“We also have a boat load of able-bodied Welfare recipients that could pick beans and tomatoes.”
Farmers need reliable help. A crop can go bad in two days.
In my youth the local farmer drove to Albany and got some people wishing to have a bottle of whisky that night and the next two to pick his tomatoes.
We used to put up square bales of hay instead of the big round ones like we do now. It eventually got impossible to find teenagers to pick up hay in the summer. We gave up doing square bales when the last two teenage boys we hired ended up passed out under a tree due to the heat. My husband and I were still going. One year we let a neighbor mow and keep the hay. He hired some illegals to help. We lost a 4-wheeler, a Stihl chainsaw, and an expensive trimmer about two weeks after the hay was done. A lot of farmers here actually go to the border to get illegals and haul them back to do farm work.
We have some large farms that use legal guest workers and they don’t have so many problems but the small farmers use illegals.
There should still be a way to make the healthy Welfare deadbeats do the jobs people claim Americans won’t do. There should be no job Americans won’t do.
I understand the problems that farmers face because we farmed but at some point Welfare people need to come off of Welfare and be productive. We shouldn’t be paying anybody not to work and then expect to bring in foreigners to do the work.