0:00
/
0:00
Transcript

Deporting the People Who Feed Us

Trump's latest attack on our supply chain means American families will soon be paying much higher prices for food.

If you ask the average Red Hat why they voted for Trump, you’re bound to hear a lot about immigrants and egg prices, and now that Trump is President, he is making both problems worse. As ICE is seeking permission to raid everything from schools to churches to hospitals, Trump is also revoking the legal status of many hard-working refugees and asylum seekers who, until very recently, were doing incredibly difficult and often dangerous jobs to feed America. Ted Genoways of Mother Jones joins us to discuss this problem and what we need to do to fix it:

TED: What happens if suddenly all the people who we've relied on for a generation to do these jobs are suddenly removed from that position? I think there's a real moral question about what we've promised to the people who we've brought to this country, especially as refugees and asylum seekers. But there's also the question of what are we going to do if we don't have the whole workforce that we rely on to make our food?

RICK: Right. Well, I mean, we're either going to pay really high prices or we're going to have to figure out how to grow stuff ourselves. Maybe we're going to set up slaughterhouses in our backyards.

As much and Trump and his followers love to hate and demonize immigrants, the simple fact is that our food system is driven mainly by people who were not born in America, and that isn’t going to change anytime soon. Trump knows it. Business knows it. And American working families should know it, too.

Because you can’t make America “Great Again” when Americans are paying six bucks for a tomato just so they can justify being cruel to the folks who feed us.

Discussion about this podcast