Ponder this brief news item from the state’s WBAY. I’ve footnoted it for reference and easy mockery:
“MADISON, Wis. (WBAY) – Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers says he’s “very concerned” about immigration officials targeting farm workers, [1]especially as ICE arrests ramp up across the Midwest.
“Evers says his team is keeping an eye [2] on Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s presence in the state.
“According to the most recent data, a University of Wisconsin-Madison School for Workers survey found 70% of the labor on Wisconsin dairy farms is performed by people living in the country illegally. [3]
“’I can probably say in my sleep [4], our state will be destroyed economically if suddenly we decide anybody undocumented [5] is going home or has to leave [6]Wisconsin,’” Evers said.
“‘When asked if ICE is welcome in Wisconsin, Gov. Evers said he doesn’t see the need for the federal government to come here.'”[7].
“He believes the state can handle immigration enforcement itself.” [8]
Riddle me this: How many internal contradictions can one fit in a single news article?
1. I.C.E. isn’t “targeting farm workers,” it’s targeting illegal immigrants. This is misdirection and deceit. This is like saying that homicide detectives are “targeting” American citizens.
2. Evers is “keeping an eye” on law enforcement rather than the law-breakers who are the reason for law-enforcement’s presence.
3. Gee, Tony, that stat means your state has a big problem and had better finally get around to addressing it. Obviously the state depends on illegal workers because they can stiff them on just wages. This is called “exploitation.” Pay enough to attract legal workers; if an industry can’t do that, it needs a better—and legal—business model. You’ve also admitted that your farming industry is knowingly violating the law.
4. Yeah, I say a lot of dumb things in my sleep too, like “Oh Sydney, kiss me!” and “I am the Lizard King!“
5. The term Evers is looking for is “here illegally.”
6. Congress already decided that illegal aliens have to leave. It was your party’s President who violated his oath by ignoring that law.
7. Evers just said that illegal immigration is out of control in his state, since 70% of its farm workers are here illegally. That means, ipso facto, that I.C.E. is needed, and desperately so.
8. But what the Governor just said proves that Wisconsin either can’t or won’t “handle” illegal immigration!
Won’t somebody sit this guy down and make him watch “Adam’s Rib”?
Ethics Alarms 
Again- if the country needs low pay farm workers from out of country, craft the laws to permit this.
This isn’t hard progressives.
But it also requires actually joining the concern that laws once crafted should be enforced.
Has anyone on Ethics Alarms, even the putative liberals, offered a genuine justification of illegal immigration? I don’t count EC’s reflex, “There are always at least two legitimate points of view” mantra.
I don’t count it either.
There are legitimate concerns that lead people to want to allow illegal immigration. That doesn’t mean we should do it. After all there are legitimate concerns that lead people to want to enforce immigration laws, too.
The point is that in order to resolve the conflict, we need to take all these concerns into account and come up with something that addresses all of them. It might take some digging, but people’s bedrock concerns aren’t fundamentally different from each other. Knowing that, we can work to create better options than the ones we have. The solution is not going to be simply allowing illegal immigration.
Has that been unclear all this time?
I’m open to hearing arguments against the following Black/White statement:
There can be NO legitimate concern to *break laws* EXCEPT as an act of civil disobedience which requires not only openly publishing one’s law breaking but willingly accepting the following legal punishment, with goal of making regular voters aware of the “wrongness” of the law being protested by the act.If there is a “legitimate concern” leading to want someone to break laws AND get away with it – the real legitimacy is entirely found in trying to CHANGE the law to one that is more just and ethical.No, the people benefiting from illegal immigration are not attempting to do any of those things so they may have concerns, but their manner of addressing those concerns delegitimizes them.
I get your desire for diplomacy here and accepting that they have “concerns” that may lead to permitting illegal immigration, but that inevitably aids in arguments to legitimize lawbreaking itself. I can’t but it.
“Has anyone on Ethics Alarms, even the putative liberals, offered a genuine justification of illegal immigration?”
If you like I will give it a attempt since I believe I understand why excessive immigration is encouraged. It will be “genuine” however from a point of view not my own.
Governor Evers openly saying what the political left has been trying to hide for years, that sounds to me like an open invitation to increase ICE presence in Wisconsin. I can’t hardly wait to see how President Trump responds.
Yes, I can hardly wait to see how President Trump responds myself.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know Edward; I’ve no “good” excuse. That’s simply what happens when I reword something and then completely fail to reread and edit.
I am not sure Evers or any opponents of I.C.E. are actually hiding anything. Evers just said the quite part out loud. In fact, I would suggest that the pro-illegal immigration faction openly acknowledges that illegal immigration is a net benefit because it keeps costs of agricultural products and services (read that as lawn maintenance, house cleaning, nannies, food, vegetables, meat products, etc.) artificially low. They would argue that the actual cost of an apple is not $1.99 per pound but $1.99 per apple. Same with landscaping: the actual cost of cutting and maintaining lawns is $400 per week, not $400 per month.
I remember in Poli-Sci classes at Kent State University in the early 1980s discussing illegal immigration and both parties’ refusale to address the issue. Democrats wanted the pipeline to consistent new Democrat votes; Republicans wanted to keep wages low in certain areas to avoid the economic realities of costs of goods. Both parties railed about the problem, gave big speeches about needing reform but did nothing about it. This is a problem 60 years in the making.
Then, Trump comes along in his first term and does something and the system went crazy, Biden tried to return to prior policies but instead stupidly opened the doors which overwhelmed the system. Trump 2.0 says, “Well, I am not running for reelection (unless I make myself king one day!!!) so I am going to take a hard line stand – GET ‘EM OUT BY FRIDAY!” and the Democrats imploded. Couple that with massive fraud in many, many states, and you have recipe for disaster.
Now, we have truly mindless and pointelss demonstrations against I.C.E., resulting in at least one unfortunate, unnecessary death. The way this is going, Good will not be the last death as a result of these protests. Hell, even Don Lemon got in on the act.
jvb
But these rabid protesters are militating for low prices on milk and strawberries and apples but probably also militating for “a living minimum wage.” They want “affordability” but they want cheap labor around the house. Very strange.
I wonder why the Democrats don’t insist on a living wage for farm workers. No $20 per hour for them?
Or is that coming after the next Democrat gets in office and opens the floodgates again.
Just to be really clear, in reality “the quite part” is equivalent to the facts being “hidden” from the general public.
What’s really wrong with my comment is that I attributed it to the political left implying that the political right wasn’t part of the hiding. By rights I should be attributing it to both sides because I’m damned sure that they’ve both been hiding the fact that it’s been happening for a while.
I’m not too sure that the price differences you pointed out are that extreme. Much of what comes out of farms are commodities and prices are not dictated by the actual cost of production on the farm. Some farmers are damn near being forced to allow illegal immigrants to work their farms because if they don’t they’d loose their ass in the commodities market when they go to sell their products. Farm subsidies try to help make up the differences between commodity prices and what the farmers need to survive but it really isn’t working.
Many family farms have been pushed completely out of business in favor of very large commercial farms. A multi-generational family farm in my wife’s family is directly impacted by this and they haven’t hired a single illegal immigrant to reduce their cost. This is a choice. What do family farms do, they put in more hours to increase their output. Pretty soon, they won’t be able to sleep at all in a 24 hour day so they can produce enough to simply break even.
Agreed, Steve. My sister-in-law lived next to a family dairy farm outside Pulaski. I doubt they had any employees. They simply milked the cows twice a day, every day for pretty much their entire lives. I wasn’t aware the massive corporate dairies had taken over Wisconsin. I’ve seen them in New Mexico and here in Arizona, but it makes sense they’ve come into Wisconsin as well. And yes, the price of milk is highly regulated.
Simple solution, Tony: Raise the price of milk to the point people will stop drinking it. Same as Obama wanted to make gasoline so expensive people will stop driving. We need to have net zero milk by 2030. Your state’s business model is bad for the environment. All those cows emit tons of toxic methane every year and their urine and solid waste is poisoning the ground water. And just ask Hillary, all those illegal immigrant dairy workers, and their employers, for that matter, need to learn how to code. And so do you, most likely.
From an economics perspective the Dairy industry has some fairly extensive price supports based on expected costs of production. I don’t believe that the USDA allows low cost undocumented workers to be included in that equation.
For information on pricing of Dairy here is a recent publication that establishes the price floor for various dairy products.
Agricultural Marketing Service
https://www.ams.usda.gov › mnreports › dymadvancedprices.pdf
Price floors stabilize markets but they also distort actual production. For example, if the market clearing price of skim milk is 10.00 /cwt but the government sets a floor of $11.35 the farmer will produce a surplus of milk which needs to be consumed or it will spoil. To get it off the market the new market clearing price must be lowered to get consumers to accept it. This causes the overall market price to fall which may be good for consumers but forces taxpayers to make up more of a shortfall.
The goal of the price floor is to ensure that farmers get a fair price. If the farmer uses in effect “slave labor” because he or she does not pay prevailing required wages and the price floor is predicated on legal costs of production one of two things must occur: either eliminate the low cost workers so that the cost of production is not opaquely skewed downward for the benefit of increased profit for agri-business or reduce the subsidy and make it reflect the actual costs of production using such low cost labor.
I will admit that the pricing schema used by the USDA and the Milk Marketing Association is far more complex than this example. Nonetheless the outcome in market equilibrium is exactly what is described above.
If Tony Evers wants to protect his dairy industry so that they can have higher incomes, he should be willing to advance state legislation to provide a higher base income for dairy farmers using state taxpayer funds. The solution he provides of protecting farmers by looking the other way at law breakers would seem to justify an employee embezzling funds because he is not paid enough.
When will someone ask these politicians why the undocumented are above the law?
I will try this link the one above truncated itself for some reason
DY_AD101
This is hilarious:
Five white men eating lunch in Minnesota bullied by surging mob who mistook them for ICE agents | Daily Mail Online
Lefties rage about ICE detaining people who are citizens. And here they are identifying computer engineers as ICE agents and hectoring them while they’re trying to have lunch.
“Has anyone on Ethics Alarms, even the putative liberals, offered a genuine justification of illegal immigration?”
I cannot say that this is a ‘justification’ but rather is an ‘explanation’. (If you wonder where I stand it is … nowhere!)
Alizia, can you explain why Gen Z faces unemployment and underemployment challenges in the USA, and why at the same time the agribusiness needs to find manual workers from outside the USA? Why is it impossible for businesses in the USA to find and train young USA citizens willing to work in the agribusiness?
The Democrats have always been at the forefront of increasing the minimum wage in order to guarantee a living wage for everybody. There are many arguments against the minimum wage (increases), e.g. loss of jobs. The problems caused by a high minimum wage cannot be solved ethically and legally by an underground labor market, as this black market creates for unfair labor competition for jobs at a minimum wage level; somebody who is willing to work at minimum wage is being outcompeted for work by somebody willing to work under the table for below minimum wage with no benefits.
I am shocked, shocked that a Democrat Governor Evers is perfectly OK with this black labor market, that leaves American citizens with no chance at a decent job in the agribusiness. Apparently big business interest are more important for the Democrats today than the interest of the little man for which they pretend to fight, the US citizens with poor economic prospects.
It beats me that there are no American citizens willing to do manual labor in the agribusiness given the high unemployment among young men. If the agribusiness is unable to find labor at minimum wage levels, then that should simply be the sign to raise the wages until you find workers. American will not stop using dairy products even if the prices in the supermarket go up. Hiring American citizens will lower unemployment levels, and be good for the USA as a whole. Having been raised on a dairy farm myself, I can attest that there is nothing dishonorable about manual labor. And for those young men who prefer to stay at home and spend their days with idle pursuits online “He who is unwilling to work, neither shall he eat” (2 Thessalonians 3:10).
Of course Evers handle ICE enforcement himself, by doing nothing. I wonder how big the campaign contributions of the agribusiness to Evers and other Democrats in Wisconsin are.
So Evers’s stance is not different than that of Walz and Pritzker. He just uses other rationalizations.