View From the Melon Patch

“I don’t care what the hell happens in this world. If President Trump gets reelected, the border’s going to be sealed, the military will be deployed, the National Guard will be activated, and the illegals are going home.”

—Stephen Miller, Trump’s top immigration adviser, in a podcast February 5 2024 with right-wing activist Charlie Kirk.

“Illegal immigration is poisoning the blood of our nation. They’re coming from prisons, from mental institutions—from all over the world.” —Donald Trump

"You wouldn't believe how bad these people [immigrants] are. These aren't people. These are animals.”

—Donald Trump

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This country not only benefits greatly from the input of immigrant culture and labor, their input is absolutely vital to the future of the US.

These facts on immigration are taken directly from the CBO’s Budget and Economic Outlook Report (2024-2034), as reported in a recent newsletter published by the Center for Public Integrity:

• Without immigration, the federal budget deficit will continue increasing, mostly because of high interest rates, the 2017 tax cuts for the rich, and rising health care costs.

• With immigration, the deficit will actually shrink.

• The U.S. labor force will grow by an extra 5.2 million workers, mostly because of increased immigration. Immigrants will boost the country’s GDP by a total of 2%.

• Immigrant workers will add an extra $7 trillion to the U.S. economy within the next decade and an extra $1 trillion in federal tax revenue.

• Immigrants, legal and illegal, increase the amount of federal, state and local taxes paid (almost $5000 per capita in 2023)

• New immigrants will prevent the U.S. population from shrinking. By 2042, immigrants will be the source of all U.S. population growth. 

And this from public media outlet, marketplace.org:

Immigrants contribute more in taxes than they consume in government benefits. On average, immigrants pay $1.38 in taxes for every $1 of benefits they receive, while U.S.-born individuals pay 69 cents per dollar of benefits.

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So Stephen, you want to close our southern border, do you? You want all immigrants who are already here—no matter how long they’ve lived in the United States—to go back “home,” as you put it, ignoring the obvious point that many of them are already home. You want to build a wall to keep them out, round up those already here and throw them in detention camps. Men, women, elderly, children, infants, all of them, leaving just us white toasts behind to make this country hum again. I mean, white folks never had any help before making this country great, so why would we need it now, right?

Maybe you think the situation is so dire no cost is too great. Maybe you believe, like others who listen to you and the orange buffoon, that immigrants are poisoning our blood. I mean, I don’t hear you bringing up the costs of an enterprise this enormous, so I must assume you believe any cost is worth it.

But, in case you haven’t bothered to look, here are combined figures from the DHS, Center for American Progress, and ICE.

Costs of Rounding Up, Detaining, and Deporting

The estimated fiscal cost of doing what you want to do is roughly $374 billion. This doesn’t include the complicated costs of long-term detention, legal challenges, economic impact, and additional admin expenses.

And, of course, you might consider the costs of the incalculable suffering your efforts will bring to millions of affected people.

Not your problem, right?

Long-Term Detention

About 11 million undocumented immigrants reside in the U.S. ICE estimates detention costs at $134 per day for each one.

The Migration Policy Institute (MPI)  indicates that mass deportation would be economically damaging and logistically infeasible. The cost would be substantial, the impact on industries that rely on immigrant labor would be devastating, and the legal and human rights concerns would be unethical.

• Legal representation costs up to $15000 per case (American Immigration Council).

• According to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), the average case in immigration court is over 800 days. Extended cases increase costs due to prolonged detention and repeated court cases.

• Immigration court backlogs lead to delays and higher costs because more resources are needed to handle prolonged cases and appeals.

Stephen, have you thought this through?

Legal Challenges

Some immigrants, especially those who have made the US their home for many years, might want to challenge your intrusion into the lives they have made for themselves and their families. This only increases the costs by an untold amount.

Economic Impact

The $374 billion doesn’t count the cost to the nation’s GDP, which wouldn’t be peanuts. According to the Congressional Budget Office, as reported by the Center for Public Integrity:

• Without immigration, the budget deficit will continue increasing, mostly because of high interest rates, the 2017 tax cuts for the rich, and rising health care costs.

• With immigration, the deficit will actually shrink.

• Immigration will grow the U.S. labor force by an extra 5.2 million workers. Immigrants will boost the country’s GDP by a total of 2%.

• Immigrant workers will add an extra $7 trillion to the U.S. economy within the next decade and an extra $1 trillion in federal tax revenue. 

• New immigrants will prevent the U.S. population from shrinking. They will be the source of all U.S. population growth by 2042.

• Without the tax contributions of immigrants, both legal and illegal, the Social Security trust fund is projected to be depleted by 2033 or 2034.

• In 2021, immigrants contributed $177 billion to SSA (immirationimpact.com). Contributions will only increase as immigration increases and help extend the solvency of SSA.

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Growing up in my family’s watermelon operation in the lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas gave me early insight into the people who are so unjustly vilified today by the likes of Donald Trump, Stephen Miller, and the right-wing hate mongers who follow them.

For 20 years, we leased land for farming in an area north of Edinburg, east of Hargil, and just west of U.S. Highway 281, about 40 miles from the Mexican border. Even in the 60s, you couldn’t find white boys willing to sweat their days away in the watermelon patch, so we relied totally on Hispanic farm workers from both sides of the border—Mexican Americans, who were residents of the U.S., Mexican nationals who crossed the river back and forth illegally to feed their families, and me, the lone white captive farmhand.

I began working in the melon fields when I was 12. Once the workers got to know me as a gringo they could trust, they became my forever friends.

But nobody is perfect. For example, we incurred the only theft of property in all the years of our farming operation in 1969. The twin sons of one of our farmers—Bill Mahan—yes, they were white—came on our place in the dead of night and drove off with one of our spanking new John Deere 4620 tractors—valued at over $40000 in 1969 dollars. Bill, who knew his sons’ habits, picked up their trail, found the tractor, and returned it a day later. My dad didn’t file charges.

Did we ever experience problems with theft or violence from our farm workers? Never. But one of our field bosses did teach me never to underestimate him. I was walking a row one day during harvest checking fruit density and when I arrived at the row’s end, Manuel was waiting for me.

“Hey Mike. I got something to show you,” and led me over to his pickup.

“See?” He pointed to the back of his truck.

I looked there and saw a live rattlesnake stretched out along the bed. Live, I repeat.

“I looked wide-eyed at Manuel. “Holy shit! How did that get there?

Smiling, he said, “Like this,” reaching casually into the bed like he was picking up a hoe. His arm reappeared holding the snake behind its head.

“Manuel,” I said, “Remind me never to mess with you.”

Did we ever have issues from our illegals? Never, unless you count the times they disappeared for a few days to take money home to their families, only to return a few days later ready to go to work.

Through the years I found that both Mexican Americans and illegals worked hard to provide for their families. They were uniformly honest, gracious, modest, and jovial. They maintained these qualities even though they were overworked and underpaid for the value they added to our operation. Did my dad pay them what they were worth? Absolutely not. But if it weren’t for them, there would’ve been no farming business. They were obviously critical to the enterprise.

Just as obviously, they weren’t well-organized enough to take advantage of their value. We’d all heard about the good trouble Cesar Chavez and his United Farm Workers were causing in California to improve working conditions. But California was a long way from Texas.

During planting season, I’d gather daily with some of the hands under the shade of a mesquite tree for lunch. They routinely offered me tacos, sometimes made of refried beans and pork, other times egg and chorizo or egg and potato and I routinely accepted. They taught me how to forage in the chaparral for little balls of fire called chile pequins.

The chile pequin grew wild on bushes scattered throughout the brush. The berries were green or red, depending on ripeness, small, and oblong. They blew up in your mouth like mini hand grenades when you bit down on them. The hands liked to watch me eat them. They laughed when I tried to hide the fact the heat had set my mouth ablaze. But I never gave them the satisfaction of declining to eat them.

During harvest season, field trucks brought in melons from the field all day long every day as long as the fields were producing and the price of melons justified the expense. The field hands would pitch the melons up to us on the loading platform. We’d sort them by weight and place them on the appropriate conveyor. From there they were loaded onto the appropriate 18-wheelers, which shipped the loads all over the US and Canada

I was 11 when I worked my first harvest as a field hand pitching melons up into the waiting arms of hands in the bobtail trucks that rolled slowly down the rows rich with melons. By the time I was 14, I was stacking bulk melons in 38-foot trailers, ranging from refrigerated reefers (a godsend in the Valley heat), unrefrigerated dry boxes (like working inside a sweltering sauna), to open tops (offering direct exposure to the sun, so hotter than hell). The pay was $40 per load. If you worked your ass off and the field hands cooperated, you might get three trailers loaded in a day. Thats $120, big money in the 1960’s—I don’t care who you were—especially for a fourteen-year-old.

One of my first stacking jobs was in an open-top trailer. The loading platform was filled up with other trucks, so this trailer had been parked by itself some distance away. The field trucks lined up one behind the other waiting their turn to offload. The field hands pitched the melons up and over the side walls, where another hand caught them and pitched them to me. My job was to stack the melons in neat, tight rows, using hay at the end of each row to protect the melons from the trailer walls.

Knowing I was young and raw—and maybe too because I was the owner’s son—the hands tested me on this occasion and began pitching their melons to me as fast as I would take them. The faster they offloaded, the faster they could either take a break in the shade under their trucks or go back out to the fields for another load.

An experienced stacker would have told them to slow down and avoid busting melons and demand the time needed to do their job. But I was young and considered their breakneck pace a challenge that I planned to be up for. All I remember before passing out is the sweat blurring my eyes and a couple of busted melons on the floor of the trailer.

I woke up in the shade underneath the trailer feeling the coolest breeze I’d ever felt in my young life and looking up into the smiling faces of a couple of anxious hands. They had laid me there and poured water over my face, arms and chest. I’m reasonably certain I suffered a heat stroke, but there was no doctor around for a diagnosis. This was the life of a migrant farm worker. I wasn’t about to ask for special treatment.

Maybe the most important lesson I learned during my days in the Valley was that we humans, regardless of race or class, are all of the same cloth despite differences in culture and economic status. I’d hate to think I’d let racism or classism—or any -ism—come between me and the experiences and friendships I’ve made in my life with folks of all stripes. My fellow farm workers taught me a lot. With their help, I believe I became a much better person than I might’ve, with the instinct to show compassion toward all sentient beings.

Stephen Miller, I’m sorry you missed out on the richness that comes from experiencing life’s diversity. I don’t know, maybe that explains the hate you feel.