Tag: immigration
Trump Policies Poised To Devastate His Voters In Rural America

Trump Policies Poised To Devastate His Voters In Rural America

Everyone is talking, understandably, about Iran. But the rest of Donald Trump’s policy agenda continues to goose-step on. Radical changes in social spending, immigration policy, and tariffs — changes that will hurt tens of millions of Americans — are either about to start or are already happening.

And one point I haven’t seen emphasized much is that while the human damage from these policies will be very widespread, it will be especially severe in rural areas and small towns — the very areas that overwhelmingly supported Trump in 2024.

The first thing you need to understand is that while rural Americans like to think of themselves as self-reliant, the fact is that poorer, more rural states are in effect heavily subsidized by richer states like Massachusetts and New Jersey.

This reality makes it inevitable that the standard conservative fiscal agenda — tax cuts for the rich, benefit cuts for the poor and middle class — hurts the heartland more than it hurts major metropolitan areas. But MAGA’s Reverse Robin Hoodism goes far beyond the standard conservative agenda, in ways that will be especially devastating to rural areas and small towns.

First, consider the shape of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. (I think it’s important to call it by its ludicrous official name, as a reminder of the extent to which Republican members of Congress have become North Korea-style sycophants.) The final details haven’t been settled, and there’s still an outside chance that the whole thing falls apart. But it’s almost certain that there will be savage cuts to Medicaid and food stamps, programs that disproportionately help Trump-supporting rural areas.

Let’s talk about Medicaid first, a program that is far more important than most affluent Americans tend to realize. Almost 40 percent of children are covered by Medicaid, with some of the highest percentages in deep red states like Alabama and Mississippi. Medicaid pays for 42 percent of births in America. And more to my point, Medicaid covers a higher fraction of the population in rural than in urban counties. So deep cuts in the program will hit Trump-supporting regions especially hard.

The same is true for OBBB’s deep cuts to food stamps.

The damage will be magnified by Republican plans to cut Medicaid spending by adding work requirements. We know from repeated experience that such requirements don’t actually lead to significant increases in employment. What they do instead is block access to health care by creating bureaucratic hurdles for beneficiaries — hurdles that rural Americans, often burdened by limited formal education and inadequate internet access, find especially hard to overcome.

Furthermore, rural America has long had a problem of hospital closures: It’s hard for hospitals to stay in business given both low population density and limited ability of patients to pay. The Beautiful Bill will accelerate this trend, so that even rural residents who can afford care may very well find it geographically out of reach.

In addition, federal health spending, both Medicaid and Medicare, is disproportionately important in supporting rural and left-behind local economies. For example, the economy of West Virginia no longer rests on coal mining, which employs very few people these days. It would be more accurate to say that the foundation of West Virginia’s economy is federal spending on Medicare and Medicaid. That is, in deep red West Virginia, Medicare and Medicaid are directly and indirectly a major source of income.

Then there are Trump’s immigration policies. American agriculture relies heavily on hired workers — and around two thirds of these hired workers are immigrants. A majority of these foreign-born workers are undocumented:

Moreover, even if you a legal resident or even a native-born citizen, do you really feel safe if ICE thinks you look like an illegal immigrant? Not surprisingly, there are reports of widespread ICE raids on farms and of workers refusing to work out of fear of arrest and deportation.

Can immigrant workers be replaced with native-born workers, or even with legal immigrants? No. All indications are that few native-born Americans would be willing to do these jobs unless they were paid much higher wages. Under the Biden administration the U.S. introduced a program offering grants to farmers who bring in foreign workers legally — but the Trump administration has frozen funding for that program, including money that had already been promised, leaving farmers on the hook for many thousands of dollars.

So Trump’s anti-immigrant policies are inflicting will be a major blow to U.S. agriculture — to family farms that employ immigrant workers and are being left high and dry, to food processing and local retail. Like Medicaid, immigrant farm labor directly and indirectly supports many rural jobs for the native-born.

Finally, there’s the trade war. In case you haven’t noticed, Trump hasn’t yet delivered a single one of the 90 trade deals he promised to negotiate by July 8. China has already retaliated, and others will follow. And U.S. agriculture is highly dependent on exports:

Nor can you argue that farmers will make up for lost exports by producing goods we currently import, since we mainly import the farm products we can’t produce here. That’s a point that seems to be lost on Trump’s Commerce Secretary. Recently Howard Lutnick clashed with Rep. Madeline Dean over the impact of tariffs on prices of food items including bananas. “If you build in America … there will be no tariff,” Lutnick argued. “We cannot build bananas in America,” she replied, somehow managing to avoid saying “Duh.”

While many are now realizing that Trump’s policies will produce social and economic disaster, relatively few understand that the disaster will fall disproportionately on rural Trump voters. But of course it will. For the purveyor of Trump bibles and Trump meme coins, screwing the little guy has always been his personal style of grift. It remains to be seen if rural Trump supporters will awaken from their naivete.

Paul Krugman is a Nobel Prize-winning economist and former professor at MIT and Princeton who now teaches at the City University of New York's Graduate Center. From 2000 to 2024, he wrote a column for The New York Times. Please consider subscribing to his daily Substack.

Reprinted with permission from Substack.

Trump Wants 'Illegal' Workers -- For Himself, At Least

Trump Wants 'Illegal' Workers -- For Himself, At Least

Donald Trump recently wrote on Truth Social: "Our great Farmers and people in the Hotel and Leisure business have been stating that our very aggressive policy on immigration is taking very good, long-time workers away from them, with those jobs being almost impossible to replace."

Let's get the obvious out of the way. Trump is heavily invested in two of those three businesses. He's proven himself very good at looking out for Number One.

That's much easier than formulating an immigration policy to meet the needs of employers while ensuring decent wages for all workers. Many of these "very good" workers would have been admitted to this country legally, if we had carefully written immigration policy. The lack of said policy is a major driver of illegal immigration.

Consider also the weirdness of singling out two industries for lax immigration enforcement. Suppose an undocumented worker tending almond trees in California's Central Valley chooses to start a window-washing business in Bakersfield. Is he now slated for deportation?

Border czar Stephen Miller is putting on a show of force that is both nasty and ineffectual. The wannabe warlord says he wants to arrest 3,000 migrants a day, apparently any migrants. His enforcers have been pulling people with pending asylum cases and valid work permits off worksites.

Few will argue against booting out undocumented aliens who have committed crimes, other than being here illegally. Barack Obama did a better job of that than Trump has. MAGA's obsession with the Southern border, already calmed by Joe Biden before leaving office, ignores nearly half the dilemma. An estimated 42% of undocumented immigrants now in the U.S. arrived legally but overstayed their visas.

Meanwhile, organizers of the "No King" rallies did a masterful job. They broadly named the event to take much of the focus away from the sometimes-abusive activities of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. Americans have diverse opinions on what immigration policy should look like while there is growing anger at Trump's caudillo act and personal lawlessness.

That combined with Trump's toxic personality and chaotic politics resulted in small crowds honoring the U.S. Army's 250-year anniversary. That was too bad. The anniversary marked centuries of faithful service and sacrifice to the country. That was inevitable when Trump made the celebration an adjunct to his 79th birthday.

Trump set the scene by holding that unseemly political rally featuring himself at Fort Bragg. The Trump brand of vulgarity further diminished the Army's parade by including an official broadcast shouting out "Special thanks to our sponsor — Coinbase." Coinbase operates a huge exchange for cryptocurrency, one of Trump's shadowy avenues for amassing more wealth.

The "No Kings" planners, who put together big gatherings in every state, wisely kept the protests outside Washington. That avoided conflict with the Army/Trump birthday parade. Many of the "No Kings" rallies turned joyful with a here-comes-summer feel.

A few hours after calling to exempt farm and hospitality workers from harsh immigration enforcement, Trump blamed Biden for the problem Biden went far in solving. Trump himself has employed an illegal workforce, most famously the construction workers who built Trump Tower.

Immigration chaos is too useful politically and too personally enriching for Trump to end. Nor does the Republican-controlled House have the courage to act. Republicans memorably refused to vote on a bipartisan bill that would have gone far in strengthening enforcement.

Americans don't want open borders. They also recognize that many of the people who came through these open borders without the proper documentation are, indeed, otherwise very good people. Also that they are taking jobs it's hard to find Americans to fill.

Don't expect sane immigration reform in the Trump era. That requires hard work.

Reprinted with permission from Creators.

Labor Movement Enraged By ICE Arrest Of California SEIU Chief

Labor Movement Enraged By ICE Arrest Of California SEIU Chief

Unions across the United States have been rallying against the detainment of California labor leader David Huerta, who was arrested at an immigration protest on June 6 and released Monday afternoon on a $50,000 bond.

UPDATE: David Huerta was just released from custody!

[image or embed]

— SEIU California (@seiuca.bsky.social) June 9, 2025 at 10:50 PM

Huerta, president of Service Employees International Union California was injured during the arrest and charged on Monday for purportedly impeding Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers.

The Trump administration triggered protests by rounding up immigrants in the Los Angeles area in an effort to increase its deportation numbers.

“What happened to me is not about me; This is about something much bigger. This is about how we as a community stand together and resist the injustice that’s happening,” Huerta wrote in a statement on June 6. “Hard-working people, and members of our family and our community, are being treated like criminals. We all collectively have to object to this madness because this is not justice. This is injustice. And we all have to stand on the right side of justice.”

The Trump administration’s decision to arrest and charge Huerta is serving as a rallying point for labor unions, immigrants, and minority communities that are being targeted.

“They have woke us up,” Tia Orr, executive director of SEIU California, told the Los Angeles Times.

With more than 750,000 members, SEIU California called for Huerta’s immediate release during a rally in downtown Los Angeles Monday. Similar rallies also occurred in Washington, D.C., Seattle, Boston, and Chicago.

Other unions lent their voices to the cause, too.

“The nearly 15 million working people of the AFL-CIO and our affiliated unions demand the immediate release of California Federation of Labor Unions Vice President and SEIU California and SEIU-USWW President David Huerta,” the AFL-CIO wrote in a release on June 7.

Lee Saunders, president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, accused ICE agents of violating Huerta’s First Amendment rights by arresting him in the first place.

“AFSCME stands in unwavering solidarity with our union brother David Huerta. We demand his immediate release, and we will not be silent until justice is done,” Saunders wrote in a statement on June 8.

The arrest was also condemned by lawmakers like House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, who, in a statement released Sunday, said that the arrest of Huerta was “unacceptable.”

“This is the United States of America and we will not be intimidated by a wannabe dictator in the executive branch,” Jeffries wrote in a statement on June 8.

President Donald Trump spent much of the weekend attempting to escalate the situation in Los Angeles, particularly by deploying National Guard troops to the area over the objections of California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass.

Trump and his border czar Tom Homan also promoted the idea of arresting Democratic leaders for opposing the Trump administration’s mass deportations.

In addition to vocal opposition from multiple unions and political leaders, other Democrats have criticized the escalating conflict created by the Trump team.

“Governors are the Commanders in Chief of their National Guard and the federal government activating them in their own borders without consulting or working with a state’s governor is ineffective and dangerous,” 22 Democratic governors wrote in a statement released on Monday.

“Further,” they continued, “threatening to send the U.S. Marines into American neighborhoods undermines the mission of our service members, erodes public trust, and shows the Trump administration does not trust local law enforcement.”

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

Donald Trump

Humiliated Trump Seeks To Deflect Attention With Los Angeles Provocation

What is our moral responsibility as citizens of the United States when the President of the United States moves to deploy thousands of American soldiers against us?

Trump signed a memo on Friday night ordering 2,000 members of the National Guard to be deployed in Los Angeles County after federal immigration agents in riot gear squared off with hundreds of protesters for a second consecutive day.

Trump’s action is extreme although technically legal. Title 10 of the United States Code allows a president to federalize the National Guard units of states to suppress “any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy.” In a presidential memo, Trump said, “To the extent that protests or acts of violence directly inhibit the execution of the laws, they constitute a form of rebellion against the authority of the Government of the United States.”

Why is he doing it, and why now?

Because Trump can’t stand to be humiliated — as he has been in the last two weeks. By senate Republicans refusal to quickly enact his so-called One Big Beautiful Bill. By Xi Jinping’s refusal to back down on trade (and restrict shipments of China’s rare earths, which American industry depends on). By Putin’s refusal to end the war in Ukraine. By the federal courts pushing back against his immigration policy. And, now, by insults and smears from the richest person in the world, who has a larger social media following than does Trump.

So what does Trump do when he’s humiliated? He deflects public attention. Like any bully, he tries to find another way to display his power — especially over people whom he doesn’t consider “his” people.

He has despised California since the 2016 election when the state overwhelmingly voted against him.

And what better Ground Zero for him to try out his police state than Los Angeles — a city teaming with immigrants, with Hollywood celebrities who demonize him, and wealthy moguls who despise him?

He is calling out the National Guard to provoke violence. As California governor Gavin Newsom said, “that move is purposefully inflammatory and will only escalate tensions.”

Exactly. Trump wants to escalate tensions. He wants a replay of the violence that occurred in the wake of the George Floyd murder — riots, mayhem, and destruction that allow him to escalate his police state further — imposing curfews, closing down parts of Los Angeles, perhaps seeking to subdue the entire state. And beyond.

Please do not give him this. Don’t fall into his trap.

We cannot be silent in the face of Trump’s dictatorial move. But we must not succumb to violence.

What is needed is peaceful civil disobedience. Americans locking arms to protect those who need protection. Americans sitting in the way of armored cars. Americans singing and chanting in the face of the Americans whom Trump is drafting into his handmade civil war.

Americans who do not attempt to strike back, but who do what many of us did during the Civil Rights and anti-Vietnam War movements — peacefully but unambiguously reject tyranny.

A humiliated Trump is the most dangerous Trump. But he will overreach. He already has. And this overreach will ultimately be his undoing.

As long as we keep our heads.

May we look back on this hellish time and feel proud of what we did.

Be strong. Be safe. Hug your loved ones.

Robert Reich is a former secretary of labor and professor of public policy at University of California-Berkeley, who served in four presidential administrations of both parties. He is the author of several books and currently writes daily commentary on Substack.

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

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