Posted on 07/09/2025 12:03:37 PM PDT by DFG
Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said millions of adult Medicaid participants who will face stricter work requirements under the GOP megabill should replace foreign farm workers deported under the Trump administration’s immigration policies.
“There will be no amnesty,” Rollins said Tuesday during an event at USDA headquarters highlighting the administration’s efforts to strengthen farm and national security policy. “The mass deportations continue, but in a strategic way, and we move the workforce towards automation and 100 percent American participation.”
“With 34 million people, able-bodied adults on Medicaid, we should be able to do that fairly quickly,” she added, referencing Medicaid participants currently in the program who don’t yet meet the reconciliation package’s new work requirements.
Farmers and some lawmakers have expressed alarm over the potential impact of the administration’s deportation policies on the largely immigrant workforce that keeps the food system running. Some of President Donald Trump’s most ardent supporters have criticized the administration for giving special treatment to farms.
MAGA influencer Charlie Kirk said Monday that an “amnesty proposal” for farmworkers would splinter the MAGA coalition. Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) joined the chorus, posting on X, “No amnesty.”
The Trump administration briefly announced a pause on immigration raids last month on farms, hotels and restaurants before backing away from the policy within days.
(Excerpt) Read more at politico.com ...
Most Medicaid recipients live in cities and do not have farms nearby.
“Recruit” them into a new Civilian Conservation Corps.
It worked for FDR.
She’s a donor shill piece of work all around. She says they’re won’t be an amnesty, then she describes their intended amnesty.
Reportedly MAHA had been promised Massie, a great advocate for small farmers, as the Sec of Agriculture. Instead, we’ve got this sell-out-the-country hag.
I support this.
But this is going to be spun as — telling people on Medicaid to go out into the fields and pick cotton. It will be seen as an effort to re-impose slavery.
I was thinking the same thing, but ...
Immigrants had housing nearby. And buses still work.
Sometimes you have to move to where the work is.
Low risk prisoners instead. Give them a day off their sentence for each day they work.
On the Many Loves of Dobie Gillis tv series, the lazy beatnik Maynard G. Krebs (later famous Gilligan star Bob Denver) would always shout out in fear
“Work!?”
when someone mentioned his getting a job.
Urban Medicaid recipients do live near hotels and restaurants that need workers. Of course, they have to be paid an attractive wage and have good working conditions that many employers find too expensive and too hard to provide.
I worked the fields throughout my teen years.
It’s respectable work and it makes you appreciate both rest and a better job.
Pastures of Plenty
by Woody Guthrie
It’s a mighty hard row that my poor hands have hoed
My poor feet have traveled a hot dusty road
Out of your Dust Bowl and Westward we rolled
And your deserts were hot and your mountains were cold.
I worked in your orchards of peaches and prunes
I slept on the ground in the light of the moon
On the edge of the city you’ll see us and then
We come with the dust and we go with the wind
California, Arizona, I harvest your crops
Well its North up to Oregon to gather your hops
Dig the beets from your ground, cut the grapes from your vine
To set on your table your light sparkling wine.
It’s always we rambled, that river and I
All along your green valley, I will work till I die
My land I’ll defend with my life if it be
Cause my pastures of plenty must always be free.
Country version by Lester Flaggs & Earl Scruggs.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5y9ICZhbBtQ
Fine. For the urbanites let them clean up graffiti and litter. Sweep sidewalks, empty the trash cans. Lots of city work that can be done.
100% you are correct, when I was about 14, I went to work in the fields, where I grew up watermelons were the biggest crop, end of May thru June, all the kids my age picked watermelons, once that wrapped up we cropped tobacco and finished out the summer bailing hay, not the big round bales you see now but the much smaller rectangular bales that you stacked up in a barn.
Machines pick cotton now, people are way too slow and the farms are much larger in general. But drivers are needed and the cabs are air conditioned now.
“I worked the fields throughout my teen years.”
I was in the barn stacking hay and later on a horse taking Yankees on 2 hour trail rides. Nice tourist girls on the trail rides.
Interesting last two lines...
Wonderful idea!
But it’s not really about “picking cotton”.
It’s about yanking people out of the inner city (where “everything is free”) and telling them they now have to be agricultural workers.
The perception is definitely going to be “I ain’t picking cotton for no white man”. It doesn’t matter if cotton is involved or not. And it doesn’t matter if we now have AC.
Ironically, inner cities used to have farms.
It’s because he and other Communists wanted to help the US and Soviets to fight and defeat Germany in World War II.
Woody Guthrie’s guitar had the words on it:
This Machine Kills Fascists.
(the real ones in Germany).
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