Bittersweet Harvest: Mexicans Tackle Trump Over Migrant Row
SBS (2015)
Film Review
Bittersweet Harvest is an Australian documentary about a special training camp for Spanish-speaking labor activists who organize immigrant farm workers in the US. It takes its title from a ludicrous claim Donald Trump made accusing Mexican immigrants of being druggies, criminals and rapists. The film profiles two “undocumented” student organizers who, based on stellar academic achievement, have won university scholarships.
As the film ably documents, American’s $400 billion agriculture industry would collapse without the one million immigrant workers who comprise the bulk of its labor force. Americans don’t want these jobs: the living and working conditions are too obscene and the pay too meager. Ironically the substitution of immigrant labor for black slaves has enabled the southern US to maintain the plantation system it developed prior to the Civil War.
Following the trainee activists as they visit farm worker camps, the filmmakers raise thorny questions, such as why neither federal nor state governments enforce basic labor laws, eg child labor, minimum wage and occupational safety laws (limiting exposure to cancer causing pesticides like Roundup and green tobacco sickness).
The film effectively highlights the total hypocrisy of politicians like Trump who use the immigration crisis to score political points. The federal government could shut down illegal immigration tomorrow by a) prosecuting the agro-businesses that employ undocumented immigrants or b) requiring them to pay minimum wage and provide safe living and working conditions. Clearly our elected officials have no interest in doing either: the current system allows Food Inc to reap immense profits at the expense of the illegal labor they exploit.
The Most Revolutionary Act 
Reblogged this on An Outsider's Sojourn II.
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Americans bent over fields of lettuce, strawberries, cucumbers, tomatoes, squash, corn? Hah! That’ll be the day. The only thing Americans do is gas up the SUV and drive to the supermarket and pick up what they want. And our corrupt politicians are paid to see no problem with Mexican immigrants doing back breaking labor for peanuts. Nor do they care about the children of these immigrants. Those pesky child labor laws just don’t apply to them. Mexican immigrants are the hardest working people I’ve ever seen. They do not complain, they just work. But just as you say, they are a convenient scapegoat for politicians to go on and on about Mexican immigrants taking over jobs that Americans could be working. That’s a load of shit and we all know it.
Thanks Dr. Bramhall!
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What makes me more angry than anything else is the continual lies and distortions. They lie about everything. I don’t think the people who run our country even know how to tell the truth.
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But the really sad fact is that many Amerikkkans eat that shit up and run with it! That is a huge reason why this continues because when you got the sheep willfully being led by the nose by snakes that are blaming the problems in Amerikkka on so-called ‘illegals’, well, then, they’d follow the snake right on over the cliff. “The ‘illegals’ are taking OUR jobs. Muslims are terrorists and Black people are lazy, drug addicts on welfare!” Isn’t that the usual rhetoric and it never gets old because that bigots, racists and the ‘blamers’ are hearing just what they want to hear?
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You definitely have a point – which only emphasizes the importance of educational reform. If the US offered children a genuine education that taught history, geography and critical thinking, they wouldn’t be so easily duped.
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Bingo! And that is why the public education system in the U.S. is laughable. It’s all done by design!
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