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Hey Barry, my family was in the citrus and cattle industry down in Fla. from the 1950's up until my grandfather passed away a couple of years ago.
The thing I've wondered about with "immigration reform" is this:
Since before I was born...Mexican farm workers have come here and worked. Down in Fla. in the 1960's and 1970's and 1980's the politically incorrect term was "Wetbacks" (like they had swam the Rio Grande lol)
Anyway, my grandfather had a fleet of trucks owned thousands and thousands of acres of orange groves and employed over a thousand people for that part of his business.
And the vast majority of the ones he employed were the Mexican people picking the oranges. They would come to Florida for picking season. Each Mexican worker would be in the grove with his wife and all their kids picking oranges.
And they are the BEST at it.
They could literally strip a tree in under a minute of all the oranges.
So I'm a teenager in the 1970's and I see these guys picking up checks for a couple of thousand dollars a week (you get paid by the "tub" of oranges). And a thousand dollars in 1975 was worth a LOT more than it is now. Hell, you were rich if you had a thousand bucks back then. lol
So I tell my grandfather I want to pick oranges too!
I go out there and picked oranges all damn day. I ended up with 3 tubs full and made about $10, I was sunburnt from head to toe, and every muscle in my body hurt. lol
My point is...without those workers...WHO is going to do that work? And at what price?
I believe (and I think I have the real life experience to say this having grown up in the citrus industry), that without those hardworking people...we will be paying so much money for fruit and vegetables that it will hurt the middle class and especially the people struggling to get by as they watch their grocery bill go sky high.
There was NO problem with "immigration" back then, and there still isn't.
The only problem is the one the govt. created by fighting the "War on Drugs" and crippling the Colombian drug cartels.
Now it's the MEXICAN drug cartels because they filled that vacuum.
Once the U.S. govt. sent down our military to burn coca fields and help capture and kill the drug kingpins in Colombia...new ones sprang up in Mexico. And now we have all this violence on the border.
THAT is the main thing that people are talking about...the violence on the other side of the border and it spilling into the U.S.
Thus "immigration reform".
Maybe if the federal govt. would drop Richard Nixon's "War On Drugs" and realize that you can't force people to obey you like a dog...then this "problem" that was caused by the U.S. govt. to begin with would be "solved" without us having to put the military on the border and build a fucking wall like we are the Soviet Union from the Cold War era.
From my point of view...our govt. is so fucking ass-backwards. It's shameful.
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