https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/02/12/help-wanted-rural-america-needs-immigrants/
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How is this news?
I thought it was obvious that immigrant labor is vitally important to industries like agriculture, and it’s baffling how the republicans keep getting the rural agrarian vote while campaigning on making agriculture impossible.
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Well, it’ would be “news” to the many who can’t hear it because they’re too steeped in wingnut propaganda.
To me, it’s just “irony.”
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Except as long as you don’t have someone who doesn’t understand how the game is played (i.e. Trump), that’s how a lot of the (poorly-run) farms like it.
Employing illegal immigrants lets them underpay and provide poor working conditions while dangling the threat of deportation over their employees’ heads. A raid here and there makes it believable. But not too many, too often. Farms will literally lend each other workers after a raid until everyone is back up and running.
But Donny has gone overboard in his racist zeal, far more than even those guys are comfortable with, because it’s messing with business. So now they have labour shortages, and you get articles like this.
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I know someone (old, white, rich, republican) that while they are not a farmer, did rely heavily on immigrant labor on a daily basis. He paid his workers well and genuinely cared for everyone. He even put some of the families kids through undergrad college. One of the girls was working on her PHd last I heard. I’ve seen him with them enough to see that he really does care about their well being…
…and yet when Trump was on the campaign trail promising to round up all the illegals. This guy was full on Trump. We argued with him saying what about each of his employees? He replied, Trump won’t bother my employees, they are law abiding good Christians. We pointed out, that some had come here 40is years ago illegally and that Trump would be coming for them along with anyone that just looked like them. Noooooo he insisted that Trump would only catch those that are violent or steal. [Insert screaming gif]
I haven’t seen this guy much since then due to mostly unrelated issues. I am sure he is still insisting “his” people are special and therefor safe.
Just to add flavor to the story. His youngest son in 2016 (mid 30’s then) had been a full time meth addict for 10ish years. His friends were fellow users, and dabbled in meth production and car theft and robbing homes. The initial reason I stopped visiting was that they had taken over the barn on his father’s property and being around people on meth with guns is low on my list of things to do.
So to summarize, Trump was coming for the bad migrant workers and not his “good” workers and his son was a good Christian raised right and just experience a slight set back (on going for 15 plus years now but he’s about to turn it all around any day 
).
ETA: Just in case it wasn’t clear. This guy loved and trusted the people working at his home equal to his blood family (maybe even more than his family). They all had full access to his home. His business. His vehicles. Possibly his credit cards. He trusted them without reservation is my point. But he also trusted FOX and Trump. The migrants that Trump was describing were so awful and so unlike the people he worked with that in his mind these had to be different groups rather than trump being wildly wrong about the people he trusted daily.
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It doesn’t help that the largest food businesses in the country keep the system ouled either and use deportations to keep “illegal” workers silent. Whether it is chicken slaughterhouses in Alabama or Smithfield literally advertising in Mexico jobs for workers willing to get across the border to their facilities, undocumented immigrants are literally part of boardroom business plans.
Of course it doesn’t begin and end in rural America. Trump is far from the only hotel management company that relies on undocumented workers, and as much as there’s the meme that “without the country cities would starve” almost all agriculture has a top of the corporate chain in a city pushing the use of undocumented migrant workers.
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Probably not the correct medical term, but I like to call this sort of behaviour “controlled schitzophrenia”. Humans are really, really good at it.
I’ve seen it a lot, albeit in different environments/scenarios.
I catch myself doing it, more often than I care to admit.
To some extent, I’d say it’s a valid (but deeply problematic) coping mechanism, something to deal with life. It’s just that while it may help in the short run, it also tends to cement the status quo, however bad it may be.
And beyond a certain point it’s like an auto-immune disease, hurting instead of shielding.
And no, I don’t have a patent remedy. Having people in your life who frequently make you do a reality/sanity check helps, though.
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John Oliver’s show this week was about Brexit again. There was a lot of stuff about people like this, except in England, and except instead of deporting foreigners they are basically trying to deport their own country from itself.
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Yes, I think this is a very apt term. There is a schism between what he sees daily and what he is told by his trusted news source.
Same with his son. There is what he sees daily and what his ideal image of his son is.
It’s kind of a regular theme for him and has not made his life any easier.
ETA: Yes, it’s easy to see in others but is something that get the smartest of people. In fact being smart can be part of the problem.
I haven’t watched the episode yet but from what I have already heard it it seems there was a significant amount of this type of schizoid thinking.
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It’s just cognitive dissonance. And basically as long as his head is ringing like a bell from holding multiple directly contradictory beliefs, he won’t be able to think as well as he is capable.
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Thank you. I was trying to dredge up that term from the long term memory banks and it just wasn’t leaping forth for me.
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Cognitive dissonance doesn’t quite seem to cover it (yeah, right, listen to the kitchen stool shrink here…), as far as I understand it a person having cognitive dissonance is still the same, single person - I’ve met people who seem to switch between separate personalities.
I’d really like a professional to weigh in on this.
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There are rules about that i do believe. But fwiw i think cognitive dissonance covers it.
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