I did two summer seasons of farm labor in my early teens. Detasseling corn. It was hot, laborious, and nonstop. Every day get on the bus and go to a new field, and repeat until the season is over.
It sucked overall, but those jobs were always meant for teenagers looking to make a few bucks before high school started. Now teens can’t get those jobs at all because the Mexicans take them permanently, no thanks to the cheapskate farmers.
Trump is way out of his element on this one and he’s going to screw Americans over just like every other president has.
These jobs aren’t “meant” for teenagers. Teenagers have NEVER had more than a seasonal, marginal share of the agricultural workforce. If summer jobs have been lost, that’s a shame, but they’ve never been central to food production. Even allowing for Operation Wetback in 1954, Mexicans legal and illegal have been central to field work.
And foreign workers, mostly illegal, fill a third to half of all meatpacking jobs and way more than that in dairy and pork processing.
The one constant in these jobs is that they are hard work and low-paying.
As an example, if you ship all the illegal apple-picker back to Mexico and Guatemala, most of domestic fruit would rot on trees.
When The U.S. Government Tried To Replace Migrant Farmworkers With High Schoolers
WORKING TOBACCO FIELDS IS ANOTHER PLACE FOR TEENS