U.S. farm industry groups want President-elect Donald Trump to spare their sector from his promise of mass deportations, which could upend a food supply chain heavily dependent on immigrants in the United States illegally.
So far Trump officials have not committed to any exemptions, according to interviews with farm and worker groups and Trump’s incoming “border czar” Tom Homan.
Nearly half of the nation’s approximately 2 million farm workers lack legal status, according to the departments of Labor and Agriculture, as well as many dairy and meatpacking workers.
I really don’t think you could reasonably argue that the slaves in the US were compensated and okay with their conditions. For one, there were slave rebellions, and none of them asked to take part in the system or were given the option to leave.
I do get what you’re saying though, and we do seem to be in ultimate agreement.
We have a legal framework for it in the US as well, it’s just slow and inefficient with weird quotas that make people want to abandon the system. It undermines itself.
We do also have at least one prominent union for farm workers, including undocumented farm workers.
https://ufw.org/ The existence of a labor union with a history of real impact, as well as the workers seeking the work, is part of why I think the slavery comparison is misguided.
Equating immigrant farm labor to slavery creates the notion that we should abolish it entirely, which hurts both us and them, when the problem isn’t “immigrants doing farm work”, it’s the massive exploitation hazard which leads to too many opportunities for farm labor to have said terrible working conditions.