In 2011 Alabama passed HB 56, and immigration law that was considered the toughest in the country. It had been promoted by the organization Grow Alabama to promote the state’s farmers using a community-supported agriculture model.

The result of scaring any migrant workers away in order to give the jobs they had “stolen” from Americans in Alabama back to them was that after the abrupt departure of those workers, many of whom were undocumented immigrants that feared deportation, many farmers were left without the workers to harvest their crops. Many crops simply rotted unpicked in the fields, resulting in the loss of tens of thousands of dollars in revenue.

During the following year, the leader of Grow Alabama, Jerry Spencer, who had pushed the legislation, had to admit that many of the dozens of farmers he worked with in that organization retired early, while others switched from labor-intensive fruit and vegetable crops to fruit trees where there is less bending an picking up heavy boxes and buckets.

As for the rest of the Alabama farm workers?

They did not return for the second year.

When Spencer saw the results of his law, he tried to recruit dozens of unemployed U.S. citizens to replace the missing immigrant workers, but even though he had driven them an hour north of his Birmingham, Alabama, home to a tomato farm in Chandler Mountain, they did not last.

The longest a worker stayed was three hours.

What should have been picked, rotted on the ground

Alabama hasn’t fully recovered. And, it has been six years.

In 2011, Georgia also passed a similar law, and about 40% of its farm workers immediately disappeared, resulting in a loss of $140 million worth of crops.

Obviously, the farm workers, documented, or otherwise went in the shadows rather than face possible deportation or having to go through a process they would be subjected to because of profiling,

It was further made obvious that they had stolen no jobs from anyone because, as the jobs became open, no one took them.
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Having seen this, with Trump’s desire to deport people and make the lives of those who stay very difficult, farmers across the country are concerned they might soon face the same situation.

Their reality is that those who Trump’s tough talk might scare away, if his actions don’t send them away, comprise 50-70% of the workforce that dairy, fruit, and vegetable farmers rely on.

U.S.-born workers simply do not appear to be interested or able to do the unexciting jobs that immigrant farmworkers do.

With supply and demand, if the crops nationwide face the same fate as those in Alabama and Georgia, the lack of supply will mean higher prices for things we take for granted.

The Trump administration seems oblivious of cause and effect, and doesn’t seem to have considered the consequences to the food supply.

Jerry Spencer now realizes from having seen the effect of the law he pushed for,

“There’s just no question it’s going to affect farming. I hope they do have people fighting for them, because somebody like Donald Trump has no idea of what it takes on the ground.”

I have this thing about lettuce.

Think how many places you have seen it used and how many ways on any given day.

It’s a garnish under food, a decoration on a plate, it sits in huge bowls at salad bars, it is used as a doily on sandwich plates, it seems to be in every sandwich made everywhere, and it is used this way in just about any place food is served from the greasiest spoon to those restaurants where each table gets multiple servers who are experts in addressing particular needs like gravy and pepper.

Imagine something we take for granted like lettuce either suddenly becoming a rarely seen delicacy, or going from what was a free item to something we have to pay for because there’s no one in the field picking it.