{"id":40247,"date":"2025-08-21T12:45:00","date_gmt":"2025-08-21T12:45:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/?p=40247"},"modified":"2025-08-23T13:12:19","modified_gmt":"2025-08-23T13:12:19","slug":"these-people-do-it-naturally-president-trumps-views-on-immigrant-farmworkers-reflect-a-long-history-of-how-farming-has-been-idealized-and-practiced-in-america","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/these-people-do-it-naturally-president-trumps-views-on-immigrant-farmworkers-reflect-a-long-history-of-how-farming-has-been-idealized-and-practiced-in-america\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018These people do it naturally\u2019: President Trump\u2019s views on immigrant farmworkers reflect a long history of how farming has been idealized and practiced in America"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Doug Sackman<\/a>, University of Puget Sound<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Trump administration\u2019s mass deportation campaign<\/a> has not spared the U.S. agricultural industry<\/a>, with agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement frequently raiding farms<\/a> across the country in search of undocumented workers<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now, farmers are facing a crisis the administration has helped create<\/a>: not enough people to pick crops.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On a recent call to CNBC<\/a>, President Donald Trump said, \u201cWe can\u2019t let our farmers not have anybody.\u201d To assure farmers that he had their back despite the immigration raids, he sought to distinguish immigrants he called \u201ccriminals\u201d and \u201cmurderers\u201d from nonthreatening farm laborers who have been picking crops<\/a> for years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To do so, Trump used an old stereotype<\/a> for farmworkers: \u201cThese people do it naturally, naturally.\u201d Trump recounted asking a farmer: \u201cWhat happens if they get a bad back? He said, \u2018They don\u2019t get a bad back, sir, because if they get a bad back, they die.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIn many ways, they\u2019re very, very special people,\u201d said Trump, referring to undocumented farmworkers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Trump is labeling some of the people his administration has targeted for deportation as naturals.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As a historian of American agriculture and labor<\/a>, I think the Trump administration\u2019s contradictions on farmworkers are part of a long history of idealizing farming in America. It\u2019s a history in which race, nature, exploitation and the very identity of America itself have all been involved.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

From Jefferson to Sunkist<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Thomas Jefferson<\/a>, most famous for writing the Declaration of Independence, also declared, \u201cThose who labour in the earth are the chosen people of God.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jefferson thought America\u2019s true calling<\/a> was to be an agrarian nation, for virtuous and independent farmers would also be perfect citizens. But Jefferson didn\u2019t actually get his own hands dirty<\/a>. He told John Quincy Adams<\/a> that he \u201cknew nothing\u201d about farming.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Founding Father Alexander Hamilton, in the musical \u201cHamilton<\/a>,\u201d crystallized the critiques against what came to be called \u201cJeffersonian agrarianism<\/a>,\u201d which praises agricultural life and the virtues of farmers, but fails to acknowledge it was not the planters who did the backbreaking work: \u201c\u2018We plant seeds in the South. We create.\u2019 Yeah, keep ranting: We know who\u2019s really doing the planting.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The image of America built up by white farmers contrasted with a reality that \u201cthose who labour in the earth\u201d were often enslaved people. As the cotton empire expanded, so did slavery.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Apologists for this system of inequality argued that the \u201cnatural station<\/a>\u201d of Black people was to be enslaved. Black people were portrayed as natural manual laborers \u2013 and by extension, the institution of slavery itself was defended as natural, rather than an abrogation of the \u201cnatural rights\u201d promised to all men in the Declaration of Independence<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

American agricultural leaders in the early 20th century, as I document in my book \u201cOrange Empire<\/a>,\u201d adapted these forms of \u201cnaturalization\u201d \u2013 the process, as developed by cultural theorists<\/a>, through which man-made things such as racial hierarchies are made to appear natural.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"A
Mexican migrant workers harvest crops on a California farm in 1964. AP Photo<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

In this naturalizing mode, the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce argued in 1929 that \u201cmuch of California\u2019s agricultural labor requirements consist of those tasks to which the oriental and Mexican due to their crouching and bending habits are fully adapted, while the white is physically unable to adapt himself to them.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As I describe in my book<\/a>, the president of the citrus growers cooperative Sunkist insisted in 1944 that Mexicans \u201care naturally adapted to agricultural work, particularly in the handling of fruits and vegetables.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Through this naturalization, racism appeared to be made in nature. Everything in farming \u2013 all of the food grown in what author Carey McWilliams called \u201cfactories in the field\u201d in his 1939 expos\u00e9<\/a> \u2013 was carefully constructed by farmers, their lobbyists and their advertisers to appear natural. That includes the racism and labor exploitation<\/a> at the heart of it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

While naturalizing workers as evolutionarily adapted to stoop labor, this system all but denied undocumented farmworkers legal access<\/a> to the other kind of naturalization: becoming full citizens<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So when anti-immigrant ideology sparks ICE raids and deportations, the nation\u2019s farms end up losing the labor they have long relied on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Whose homeland?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

On X, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has been presenting itself as if it\u2019s on a mission to secure a white homeland. It has posted videos<\/a> of white people enjoying America\u2019s natural wonders to the tune of Woody Guthrie\u2019s \u201cThis Land is Your Land\u201d and paintings that propagandize manifest destiny<\/a>, the idea that the U.S. is destined to extend its dominion across North America.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Homeland Security recently posted John Gast\u2019s 1872 painting \u201cAmerican Progress<\/a>\u201d as a \u201cHeritage to be proud of.\u201d It depicts a luminous white goddess flying west over the American landscape, with white farmers plowing the soil beneath, while petrified Native Americans, shrouded in darkness, are being chased from their homelands.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As I<\/a> and others<\/a> have pointed out, Homeland Security is using coded messages to affirm white supremacists\u2019 vision of turning America into a white homeland.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On the ground in America<\/a> today, nonwhite immigrants are fleeing from immigration agents<\/a>, as if the Gast painting is coming to life. The United Farm Workers union, referring to \u201cvideos of agents chasing farm workers thru the field,\u201d says that \u201cworkers are terrorized<\/a>.\u201d One worker said they are \u201cbeing hunted like animals<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2018Grounds for dreaming\u2019<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Trump told CNBC that he does not believe that \u201cinner city<\/a>\u201d people can come to the rescue of farmers, whose source of labor has been decimated<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As Politico reports<\/a>, Trump is now floating the idea of expanding an existing visa program for temporary agricultural workers and creating a new program that requires them to leave the U.S. before reentering legally. If so, he would essentially be reinventing the Bracero Program \u2013 the U.S. guest worker program<\/a> with Mexico created at the behest of California growers during World War II that lasted until the 1960s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"A
Mexican farmworkers in 1951 register to work in the U.S. through the Bracero Program. PhotoQuest\/Getty Images<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Ian Chandler is an Oregon farmer<\/a> whose cherries are rotting on the trees because he\u2019s lost the farmworkers who normally pick them. He recently told CNN<\/a> that these people \u201care part of our community, just like my arm is connected to my body, they are part of us. So it\u2019s not just a matter of like cutting them off \u2026 if we lose them we lose part of who we are as well.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Spanish word bracero roughly translates to someone who works with their arms, but the earlier guest worker program didn\u2019t have the same inclusive meaning Chandler intends. Instead, it racialized Mexicans as natural farmworkers, as mere brawn extracted from human beings who were otherwise excluded from the community<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As historian S. Deborah Kang notes<\/a>, \u201cSumner Welles, former under secretary of state to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, excoriated the \u2018poisoning discriminations\u2019 faced by bracero workers and equated their experiences with the \u2018Juan Crow\u2019 racism.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Over the course of its history, many Americans have held out hope that the U.S. would create a farming nation that lives up to the original promise of an organic democracy \u2013 the democracy Jefferson mythologized and one where all Americans are included \u2013 built from the ground up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As historians Camille Guerin-Gonzales<\/a> and Lori Flores<\/a> have shown, farmworkers, whatever their official status, have worked hard to find \u201cgrounds for dreaming\u201d in America.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Making that American dream a reality involves seeing farmworkers for who they are, I believe: vital members of the body politic who reconnect all Americans to nature through the foods they eat.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Doug Sackman<\/a>, Professor of History, University of Puget Sound<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

This article is republished from The Conversation<\/a> under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Doug Sackman, University of Puget Sound The Trump administration\u2019s mass deportation campaign has not spared the U.S. agricultural industry, with agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement frequently raiding farms across the country in search of undocumented workers. Now, farmers are facing a crisis the administration has helped create: not enough people to pick crops. On […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":56,"featured_media":40248,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[5,277,46,295,25,296,27,4,15533],"tags":[216,16800,272,1697,479,215,7866,373,537,885,891,886,860,3617,1602,1571,9880,16799,1586],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40247"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/56"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40247"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40247\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":40250,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40247\/revisions\/40250"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/40248"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40247"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=40247"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=40247"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}