I usually find the slogan used by some conservatives that “the Democrats are the real racists” because of the Democratic Party‘s historic support for slavery and segregation to be vapid and intellectually lazy. But it does have relevance to a recent talking point that has become increasingly prevalent among liberal elites eager to defend the practice of illegal immigration.
Over the past week or so, several prominent legacy media pundits and Democratic politicians have turned to making an economic case against the deportation of illegal immigrants, claiming that a whole bunch of jobs would go unfilled if millions of illegal immigrants were deported, with catastrophic consequences for the national economy. Implicit in these arguments is a fundamentally racist assumption that Hispanic illegal immigrants are useful for filling low-wage jobs that most people don’t want to do. In other words, they view illegal immigrants as cheap, low-class labor.
The most overtly racist and disturbing comment came from Catherine Rampell, a Washington Post columnist who appeared on a recent CNN panel and sparred with Republican commentator Scott Jennings on the issue of illegal immigration and declared that illegal immigrants do all of the hard jobs in the economy.
“[Former President Donald Trump] is going to crack down on immigration to the benefit of American workers,” Jennings said.
“He’s going to deport 20 million people?” Rampell replied. “The people who pick your crops? The people who process your meat? The people who care for your grandmother? The people who serve all sorts of critical functions in this country?”
I can’t think of a situation where invoking “crop-picking” as a defense of labor practices toward a certain racial demographic, in this case, Hispanics, has ever had a good connotation. But Rampell was not the only one.
Mark Cuban, a billionaire and prominent surrogate for Vice President Kamala Harris, shared a video on X of a Latino farmer asking Trump who would do the difficult jobs if illegal immigrants were deported.
“A man who picks strawberries and cuts brocolli says that undocumented workers do the hard jobs,” Cuban wrote. “He asks Trump, If he deports them, who will do the hard jobs and what will be the price of food?”
And last week, Republican vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance sat down with Lulu Garcia-Navarro of the New York Times for a long-form podcast interview where Garcia-Navarro suggested that a plan to build more houses to address the national housing shortage would not be achievable if a new Trump administration deported millions of illegal immigrants, many of whom work construction jobs.
“About a third of the construction workforce in this country is Hispanic, of those a large proportion are undocumented. So how do you propose to build all the housing necessary that we need in this country by removing all the people who are working in construction?” Garcia-Navarro asked Vance.
Vance dutifully pointed out that Garcia-Navarro and others like her, such as Cuban and Rampell, are advocating for a system that allows corporations and businesses to undercut market wages by using illegal immigrant labor. A legally working construction worker demands a much higher salary and benefits than an illegal immigrant who will work for under-the-table cash.
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Whether the liberal elites defending illegal immigrant labor will admit it or not, they are advocating for a racial caste system that places a premium on low cost at the expense of a company’s moral obligation to pay workers a just wage. Illegal immigrants do not qualify for welfare benefits such as social security and food stamps and are entirely reliant on wages to put food on their table. This makes them extremely vulnerable to wage exploitation by any business that is trying to trim down its labor costs, as federal labor and minimum wage laws do not apply to illegal workers.
It is extremely telling that the same liberal establishment that decries Trump for his supposedly “dehumanizing” rhetoric toward immigrants views illegal immigrants purely as a servant class that is willing to do the hard manual labor that no one else wants to do. It is a fundamentally racist belief that benefits businesses at the expense of American workers, and it has no place in a civilized society. In this case, the Democrats really are the real racists.