, Germany is second only to the U.S. in absolute numbers of immigrants. But Chancellor Angela Merkel’s open borders policy during the Syrian refugee crisis produced a political backlash. The far-right Alternative for Germany party won over 20% of the vote in this year’s national election and holds the second largest number of seats in the Bundestag. Germany has tightened its borders, even though its birthrate is below 1.4.

An alternative attractive to Nativists is to promote childbearing by the “right people,” which in the U.S. basically means white people. J.D. Vance is the most prominent pronatalist, as such folks are called, in the Trump administration (it should be noted that he doesn't mention White people, perhaps because his wife is second-generation Asian Indian). Speaking at the March for Life on January 24, Vance declared, “I want more babies in the United States of America.” Voicing his support for IVF, on March 26 Trump said, “I’ll be known as the fertilization president.”

Some of the pronatalist policy ideas floating around the administration are a $5,000 baby bonus after delivery, expanded child tax credits, menstrual-cycle education, preference for parents in Fulbright Scholarship awards, and a “National Medal of Motherhood.” Expanding the child tax credit is the only one of these proposals that would address the significant financial disincentives to bear children in today’s U.S. society, and it was Republicans in Congress in 2022 who ended the 2021 expansion that reduced childhood poverty to its lowest level on record.

Reacting to these proposals, MomsRising CEO Kristin Rowe-Finkbeiner, whose organization claims it advocates on behalf of more than a million mothers and families, said in a press release that they are "sheer lunacy . . . There's no question that families need policies that make it possible for moms and parents to care for their kids, go to work and contribute to their communities," arguing that affordable child and elder care, access to maternal health care and paid family leave would better encourage people to start and grow their families. Republicans, however, don’t favor such policies, and their Big Beautiful Budget Bill will exacerbate the hardships.

Trump supporters don’t understand that they face a demographic choice between what they insist on calling replacement and their gradual self-extinction. That understanding requires an objective and not even very long-term thinking uncongenial to them. Trump himself, quick to respond to warning signs that his policies aren’t working, will allow most undocumented residents to remain here. But he has made the issue of their presence so toxic that we may never adopt a rational policy about our sustainability.

 

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