Mayorkas: Who’ll Pick the Cotton — Er, Crops?

In an ever-changing world, it’s good to have some reliable consistency. When it comes to labor policy, Democrats have consistently made this same argument since … 1861.

In defending the Biden administration’s decision to open the border and incentivize a massive invasion of illegal aliens, former Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas posits it as agricultural policy. And now that Trump has slammed the door shut on the border — which Mayorkas insisted had been “secure” the entire four years — he tells an audience that Americans will rue the day when it comes to picking the cotton. Er, crops! Crops! Yeah, that’s the ticket:

Alejandro Mayorkas suggests that American views of immigrants will change when there is no one to pick their food or work manual labor:
Mayorkas: “If food is not reaching our table, because those who pick the crops have been removed. By the way, others are not there to fill those… pic.twitter.com/GH9ZL6bsYT

— Eric Abbenante (@EricAbbenante) March 6, 2025

First off, let’s just deal with the argument at face value. Oddly enough, the crops got picked well enough before 2021, when food prices had been relatively stable in the US for several years before a global pandemic upended all economic activity. Between Donald Trump’s first month in office in February 2017 and the full pandemic shutdown month of April 2020, food inflation didn’t rise above a 2.1% annualized rate in any month. 

By contrast, the annualized rate of inflation for food didn’t drop below 2.1% in any month of Biden’s presidency. While Biden and Mayorkas allowed millions of illegal aliens to cross into America, food price inflation rose into double digits throughout most of 2022 and didn’t get below 4% until August of 2023. So what benefit did that flood of ‘labor’ provide?

What about construction inflation, another sector Mayorkas warns will suffer when Trump kicks out illegal aliens? The St. Louis Fed has data organized differently for inflation in construction, but they do graph the producer price index for the sector rather elegantly:

Once again, did inflation in construction costs jump up when Trump secured the border during his first term, which Mayorkas argues would have shorted labor to the industry? Did it even go up much in the pandemic period? Or did it skyrocket while Mayorkas and Biden opened the floodgates and refused to enforce the law to secure the border?

The agricultural argument is absurd on its face in another way. If picking crops is “a job Americans won’t do,” then it’s just as true of illegal immigrants. Estimates put their participation in the ag sector at around one percent. Mayorkas’ successor Kristi Noem and new border chief Tom Homan aren’t raiding farms to find criminal aliens. ICE is conducting raids in major cities, where mayors like Brandon Johnson have declared “sanctuary” from federal law enforcement. What crops does Chicago produce, anyway?

But even if an influx of cheap labor were that important — to either industry — the answer isn’t to stop enforcing border security. The proper response would be to set up a program for temporary labor to assist US firms as needed and as necessary. We used to have such programs in the past, but those relied on strong border security and strong disincentives for violating the terms of the programs by overstaying or attempting to receive unauthorized services. Did Mayorkas even once suggest such an effort to provide cheaper labor via secure and legal means?

So Mayorkas’ argument fails any rational basis of consideration. Now let’s tackle its moral vacuity. Mayorkas wants to argue that the real value of illegal aliens is only in how they can make life cheaper for Americans. They are apparently only good for manual labor, as a sort of Untouchable caste in the American context, with apparent anxiety that their absence will force elites to perform Untouchable tasks. Or at least Mayorkas thinks that’s how the rest of America thinks, which would be an entirely different kind of cynical elitism, but just as despicable. 

It also sounds aaaawfuuuuuullllly familiar as an argument from Democrats to exploit mass importation of labor to keep costs down for the nobility. Some things never change.