Three thousand miles away from the riots in Los Angeles, President Donald Trump’s deportation policies are disrupting life on the quaint little resort island of Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, too.
According to the Washington Post, work has been halted on the construction of multimillion-dollar vacation homes, the pools at luxury resorts are going without maintenance, and landscaping companies are falling behind on cutting the grass.
The horror.
The wave of terror began on May 27 when federal law enforcement officials dressed in dark vests with “ICE” written on them arrested dozens of illegal immigrants on this small island of 20,000 people just off the coast of Cape Cod. The detainees were handcuffed, fitted with orange life vests, and taken to the docks to board a Coast Guard vessel headed for the mainland.
Since the raid, illegal immigrants on the island reportedly are refusing to show up for work. “People are losing thousands of dollars,” an owner of a landscaping service told the Washington Post. Many of his workers stopped coming to work after the raid. Some have reportedly self-deported back to Brazil. “Now we’re behind, and it’s slowing everything up.”
Martha’s Vineyard is an apt microcosm of how dependent wealthy communities in the United States have become on illegal immigrant labor. Over 60% of the homes on the island are seasonal vacation homes for the rich and are worth over $2 million on average. These homes are built, maintained, and cleaned, however, by much poorer workers who mostly rent and are mostly foreign and often illegal. Of those children who attend public school on the island, about half don’t speak English.
Without this foreign-born workforce, the wealthy families who vacation on Martha’s Vineyard would have to pay far more for the food service, construction, and landscaping services they use during the summer months.
The wealthy, mostly Democratic families who vacation on the island like to think of themselves as progressive and pro-immigrant. But Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) exposed that idea as fraudulent back in 2022 when he flew 48 Venezuelans who had illegally entered the country directly to Martha’s Vineyard. To their credit, the locals did house and feed the migrants — for all of 24 hours before the National Guard was summoned to transport them off the island entirely and to a military base on the mainland.
DO BOOMERS WANT GRANDCHILDREN?
How welcoming.
The raids on Martha’s Vineyard and their aftermath are a perfect encapsulation of the immigration debate in the U.S. today. Do we want the wealthy to have cheap illegal immigrant labor to better serve their luxury homes while the nation’s schools fill up with non-English speakers, or do we want fewer illegal immigrants at the cost of the wealthy paying their servants more? It is really that simple.