I wasn’t prepared for the level of rage that washed over my body as I watched this video of a roofing business owner in Florida blubbering over the detention of his illegally employed workforce.
I also wasn’t ready for the flashbacks to my childhood it gave me, and my reaction was not kind.
I’m still astonished by the attention this little tweet has gotten, but I understand why it has: Many, many Americans can relate.
It might not be a landscaping company. Maybe for you it was a dad in carpentry or an aunt with a cleaning business or the beach town job you expected your teenager to get this summer that no longer exists. Whatever the business is, it seems thousands of Americans have similar stories to share.
Our home was also our family business — a nursery and landscaping company in Montgomery, Alabama — and thus the setting of my childhood. My brothers and I were homeschooled in the same fan-cooled office my mother used to send invoices and place orders for flats of pansies while Rush Limbaugh droned from an AM radio in the background. Greenhouses stretched the whole length of the acre behind our house up to a barn where landscaping equipment was stored (and frequently stolen, but that’s a story for another day).
In lieu of “childcare” (a word I never heard growing up, must be a recent invention), we would climb into the backseat of my dad’s giant truck with workers and accompany them to job sites and usually get put to work in one way or another.
My fingers and hands grew strong, and my knees and feet grew tough after years of carrying black plastic gallon potted plants, barefoot on the gravel pathways (we had shoes, but it was Alabama after all), weeding around strawberries, and watering tree beds.
When you live at a business, the workers tend to become like family, eating lunch or taking breaks on our back patio with us, or telling us about their lives while we planted thousands of snapdragons in the front yard of my childhood dentist. Some workers stayed for years, others just a summer, and they were all different — black high schoolers, white rednecks, Air Force brats whose parents were stationed at Maxwell, retired women with a flair for gardening (who wanted a discount), and yes, men and women who had served time in prison. A few people were connected to us via a prison ministry — the kind of people unable to find work since applications go straight in the trash if the “have you ever been convicted of a crime?” box is ticked.
Meanwhile, competitors blew past my parents like they were standing still — mostly thanks to a constant stream of cheap (illegal) labor my parents refused to tap into. Their fledgling little business would have seasons of slight success, but they failed to build a customer base large enough to sustain payroll. They rarely paid themselves.
My father’s exhaustion every night was palpable. He always came in, hat and clothes soaked through with sweat, boots filthy, blood drying around some new scrapes and cuts on his arms that he never even seemed to notice.
Future generations will study the reverence liberals have for the heroic migrants from Central and South America who bravely came to pick our fruit and hang our dry wall while simultaneously sneering with contempt at the poor rednecks who do the same work.
While we’re on that, let’s settle the nonsense narrative that Americans “won’t do this work.” Americans did this work for generations, and though they’re barely hanging on, many are still doing it now. We must encourage young Americans to see the value and personal benefit of doing these types of jobs again. Deporting our illegal workforce is an important part of making that happen, but since that alone won’t end the stigma people have against manual labor, maybe common sense will.
I have friends doing physical therapy and paying for ludicrously expensive special camps for their kids this summer to cure their iPad neck humps and strengthen their frail hands, but what they should really do is send their kid to work on a farm for a few months. They’ll find they not only get back a stronger, healthier child, they’ll probably start saying “yes ma’am” to boot.
Of course, it takes time to break through. The first time my grandpa dropped my brothers and I off to pick cucumbers in the hot sun we whined horribly. Our hands were too small for the gloves that could protect them from the prickles, and our muscles too weak to carry the giant buckets we filled on each row. But we kept at it. And soon whining gave way to resignation, and from there, the matchless satisfaction of doing a day of hard work and coming inside to take a shower and scrub dirt from under your nails. It’s a feeling we’ve now robbed multiple generations of Americans from experiencing, instead embracing the delusion that hard work can only possibly be done by hardworking Central Americans.
I know it’s scary. I know the media will fear monger (as they always do) about food rotting in fields because no laborers will pick it, or claim that roofing jobs will queue up for months for lack of workers, but it’s vital that we stay the course and continue the work we’ve only just begun, aggressively enforcing our immigration laws.
The reaction to his baffling Truth Social post has been clear:
Americans are sharing stories of the profound damage illegal immigration has done to our country, but more importantly: They VOTED loud and clear last year, insisting that we want to put an end to it.
Don’t chicken out now.
Lyndsey Fifield is a fellow at the Independent Women’s Forum and co-host of the Out of Practice podcast.
