Human Rights Failure, Not Invasion
The United States needs immigrants but forces them to live in the shadows without rights.
April 10, 2025
Trump is now intimating that farmers will be able to petition the federal government to retain some of the farmworkers currently in the U.S. illegally. This is yet another tacit acknowledgment that the U.S. economy and way of life is inextricably dependent on immigrant labor. Even the trumpiest of farmers have warned that our food system could collapse virtually overnight if there was a mass deportation of undocumented farm workers.
When the U.S. economy readily absorbs immigrant labor however it arrives, and, in fact, cannot operate without it, then we are not victims of a migrant invasion. Instead, we are guilty of a blatant administrative failure and human rights atrocity.
People like to say that they should just follow the legal route. But that process takes many years on average and it has been this way for the past 60 years. This doesn’t work for anyone, U.S. businesses and consumers included. But this is by design.
Our failure to enact meaningful immigration reform is not because it is a “complicated” issue. It is actually quite simple. By keeping this essential workforce in a state of perpetual terror and uncertainty, we can exploit them more fully. We can suppress their wages. We can subject them to inhumane treatment at will. We can play games with their lives to score cheap political points and to gain political power. And we can scapegoat them to stoke racial fear whenever a distraction is needed.
This is yet another example of how the U.S. way of life is built on the blood, bones and despair of people we have deemed disposable.
