I got an interesting article about Kern County on my news feed. I guess the Border Patrol staged a raid of mostly field hand looking people at places they gather before work a couple days ago.The rounded up some 70 folks. I guess the word got out and all the others vanished. Also doing “routine” traffic stops.
The county agent said there are 34,900 acres of citrus on the trees in Kern County (Bakersfield) that need harvesting and not a single orange was picked yesterday.
A diner owner and a mom and pop store owner said business was off 80-90% this week.
I guess this the pointy end of the stick with the promised mass deportations. I don’t see that will help get OJ prices down. To be continued with Fresno and Sacramento scheduled as next stops.
Look up “Alabama tomato immigration”. Been there, done that.
Who possibly could have foreseen this?
The important question is how Trump and the Republicans will blame Biden for the rise in grocery prices that is to come.
I am in Bakersfield right now. My buddy who lives here told me that some of the restaurants had to shut because their workers are too scared to come to work.
After MAGAs bitching about grocery prices for the last year, they are already saying they don’t really care about grocery prices as long as their standard of living goes up, which it will when we get rid of all the illegals that are a drain on the system.
They need to show up at Mar-A-Lago for most of the restaurant and housekeeping staff.
Because they will pick up a second job picking Oranges?
Because they are idiots.
From what I understand they were targeting some pretty bad guys but then just started asking brown people who looked like field workers for papers, blocking cars, etc.
My brother has managed lawn care services for years now. He’s said that even though their workers are all documented when the INS comes to town they stay home for fear of getting caught up in some sort of sweep.
I guess always the chance too that some of them aren’t legit.
Someone on my staff is from India, working with a H1B visa. He’s expressed a lot of concern to me.
Last week he shared that sometimes when he and his wife are shopping, someone will cut them off and tell them to go back where they came from. People suck.
Regarding “sending them back”, I saw a report that if we move most manufacturing jobs back to the US, we will be short 3.8 million workers.
Good math: reduce workforce and increase job demand. That certainly reduces cost of goods, right?
There is a decent sized Sikh community here in Bakersfield. When the arrests first happened there were a lot of rumors that they were caught up in the “papers please” phase. CBP eventually made a statement that no Sikh were arrested.
I did see that the operation was not directed from Washington. It was planned and executed solely by the CBP El Centro branch.
My wife has a coworker that just moved back to India after her H1B wasn’t renewed, 5 years of working for the same company as a software developer, and now gone.
I college friend of mine grew up on a larger hog operation, their main farm hand is an illegal, that has been deported several times. Each time just says “Senor, back in 2 weeks.” And has always made good on it, 15 some years at the same operation, and only lost time was after being deported.
Here in the grain belt, I don’t think many operations hire illegal Hispanics, but the meat processors sure do.
Should be interesting when they cannot process hogs.
What are you talking about? All those poor down and out Americans who the illegals are stealing the jobs from will be lined up around the corner to work in the slaughterhouse.
No doubt.
And they will only need to uproot life and move to rural MN, IA or SD…
There is a chicken processing plant in my home town, just down the road from where my dad had his business. When I was growing up it was pretty much only black people who worked there and there were no Hispanics. I can remember in the late 80’s the first few Hispanic kids coming to our high school.
Now it’s pretty much all Hispanics who work there, there are Mexican restaurants in town, a Hispanic grocery store and other businesses.
That phrase really burns me up. It’s not the migrant stealing the job from the American worker. It’s the employer.
Of the 78 arrested, one was convicted of raping an 8-year-old girl, while another had a warrant for a sex offense against a child out of Visalia.
There were multiple arrests for large amounts of marijuana and possession of methamphetamine and DUI convictions, according to Border Patrol.
Border Patrol went on to mention that other subjects arrested had criminal histories that including charges such as: failure to appear, tampering with a vehicle, petty theft, felony drug possession, vandalism, burglary, inflicting injury on a spouse, and child abuse convictions.
I don’t think anyone here disagrees with deporting people that suck, but the fact that all illegal immigrants now live in a landscape of fear.
78 people arrested and awaiting deportation for good reason. 7,800 otherwise fine and hardworking people also disappeared and shouldn’t have had to.