By Ryan Spoon
I didn’t grow up on a farm. I grew up in a small town of 2,000 people, the descendant of generations of timber workers and cattle ranchers on my father’s side. My mother, on the other hand, 1 of 14 siblings(!), grew up on a cotton farm in southwestern Oklahoma. She told me about spending her adolescent and teen years picking cotton along with her siblings on her family’s farm. School schedules, sports, and their entire community revolved around harvest time and the FAMILY labor that was integral to farming. Technology has certainly advanced since my mother and her siblings picked cotton by hand in the 1940s through 1960s, but the tradition of the FAMILY farm still exists in America, and it is one of the foundational bedrocks of American society. That foundation is under attack! One of the many threats to this foundation of FAMILY farming is ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION.
For as long as humans have been farming, one of the most valuable assets to a farming family has been the labor provided by their own children. My grandfather with his 14 children certainly thought so! Even the Bible touts the advantages of a family that has a “quiver” full of children. Cost-effective labor provided by their own children used to give FAMILY farms a competitive advantage over consolidated corporate farming. In addition to their own children, labor from the children of other nearby families and also from legal American workers has long augmented American farming. My own 14-year-old daughter has applied to work part-time during this coming summer on the FAMILY farm of a friend from school here in the Treasure Valley (Boise, ID area). Unfortunately, over the past few decades, consolidated corporate farming has eroded that competitive advantage held by FAMILY farms by importing millions of illegal immigrants to replace legal American labor. This is far more than an economic threat! This is a threat to the very fabric of American society.
Our FAMILY farms are not only losing their competitive economic advantage, but they are also losing their financial incentive to have more children. Our youth that live near farms are being deprived of opportunities to learn work ethic and responsibility from a young age. Lower-skilled, legal American workers are also being deprived of work opportunities. After all, why should a farmer hire a teenager or a legal American adult to work on their farm if they can hire an illegal immigrant adult at much lower cost? And that doesn’t even begin to cover how such situations are ripe for abuse against the illegal immigrant laborers. We also know that much of that income paid to illegal immigrants goes back to the human trafficking cartels that brought the illegal workers here in the first place. At what point can we dispense with the illusion and just call this system what it is: modern-day SLAVERY!
The devastating impact of illegal immigration is not limited to farming. In my hometown during my father’s youth and early adulthood, any high school graduate could walk down to one of the local timber mills and obtain a good-paying job with generous benefits and the promise of a pension. That situation has since changed for many reasons in my hometown and many towns throughout America, but one of those reasons is illegal immigration. In my job as an industrial fire protection consultant, I evaluate a variety of industrial facilities, and I’ve seen thousands of them over my 20-year career. Low pay, little to no employee benefits, and an expendable workforce with little to no bargaining power with their employers have become hallmarks of American industry. But nowhere is this reality more prevalent than in American agriculture. Meanwhile, our towns and cities are filling up with American citizens who haven’t learned how to work in their youth and now have little incentive to try to compete against low-paid, poorly-treated illegal immigrant labor. Without rewarding work to hold society and families together, it’s no wonder that the drug culture is filling that void and becoming more and more prevalent, especially in our rural communities.
There are many things that need to change in America, but one of the things that we need to change is that we must ALL stand up and defend FAMILY farms against illegal immigration and the plantation owners that hire them. The moral and social fabric that binds America together depends on us. Here in Idaho, call your legislators and demand decisive, effective legislation against illegal immigration AND against the employers that hire them (https://legislature.idaho.gov). If you know of a business that is clearly using illegal labor, report that business owner for violating federal immigration law. You can report them to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Tip Line here. STAND FIRM!!!
About Ryan Spoon
Ryan Spoon graduated from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in 1998 and served as an active-duty Army officer. He now works in fire protection engineering consulting. He is the former Chairman of the Idaho Freedom Political Action Committee (PAC) and the current First Vice Chairman of the Ada County Republican Party Central Committee (Ada County GOP).
