The reason is simple: an increase in immigration enforcement, including high-profile ICE raids, shook Texas farm workers to their core. The news filtered fast that workers—regardless of legal status—chose safety over a salary.
Farmers, who had been working with their crews for decades, described the loss as “devastating” and “unprecedented.” This is alarming as most farms are founded upon immigrant labor, both legal and illegal, creating a domino effect for the food system as a whole.
. . . When farm workers vanish, the effects are felt far beyond the fields. Livestock is untended, crops go unpicked, food production declines, and food prices dramatically increase. In Texas alone, where specialty vegetables and fruits must be hand-picked, worker shortages jeopardize entire harvest seasons.
This results in fewer foods on grocery store shelves, higher prices for families nationwide, and a greater reliance on imports. Threads on Reddit and YouTube are already predicting price hikes and empty produce shelves.
Mark my words Republicans will turn to using convict labor to harvest crops before they ever turn on Trump or admit any faults.
Step1: Round up undocumented immigrants and criminals.
Step2: Put them in prison for “crimes”.
Step3: Profit! Lease them to farms for $1 a day. Since slavery is legal if you are incarcerated. Republicans are going to build an entire underclass of criminals who will do these jobs.
Bonus: None of the brown people or criminals will be able to vote because they are now felons. Farmers will cry and vote Republican if anyone even suggests doing away with the prison industrial system.
So slavery with more steps?
Not that many steps really.
Always has been
That sounds realistic except how do you rent out slaves from Alligator Alcatraz. It’s not exactly commuting distance to any Texan farms?
Alligator Alcatraz is just the first. Republican governors will be tripping over themselves to build concentration camps to supply slave labor other states industries.
It is in our constitution, and we know how they like to cherry pick that.
13th Amendment, Section 1: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”
It always amazes me that the amendment made it exactly five words before it put a gigantic loophole in place that has the ability to negate the whole thing.
Yep that is what I was referring to.
If anything, this hopefully illuminates to all Americans how much of our labor is provided by the periphery.
So MAGA isn’t about the US being self reliant on produce and products after all?
No, they are just racist schmucks, just like we suspected
It’s too bad that I don’t give a fuck about farmers who voted to arrest their workforce. Put on a cowboy hat and harvest your produce yourself. This is what you wanted.
If you didn’t notice, I also hate cowboys.
what about food security?
isnt the us even a net exporter?
I thought I was the only one who thought this. I’ve never met someone wearing a cowboy hat who had integrity.
Phase 2: Prison labor
It also carries the side “benefit” of getting farm owners (and, indirectly, anyone who cares about being able to eat food) complicit in and supportive of the “person who didn’t do anything wrong -> detention” pipeline as it ramps up and expands.
You heard it here first.
I have been predicting the return of slavery wide scale via prisoners for years.
It’s already been going on, now it will just increase in scale. The ICE detainees are being used for labor in the detention centers for fuck’s sake! At least prisoners are directly exempt in the law for being convicted of a crime (however corrupted the concept might be), detainees waiting for processing aren’t convicted of shit.
that’s just synergising industries to increase efficiency and effectiveness of under-utilised resources!
/S
Predicting? I mean…you’re a little late, bub. That shit’s been happening since the 80s. Blame Reagan.
One of the few things Reagan did that was ok was granting amnesty to migrant workers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_Reform_and_Control_Act_of_1986
It’s not hard to predict something currently happening will continue to happen.
No, that’s phase 3. Phase 2 is foreclosures, bankruptcy, and buying at insanely discounted rates. THEN it’s
slaveprison labor.You’re still off by 1, before you can have prison labor they’re going to have to make disagreeing with the government punishable by forced labor. Then they’re going to farm all of the social media and lock everyone up.
I thought that was phases 3 then 4, phase 2 was building debtors prisons,
Even “better”, only people with the right connections will have access to this slave labour, so only very wealthy or very Fascist farmers will get their harvests harvested.
Win, win, win for Fascism in the US.
Phase 3: Expansion of laws to criminalise any vauge behaviour the govt decides is unacceptable.
When everyone is guilty, you can extort the funded class to look the other way and exploit the unfunded class by imprisonment and forced Labor. The legal system will be saturated by arrests for ‘disorderly conduct’, ‘resistimg arrest’ and ‘anti-governmemt activities’ faster than the courts can keep up with tossing out bogus charges. If you have money,you post bail and try really hard to behave yourself and not rock the boat. If you don’t have money, it’s off to the work farms for you.
Its always the same formula
I heard it in The Shawshank Redemption first.
Cool Hand Luke, too
Can’t a man cut the heads off parking metres in the privacy of his own town without being treated like some sort of criminal?!
Actually, I think I heard it first in the 1200s when Genghis Khan had similar concepts. He also would raze the village, kill the men and children, and rape the women…but give it time. Maybe that’s one of the provisions within “the big beautiful bill”. Maybe it’s coming next year.
…I don’t know if I should indicate that I’m joking. It’s the kind of joke where you laugh, but also it’s a nervous laugh because you no longer feel safe in your own country, and it REALLY feels like we need a new modern civil war to take out the trash like we did 200 years ago.
Don’t forget the chillun, unless they only yearn for the mines… ☹
Who could have seen this coming.
They were totally blindsided
They voted for this.
Let them figure it out.
If you own property, start a garden. You’re likely going to need it.
" you vote for what i campaigned, on deal with it"-trump
Pfff the others Accept it.
US full of hypocrites.
Happy dyingDownvote me, doesn’t change the fact that US citizens accept a terrorist. Accepting how this terrorist has manipulated the elections. Accepting how people and US citizens are abducted… But guaranteed to hope for help from others as soon as you get caught. Fuck America.
I wonder how many of these farmers in Texas voted for Trump? My guess is the majority of them. You reap what you sow.
Actually this year is “Nobody reaps what you’ve sown and it rots in the field” but that’s not as succinct.
It’s one of those rare moments when both something and its opposite are objectivelly true.
I’m sure there are plenty of Republicans willing to take a job for shit pay that is back breaking and dangerous right?
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It really is wonderful, I could only wish to have the government give me my dream job, and these Republicans just get handed a golden opportunity, it’s like Charlie and the golden ticket, I will go down and congrat them on the big winnings and bestest deals while they are knee deep in pig shit
Good news, Texans: the tailor that makes bootstraps didn’t vanish overnight
Hope it hurts.
It’s gonna hurt a lot more.
Did anyone else get ai vibes while reading the article? Idk if it’s just me but the writing seemed so generic like something chat gpt spits out.
Yes.
So that was written by AI, right?
You telling me that “Animal planet HQ” might not be a reliable political news source?
It really felt like it, but it has a human’s name on the byline, fwiw. And there were some “rounded corners” that made me think a person edited it a fair bit.
human’s name on the byline
In a different magazine they used human names for their AI. Turned out the profile pics came from ThesePeopleDoNotExist
Disappointing to see such slop so heavily upvoted just because it fits what people want to see.
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why use prisoners? they are detaining countless immigrants, they might put them on forced labour.
so Immigrants will have to work the fields for no pay.
Yeah, immigrant prisoners.
Hang on, I’ve seen this one before.
fascism without slave labour is like a bike without wheels
