Donald Trump said on Friday that farmers may be able to keep employing undocumented migrant workers without fearing enforcement raids under a system in which they would take “responsibility” for them.
Undocumented immigrants make up 4.6% of the U.S. workforce— more than 7 million people. Many of them work in agriculture, hospitality and construction, The Guardian reports.
Shay Myers, who runs Parma, one of the country’s largest onion farms, warned that “we will not feed our people without these workers,” considering that the Department of Agriculture estimates that over 40% of industry workers are undocumented.
Um Ackshually, the Census is supposed to enumerate all persons living in the US, regardless of citizenship status, and that enumeration is supposed to be directly used by the Federal Government to apportion Congressional seats. So they are already counted, or at least they’re supposed to be.
The first Trump Administration was in charge of the last census, and tried to get a question added asking directly about citizenship status. It got squashed in the courts, because citizenship status is not supposed to matter, and the only effect that would have is to have non-citizens avoiding the census.
The whole point of the 3/5 compromise wasthat enslaved humans were considered to be worth 60% of a non-enslaved human for census purposes.