Re: Crops Rotting In Fields, Food Prices To Rise

On Fri, 28 Feb 2025 14:30:43 -0800, Adam H. Kerman wrote:

BTR1701 <atropos@mac.com> wrote:
>

. . .

>

"Without illegals, who will pick the blueberries?"

>
Can I point out for the 1,342nd time on Usenet that itinerant
agricultural laborers are NOT immigrants, legal or otherwise. They are
admitted into the United States as such, follow the harvesting from one
farm to the next. Their wages are not defined as earned income for the
purpose of the tax code. They are ineligible for Social Security
pensions and Medicare and are not issued SSNs. They leave the United
States when there is no more harvesting to be performed.
>
If they don't leave, only then do they become illegal.

Yet again you mislead. Our primary news sources, that set the
standards in political language, the New York Times and the
Associated Press, etc., have banned any such terms as illegal immigrants.
All guest workers, as you are describing, legal or illegal, as
well as any sort of overstaying visas, with or without
permanent intent, as well as actual immigrants, legal or
otherwise, are all swallowed up into the single term "immigrant"
and the "New Republic" definitely falls into the "immigration is
always good" category of mainstream journalism.

>
Farmers successfully lobbied for this special treatment decades ago.

The immigration lobby scored this success, the lobby you say does not
exist.

>

Well, Karen, let's start with your jobless 22-year-old, blue-haired,
Reddit-addicted trans son with a degree in Intersectional Queerness who lives
in your basement?

Could happen, but he'd need more of his kind on the
fields so he could feel comfortable; farm labor is
notoriously trans-phobic.