I worked for 20+ years with small farmers all over North America and elsewhere, in a variety of capacities (policy, analysis, research, networking/organizing, business development).
NONE of them saw hiring illegals as an option.
They wanted to see a playing field where they and their families could transmit traditions, land, skills, and farming systems between generations, without being hugely punished...
...by the big boys who after all had as their scheme to suck up every acre of farmland in the US, and consolidate it, and hire "farmers" to run it mainly as neofeudal sharecroppers.
Those small farmers--hundreds of thousands of them, then--HAD THE ANSWERS. But they were prevented from putting them into practice because those who controlled policy response, taxation, estate law, etc., had their own ideas of how things should be...and the power and money to inflict that model.
A big part of that money and power involves trafficking of illegal labor.
Plus let's not overlook how a lot of the big "farm" interests were doing backdoor deals with Chyna and others. E.g., in the late 1990s up till the 2008 crash, I took calls nearly every day regarding "orientals" arriving in big black SUVs and going into farm fields (both corporate and small farm) to steal germplasm.
Chyna stole trillions of dollars in germplasm that way, with the help of the big players, and the farmers who developed it through painstaking labor got nothing.
I worked for 20+ years with small farmers all over North America and elsewhere, in a variety of capacities (policy, analysis, research, networking/organizing, business development).
NONE of them saw hiring illegals as an option.
They wanted to see a playing field where they and their families could transmit traditions, land, skills, and farming systems between generations, without being hugely punished...
...by the big boys who after all had as their scheme to suck up every acre of farmland in the US, and consolidate it, and hire "farmers" to run it mainly as neofeudal sharecroppers.
Those small farmers--hundreds of thousands of them, then--HAD THE ANSWERS. But they were prevented from putting them into practice because those who controlled policy response, taxation, estate law, etc., had their own ideas of how things should be...and the power and money to inflict that model.
A big part of that money and power involves trafficking of illegal labor.
Plus let's not overlook how a lot of the big "farm" interests were doing backdoor deals with Chyna and others. E.g., in the late 1990s up till the 2008 crash, I took calls nearly every day regarding "orientals" arriving in big black SUVs and going into farm fields (both corporate and small farm) to steal germplasm.
Chyna stole trillions of dollars in germplasm that way, with the help of the big players, and the farmers who developed it through painstaking labor got nothing.