I didn’t catch that comment he made but I caught some clues in the last week that can make sense of it. Trump is actually not just talking to his followers but to his leaders, amplifying exactly the elements of the system that you accurately point out is hundreds of years old. The unspoken parts of what he said are there in the minds of his leaders, the super rich business elite and corporate backers, but not followers. Thus creating a system where one crowd’s threat is another owners opportunity for wealth. One part might interest you in particular, since I’m not a lawyer and can’t read the law, and corporations don’t run on fear but on lawyers and what was passed—by both parties—in Congress.
First the unspoken pieces often repeated and originally conservative rich generated: “the jobs Americans won’t do.” Missing piece: won’t do them because they don’t pay enough. The jobs like crop picking you mentioned were done in the South by almost unpaid black American migrant workers in the 1940s and 1950s who had owned no land, no home, no bed, non clothes, no permanent address—and had no welfare, no social security, no unions, no bank and no mortgage access. They had less then in slavery. You can see them in the classic 1960 CBS documentary now on YouTube titled “Harvest of Shame.” Well worth watching at least the first half an hour.
So these are not the jobs Americans “won’t” do but jobs they are not paid enough to do. Most of them will do the job for fair wages (minimum wage should be at least 20, or 30, or I’ve even heard $50 if it had been tied to inflation when the minimum wage was invented at $2 a day when created). Congress keeps the minimum wage deeply repressed on purpose, not accident. And they keep benefits like health care deliberately from the 11 percent of Americans near—but not at—the very bottom, “the working poor.” The gap is easy to financially close for America, but doing so would deprive power to repress wages, a power not to be given up by the rich who structure the law so easily.
Secondly and lastly for now is the EB-3 visa for unskilled workers. These workers from other countries are already coming to fill “jobs Americans don’t want.” Truckers, mechanics, warehouse jobs, and so on. This is the legal part that this myth is referring to. In order for wages NOT to rise as well as stopping or pressing minimum wage increase—last promised in 2019 but “disappeared” by Biden and a complete non-starter for Trump and will be again if he wins—workers are being brought in by companies through this legal “backdoor”. It’s not a legal loophole, it’s just that Americans don’t know it’s being done. That’s the clue I discovered. The truckers union is not just being undermined from within but from without. Behind every big union win comes a deeper union loss. Those losses are long term, involving boring laws that time to pass and don’t create good news stories.
But investors think ten years ahead, not two days ahead. The big news and big money for them is gradual transition, which they started learning a few hundred years ago. They have tons of lawyers who perform the “boring” work of corporate law and as partners who function as higher paid lobbyists in DC who create the strategy those lawyers work towards. It’s been that way since the start of America. They have mastered telling the fear part of the story to uneducated white workers and now “black workers” while “missing” or absenting the horrific and dull part that generates that fear of lost jobs: it is them who are glacially devising and enacting the laws that continually undermine the wages, working conditions, and opportunities that are fair for American workers to “want” the jobs. Foreign nurses, programmers, and now truckers and other “unskilled” jobs are being brought in legally by the very people devising the laws—the Trump and Biden backers.
Thanks for pointing out this critical issue. First they threatened poor whites to accept what they are offered or to be tossed aside, now they are doing the same poor black Americans. Let’s see how this issue plays out. Judging by history, my guess is not well.