Beto’s right, but he’s most definitely not the only person realizing this. Cutting off aid to these countries will only increase the number of asylum seekers, just as telling Mexico that they potentially only have days left to make it to the border is causing a rush to immigrate. Both are ways for Stephen Miller to create a fake immigration crisis.
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We don’t have domestic production of those things. That’s the problem.
We can’t exactly start growing Mexican-sourced coffee in California.
We don’t have workers or farms or infrastructure that exists in Mexico for the produce they grow there.
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did you not read my comment about potato salad and jello? who needs avocados and fruit when we can eat potatoes and animal byproducts like real americans!
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Was just interested in coffee in Cali and apparently it’s a thing (really expensive though) https://text.npr.org/s.php?sId=585409126
I think the American republicans have been hanging with Farage and picked up his scam . Just like in the UK none of the architects of this nonsense will suffer with the people.
Also, maybe I’ve missed it, but there’s no mention of just how catastrophic this would be to Mexico. Like Brexit your Southern neighbours would rightly view it as a hostile act of a rogue racist regime.
On the upside perhaps Latin America would stop being flooded with guns from the North. That would be a good thing because that’s a real crises and has been for a long time.
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I’m having this weird 1950s deja vu… next step is to go back to calling avocados “alligator pears” and rename sloppy joes “freedom tacos”…
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Thanks for pointing that out. That’s a huge part of this that people seem to overlook. All this nationalism and protectionism also means we’re saying fuck you to our economic partners… or to just other human beings in other parts of the world… for what reason? I mean, i know the answer. Trump is a racist and an idiot and has surrounded himself with more sycophantic racist idiots.
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Even if the US had the climate and the infrastructure to grow the kinds of food products we import from south of the border (good luck growing your own coffee, Seattle!) very few “American workers” are interested in doing the back-breaking agricultural work needed to harvest them. That’s why there’s so much demand for migrant laborers.
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If I had to guess, I would lump this threat in with the one to rescind birthright citizenship.
Something the press gets in a tizzy over but the president neither has the power to enact it, nor the will to carry it out.
Conservatives elected a blowhard incompetent moron.
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American auto companies have factories in Mexico precisely because it doesn’t have working conditions and environmental regulations comparable to ours. The same reason why “right to work” states in the Deep South are major manufacturing centers. Because they can avoid providing decent wages and working conditions and lack organized labor’s ability to impose those on companies.
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There’s a bit in one of the books by Anthony Bourdain where he says something like “if the Mexican border was closed, the American restaurant industry wouldn’t last long.” He makes the point that Mexican and South American immigrants make up an overwhelming amount of the service industry and that talented Mexican prep and line cooks are in virtually every major restaurant.
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Plus the recipe calls for 2 tablespoons of avocado.
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And if they come back here, they are going to be automated to hell and back so you will have robots doing 90% of the labor anyway. As far as employing people goes those jobs are gone and not coming back.
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Let’s solve it! There’s plenty of regions in the US that are suitable for coffee. The reason we don’t produce it is because coffee is labor-intensive, which is a feature, not a bug. As automation cuts off more and more jobs, it would be great to have at least some jobs added, even if they are also eventually going to be automated. As for the other things you mentioned (beer and so on) of course we produce that. Avocados are native to Mexico and we don’t have a lot of great growing area for them. Oh well. I’m completely ok with eating what is seasonal and local.
Exactly. It grows in many areas. Let’s grow it. And it’s not like Mexico is the world’s main source of coffee. The world is full of coffee. Brazil and Vietnam are #1 and #2.
It’s probably true, but let’s again mention how catastrophic it has been to us to have so much industrial production move to Mexico.
Our southern neighbors have never had fond views of us, at least not sense the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848. Literally, since that day, they have not liked us and we will never get them to like us. Historical aside, they even considered, although not for very long, entering WWI against us.
Yes, that’s another benefit.
I’m not seeing any negatives in all this…
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In addition to all that, the same Nativist yahoos would cry bloody murder when they found out that the ethnostate of their dreams would not include low-low prices at Walmart (for anything, imported or domestic).
People who advocate for knee-jerk brain-dead protectionism and isolationism aren’t exactly the most sophisticated and well-informed thinkers out there – problems like those you mention are hand-waved away with magical thinking. Xenophobia and bigotry are easy for them, but they really need to leave matters like economics and geopolitics to the grownups.
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Cutting off supplies from other countries because you don’t like the people there isn’t a problem to be solved. We don’t need to dial the clock back in America to struggle to grow and produce things we don’t have the infrastructure simply out of spite. Because that’s what it comes down to. You want to close the southern border, force Americans to do menial work, do without major product imports, and overhaul the entire agricultural output of our country to avoid using things brown people make.
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I wonder which Americans would end up doing the most dirty and unpleasant of those menial jobs in a white-dominated ethnostate…
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Have you even been to Mexico? It’s not exactly Iran, despite all the effort the current U.S. leadership has been putting into turning our nations into bitter enemies.
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Or at least there will be if those namby-pamby environmentalists don’t get in the way of global warming!
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I think it’s probably a big surprise to most people when they discover that coffee is originally from Ethiopia. It was brought over from Europe (where it was brought by muslim conquerors and traders). And tea became trendy in England in the 18th C replacing the old coffee houses that had been around for centuries…
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My goodness, the two great enemies of Identitarians. They need to boycott all coffee now in protest.
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