‘Too backbreaking:’ Schiff says Americans don’t want to work on California farms
Sen. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., is worried about what will happen to California’s farm workforce, should President Trump’s mass deportation policy eliminate workers.
“These are just some of the difficult conditions that farm workers are often in,” Schiff said. “They’re working in 100 degree heat, they’re working in the cold. They’re some of the hardest working people I’ve ever met. And I want to raise an issue of the impact that mass deportations would have on them, first and foremost, on people who are working so hard to put food on our table.”
Schiff said that estimates suggest that half of California’s farm workforce is undocumented, and asked Rollins how farmers were supposed to survive if half their workforce is cut because “American don’t want to do that work” since it's “too backbreaking.” As a result, Schiff asked who would work on California's farms.
“President Trump ran and was overwhelmingly elected on the priority of border security and mass deportation,” Rollins said.
Still, Rollins said she would work with the committee and with the Labor Department on the matter.
“We will work together to understand and hopefully solve for some of these problems. The dairy cattle have to be milked, but if we’ve got a mass deportation program underway, then there’s a lot of work that we need to do,” Rollins said.
Posted by Diana Stancy