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MAGA farmers in blue state New York are losing workers - what did they think would happen? [1]

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Date: 2025-05-30

There are two New Yorks — the city and upstate. Overall, the state has been reliably blue in Presidential elections. The last time it voted for a Republican candidate was 41 years ago when Reagan won 49 states in 1984. However, in 2024, Harris's margin was "only" 13% — a decline from the 23% by which Biden won the state in 2020.

The rural areas of the state (upstate) — along with Long Island and Staten Island (aka North Alabama) — voted for Trump. Farmers in New York, as they are everywhere, were reliably MAGA. Now, they are reaping what they sowed. Except reaping in 2025 may prove a struggle for them.

2024 presidential election results by county in NY (The blue block on the right is CT. The red/blue at the bottom is PA/NJ)

The New York Times reports (paywall should be down):

The business owners who depend on migrant work — many of them supporters of President Trump — feel anxious about the prospect of losing a crucial labor force. In the surrounding communities, there is palpable acrimony between those who think migrants should be allowed to stay in the country and those who want them to go.

Meanwhile, the undocumented workers, many of whom work in agriculture, are terrified to go to work. The NYT adds:

They have seen federal agents sweep away a mother and her three children from their home on a dairy in the village of Sackets Harbor, NY. And they have heard about the food vendor arrested by the immigration police after she hit a deer in a snowstorm and sought help from a neighbor who reported her to the authorities. Officers then took her husband from work and their daughters, 6 and 9 years old, from school.

Trump sold his immigrant removal push by promising to focus on violent criminals. It was an effective tactic. Immigration is the sole policy where he still has support. However, as anyone who is not a MAGA or has been under a rock for nine years knows, TACO is a big liar. And his immigration brownshirts, who have not been rounding up anywhere near the numbers immigration czar Tom Homan promised, are plucking the low-hanging fruit.

From the NYT:

President Trump has vowed to remove immigrants from the country by the millions, but his administration has so far fallen vastly short of that goal. To boost deportations, immigration officials have detained workers at their homes and jobs — a method that, in the past, had been reserved for only the most violent criminals.

The White House, despite the evidence that its policies are hurting farmers, disagrees with the facts and offers some optimistic rhetoric from an alternative-fact galaxy.

Hurting farmers is not the point, the administration said. "Two things can be accomplished at the same time: enforcing our immigration laws and supporting America's vital agricultural industry," Kush Desai, a White House spokesman, said. "The Trump administration is already delivering relief for America's farmers by slashing regulations, ending unfair trade practices and lowering energy prices."

A: How can you enforce immigration laws and support farmers? 42% of farm workers are undocumented. In addition, the administration has shown it will deport immigrants here legally — a further 19%. In New York State, Cornell University estimated in 2019 that about half of all farmworkers were undocumented.

B: Which slashed regulations have helped farmers? The government's Energy Information Administration reports that energy prices have increased ("modestly," but still up). And it is hard to find an "unfair trade practice" Trump has actually ended (see TACO again).

New York farmers have the same problem farmers across America have. If you deport the "illegals," you won't find any "legals" to replace them. The paper adds:

Dairy is the state's biggest agricultural sector, and New York is the fifth-largest dairy state, according to statistics released by the state's Agriculture Department in 2023. Dairy farmers have long employed people without legal status to tend to their cows because they cannot find US citizens to reliably perform jobs that are "physically demanding, dirty and socially denigrated work,"

Unsurprisingly, the administration's arbitrary and capricious floundering has not produced optimal results. Even though they can't make their numbers, they are still peeing in US agriculture's pool.

David Fisher, president of the New York Farm Bureau, a nonprofit industry group, stated that recent deportation efforts have created anxiety not only for farmworkers but also for their employers. In a statement, he said:

"Local sources of labor are simply not available in most cases. It is essential that we work effectively with this administration to make our voice heard."

Dream on, Dave. "Working effectively" is not part of this administration's skill set. Nor is clarity. The NYT has this:

US farm owners voted overwhelmingly for Mr. Trump, as did the electorate across rural parts of New York. But because many farm owners depend on immigrant labor, their industry is imperiled by the president's deportation efforts. Mr. Trump sought to relieve that tension last month by vaguely suggesting that farmers will be able to petition the federal government to retain some workers who are undocumented, but he did not clarify how or when the government would do it.

Bozo didn't "clarify" because he has no fecking clue what he's talking about. Petition the federal government? How is a farmer supposed to do that? Where's the website? Where are the forms? Good luck finding a human being to talk to. They've probably all been fired.

I hate to say it, but Trump has a superpower. He has a preternatural ability to get people to vote against their own interests. He's far from the first Republican to do that. But he's the best at it. How can people be that stupid?

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