Immigration always makes a handy flashbang for loudmouth demagogues. We’re all mad as hell about these illegals coming into the country. We’re sharpening our pitchforks and lighting torches against open borders. We beat down an immigration-reform bill before Congress earlier this year because it was the San Francisco-values crowd, with all those sissified, softheaded liberals, surrendering the homeland to hordes from south of the border. Let that stuff become law and the next thing you know we’ll all be playing soccer and eating tac … Wait a minute. Scratch that part.
Dr. Joseph Goebbels, propaganda minister of Germany’s Third Reich, supposedly said: “Repeat a lie a thousand times and it becomes truth.” He’s been quoted that way more than a thousand times, so it must be true.
Applying this logic, anyone within range of a talk-radio rocket nozzle, or the nightly bickerfests of cable TV, must be dead certain by now that the immigration-reform bill was the Devil’s work, that mining the border makes good sense, and that no one should get into this country without a good prostate check by Big Daddy D.C. Don’t even bother debating it.
Maybe that’s all true but we’re beginning to wonder here at GoToTell. Every now and then reality tends to mix all the easy blacks and whites into grays. And we’re starting to see some gray in that immigration bill, along with a whole lot more on the strawberry fields of Hillsborough County.
Reading a fish wrapper the other day, we were fascinated to learn that strawberry seedlings are coming here from Canada where they must be planted in the fields of Hillsborough. Soon. As in this week. That’s interesting and sort of cool in its own right. Now, we love Canada for its most awesome hockey players, who wear lightning bolts, and its strawberry seedlings.
Anyway, the point is that strawberries are big business in Hillsborough - something like $200-million a year. The annual strawberry crop is the largest winter crop in the country. The people running this business are a little sweaty these days and not because it’s still 90 degrees outside. They’re worried about finding enough workers to plant all 8,000 acres worth of Canadian seedlings. It seems there aren’t a lot of unemployed real estate brokers and home builders driving over to do that job.
Meantime, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security announced last month that it’s all set to ramp up worksite enforcement against illegal workers by, among other things, looking harder for fake Social Security numbers and increasing fines against employers by 25 percent. Yup. Your tax dollars at work just in time for strawberry planting.
What’s even more absurd is that strawberry producers aren’t making any secret of who’s out in the field. Two words. Illegal immigrants. Don’t believe it? Get a load of this bit of candor attributed to Hillsborough strawberry farmer Mike St. Martin. Referring to strawberry field hands, he said: “If they had legal papers, they wouldn’t be in the strawberry fields. They’d be working in hotels, landscaping, and hamburger joints.”
God bless him. There’s at least one honest man in Hillsborough unafraid to speak his mind. We promise not to tell the feds which farm is yours, Mike, because we love you, we love your strawberries and we don’t want to pay $25 a flat.
We’ve known a few farmers and ranchers in our time and we can’t remember a single one that fits the effete, liberal-snob stereotype. They tend to drive big-ass pickups, chew a little tobacco here and there, go hunting, use bad grammar, listen to Country music, watch a little NASCAR and vote Republican. These are bedrock Americans making a living off the land in good ways and bad. But, either way, we need them to keep our refrigerators stocked. And when they say that immigration bill should have passed this year, we’re inclined to listen - no matter what Rush Limbaugh says about it.