What are the reasons why in many countries the natives refuse to do hard work and rely on undocumented illegal workers to work the hard menial jobs? Some of the reasons are explained below. Somewhere along the development of socieites, as the lower classes gentrify and become more affluent, they begin to shun work that is seen as demeaning or physically demanding, like construction work, janitorial activities, trash collection, street sweeping, household chores, etc.
While in the United States, the middle class became affluent thanks to government spending and social and financial incentive programs, the middle class in Lebanon has been largely decimated by 50 years of warfare and instability, many emigrating and settling abroad. This depletion of the middle class created a two-tier vertically stratified class structure consisting of the political-tribal-religious elite (historically wealthy landowners, but also warlords and deeply corrupt politicians) on the higher end and a poor class on the lower end.
With the flight of the educated middle class, that poor class consisting of generally uneducated peasants from the countryside, migrated to the cities and became urbanized. They slowly, but incompetently, replaced the middle class, filling jobs and businesses that once were dignified and with good revenues. But socially, they remained relatively tribal, retaining the mores and customs of their villages of origin. But as often happens with "arrivists", much of their financial success stemmed from criminal and gang activities during the chronic war conditions that have prevailed since the early 1970s. Much of the current Lebanese psyche is that of a Mafia-controlled culture. The individual Lebanese mindset is conditioned in a narrrow range of beliefs and modes of action that prevail in a society divided between lords and serfs, bosses and their men, clergy and their faithful.... The individual Lebanese has reflexes typical of a slave in the service of someone grander than him or her.
This "new" up-and-coming middle class of urbanized villagers is at the same time very religious but also deeply consumer of every tacky rubbish that is imported from the west. In terms of competence, they could not replace the better quality of the older genuinely urban emigrated middle class. The periodic setbacks due to instability and economic collapse did not help effect a slow improvement.
At the same time, emigration to the Arab Gulf states for work inculcated to the Lebanese the mentality of the extremely wealthy Gulf Arab arrivists. Fifty years ago, the Gulf emirates were just emerging from their nomadic lifestyle and beginning to invest their sudden oil-based wealth in building more modern societies. The educated Lebanese flocked to the Gulf and became the first teachers, engineers, scientists, developers etc. filling a huge void in modern qualifications for the native Gulf Arabs who were embarking on the long modernization process. The Lebanese spoke Arabic as well as other western languages and became the unavoidable go-betweens between the west and the Gulf. They still do today but are gradually replaced by the younger generations of Gulf Arabs who learned their trades directly from western universities and academies.
But the "arrivism" gene has yet to disappear. Wealthy Gulf Arabs, who often did not have to work hard to earn their wealth, indulged in the imagery and fantasy of what wealth can afford: behaving like lords whose army of foreign indentured slaves did everything: Maids, cleaners, construction workers, and yes, engineers and teachers were all treated with condescension and discrimination, the local laws codifying the supremacy of the native Arabs over everyone else. The Gulf Arab states are not countries of immigration, so the 75% of foreign workers who make up 80% of the active population have only one right: work, earn a salary, then leave when the boss (always a native Arab) says so.
As the need for the Lebanese foreign labor began to diminish some time in the late 1990s early 2000s, the returning emigrés brought back with them customs from the Arab Gulf: everyone must have a maid, a chauffeur, someone to clean up... The most flagrant manifestation of this superficial and silly behavior is the ardent desire of the Lebanese to be treated like VIPs: In restaurants, hotels and similar public places, the "Valet Parking" has become a must. Even in the dingiest of restaurants in the darkest of alleys, the Lebanese seem to like, or at least they are cowered into accepting, the idea of paying the extortion and racketeering charge of "valet parking". The operators of the valet parking do not give the client the option of self-service vs. valet parking, the latter being the only option or else you might not find your car intact when you're done dining. These Mafia-like operations are rampant: beaches, resorts, hotels, restaurants....
Another manifestation of Arabian Gulf arrivism implanted in Lebanon is the maid system. Even the poorest of households believe they must have a maid to show others that they have arrived. When you buy your maid from the importer, she comes with a maid uniform that she must wear at all times. When she rides in the car of her "mister", she is never allowed to sit in the front passenger seat, always in the back seat. Maids are brought with the family to the beach resorts but are not allowed to wear a bathing suit or bathe: They are prohibited from swimming pools. On the back end, her passport is held by her "mister" so she can't escape.
In supermarkets, there are workers (Syrians, Bengalis) whose job is to pull and push your full shopping cart up to your car in the parking lot. You're a VIP, so it would be demeaning for you to be seen by the other VIPs operating a cart.
How do these poor households afford an Arabian Gulf arrivist lifestyle? With money regularly wired by the emigrés from their adopted countries. Lebanon is not a productive country. It relies on the services sector, on tourism and could be self-sufficient because it grows a lot of its "natural" foods (vegetables, fruits...) which are relatively cheap. But the arrivist lifestyle requires people to consume western-style boxed processed food that is imported and very expensive.
In sum, just as Mexicans and other Central Americans do the menial jobs in the United States for a native population that farts higher than its own asshole, Syrians and others (Egyptians, Bengalis...) do the menial jobs for the arrivist Lebanese whose only purpose in life is to sit in cafés, consume and look like smart VIPs with money wired by relatives from overseas. Ostentation is huge in Lebanon.
The funny aspect of all this is that there is always a 1-2 generational gap between the moment novelties (both good and bad) emerge in the west and the moment they arrive in Lebanon. Those novelties could be changing social mores (gays, divorce, environment, marijuana...) as well as technical developments (electric cars, solar power...). Whenever there is a new development in the west that breaks the taboos, it is immediately condemned and ostracized by a very conservative and religious culture. But wait 20-30 years and it becomes a standard bearer for "progress". If it is a technical development that can be exploited to make money, then it arrives to Lebanon the very next day.
The common thing to all of this: Lebanon does not produce. Does not innovate. It waits for others to do it, then it imports it and copies it. Yet, Lebanese individuals do wonders when they leave the country. Why are they unable to innovate and produce in-country? Because of the restrictions, constraints, limitations on individual freedoms that imposed by religions, sects and tribes, plus a Mafia mindset of corruption that makes the Lebanese always ask himself/herself, when faced with the necessity to conform to laws, rules and norms, "How can I get bypass this?" How can I get away with it?" The system is an obstacle and not a shared common project that must be upheld. There is no collective conscience in Lebanon. Only raw individualism.
While Trump can send his Gestapo-ICE police to kidnap and deport undocumented Central American immigrants without due process, the Lebanese government wouldn't even dare think about doing something like this with its 2 million undocumented Syrian migrants. Why? Because the Syrians are largely Sunni Muslims and the Lebanese Sunni community would rise up to defend the Sunni Syrians instead of upholding its own national Lebanese laws. While I do not condone Trump's Fascist cruelty, I accept the compelling rule of law. But assuming that Trump manages to void the country of all its illegal migrants, who will do all the menial jobs in their stead?
Similary, imagine that all the illegal Syrian migrants leave Lebanon to return to their country, who will do all the menial jobs in their stead? Will the Lebanese stop their stupid arrogance, ostentation, and living beyond their means? Will the values of humility and modesty, thrift and self-sufficience, and hard work return to this country tormented more by itself and by its own people than by any outsider or foe?
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What It Will Take to Get U.S. Citizens to Work the Farm — According to Dolores Huerta
Samuel Benson
Sat, August 2, 2025
Damian Dovarganes/AP
The agriculture sector is on edge like never before.
With ICE officers chasing undocumented immigrants through fields and barging into meatpacking plants, workers are spooked. Even before the farm raids, workforce shortages and economic uncertainty rankled the industry. Now, as harvest season arrives for many crops, concerns are growing that there may not be enough workers out there to feed the country.
To Dolores Huerta, it’s an unprecedented problem caused squarely by the Trump administration. “It’s an atrocity, what they’ve been doing to the immigrant community,” Huerta said in an interview with POLITICO Magazine. The longtime labor activist says the federal government’s current approach is “very, very different” than anything she’s seen before.
And the 95-year-old Huerta has seen a lot.
She first began lobbying the California legislature on farm labor issues when she was just 25, and she founded an agriculture workers union soon after. In her early 30s, she partnered with civil rights leader Cesar Chavez to create the National Farm Workers Association, now the United Farm Workers. For years, she and Chavez worked in tandem, delivering major victories to protect farm workers from exploitation and exposure to dangerous pesticides. President Barack Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012.
The Trump administration is now struggling to reconcile its mass deportation efforts with the need to keep farm production going. Huerta is not optimistic about how it will all play out, though she was able to poke at Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins’ recent suggestion that automation will soon replace human laborers. “I guess I could just wait until they get enough robots to do the farm work,” Huerta joked.
The Trump administration has launched farm raids targeting undocumented immigrants, which has sent a chill through the labor force and industry. You’ve advocated for farm workers for decades. Does the current climate feel familiar, or are we in a really different place?
Oh, it’s a very, very different place. Because in the past, in the ’50s, when we had this “Operation Wetback,” they were not putting people in jail. They would repatriate people. They would deport them, take them to the border. Somewhere along the way, I think during Newt Gingrich’s time, they started putting people in jail, but then they would let them go. It was not putting people in prisons, like we’re seeing right now. The kind of brutality, the horror, the kidnapping, endangering people’s lives, separating the families — the way that Trump did in the last administration, and they’re doing now, leaving all of these missing children — it’s an atrocity, what they’ve been doing to the immigrant community.
Many of those people that they have been picking up and arresting are farm workers. Here in Bakersfield, California, we were the first city to be hit. When Border Patrol came in, they arrested [78] people, and only one person had any kind of criminal record. And when they talk about a criminal record, it could be a traffic stop. It could be just that they came in, and they were deported, and came back in again. These are not violent crimes that we’re talking about. They are, you might say, civil infractions, and yet they’re being treated like they were criminals.
This administration says it wants to get to a “100 percent American workforce.” It also has discussed rapidly expanding migrant visa programs, like H-2A. Do you see those two goals in conflict? How might that play out?
Well, I think it would be really great to have American workers to work on farms. Farm work has been denigrated for so many years by the growers themselves, and they did this because they never wanted to pay farm workers the kind of wages that they deserve. Farm workers were essential workers during the pandemic. They were out there in the fields. So many of them died because they never got the proper protections that they needed. But they were out there every single day, picking the food that we needed to eat.
Farm workers don’t get the same kind of benefits or salaries that others get. We just recently did a study with the University of California Merced. Their average wage is $30,000 a year, $35,000 a year. And on that, they have to feed their families. A lot of them, unless they have a union contract, they’re paid minimum wage. They’re not respected.
The whole visa program, the H-2A program, it’s always been there. Cesar Chavez and I, when we started the United Farm Workers, one of the first things that we did was end the “Bracero Program,” which was a similar [guest worker] program. Now they’ve increased these H-2A workers in agriculture. This is a step above slavery. They can’t unionize. They don’t get Social Security. They don’t get unemployment insurance. Farmers save money by having these H-2A workers. They cannot become citizens. There is no way for them to even get a green card.
If you were trying to get to a 100 percent American workforce, what’s the solution here? Does it start with paying more competitive wages for workers? Or is it something else?
Well, right now, we’re trying to stop a detention center here in California City, which is up here in the Mojave Desert. They are offering the people to work in that center $50 an hour. In California, our minimum wage is $16. That’s what a lot of workers get.
Let’s offer farmworkers $50 an hour, the same kind of a salary that you offer the prison guards, and you’ll get a lot of American workers.
We have very high unemployment in the Central Valley. We have the prison industrial complex, where a lot of our young people are going to prison. So many of these young people don’t have to go to prison if they were paid adequately. I’m sure a lot of them would go and do the farm work, especially if they had good wages to do it. And we still have a lot of young people here in the valley that go out during the summers and they do farm work to help their families. I’m sure a lot of people that we now see that are homeless on the streets and that are able to work would go to work if they were paid $50 an hour.
So it’s just a matter of improving wages?
And training, too. Because farm work is hard work. I mean, you’ve got to be in good physical shape to be able to do farm work.
Why are undocumented workers such a large part of the agricultural workforce? Is it just that these are low-paying, hard jobs that Americans don’t want to do, or is there more going on?
Well, like I said earlier, the growers have denigrated the work so much that people don’t realize that this work is dignified. Farm workers are proud of the work that they do. They don’t feel that somehow they’re a lower class of people because they do farm work. They have pride in their work. If you were to go out there with farm workers, you would be surprised to see that they have dignity, and they care about the work. They care about the plants.
When we started the farm workers union way back in the late ’50s and early ’60s, you would be surprised how many American citizens were out there. Veterans were out there. The Grapes of Wrath was filmed here. All of those workers in that camp were white. It was the “Okies” and “Arkies,” the people that came from Oklahoma and Arkansas and those places to work in the fields. They were all white workers. There were some Latino workers, and then over the years, you had the Chinese, you had the Japanese, and different waves of immigrants that came in to do farm work.
When did it change?
Well, the growers always fought unionization, as they still do to this day. I’ll give an example. There’s a company called the Wonder Company. When you watch television, you see all of their ads for pistachios. They’re billionaires. The United Farm Workers just won a recognition election, and they refused to recognize the union.
When you have a union out there, you have a steward out there in every single crew, and their job is to make sure that there’s a bathroom out there in the fields, which farm workers never had before. We had a big movement to get farmers just having toilets in the field and hand washing facilities, cold drinking water, risk periods, unemployment insurance, et cetera. This is the thing that we fought for, and the growers fought against it, right to the end. The Farm Bureau Federation fought against all of these improvements for farm workers, and they continue to fight.
You supported the 1986 Reagan amnesty, when 1 million farm workers received legal status. The Trump administration has been adamant, for political purposes, that there will be “no amnesty.” Do you think the administration could get to some sort of mass legalization for farm workers? If not, what happens next?
The problem with this administration is, they’re so racist. Racism rules, fascism rules with this administration. I don’t know, I guess I could just wait until they get enough robots to do the farm work.
What about pesticides? You’ve long fought against pesticide use in agriculture because of the effect of exposure on farm workers. Now, there’s this “Make America Healthy Again” push to get rid of pesticides. What do you make of that?
Well, I think maybe that’s one good thing that Robert Kennedy Jr. might do. His father was a champion for the farm workers. The pesticides — we should have gotten rid of those a long time ago. We didn’t have pesticides until after World War II.
There’s a pesticide called paraquat. Paraquat is banned in Europe. It’s banned in almost every country except the United States of America, and it is used right here in Kern County in California. It causes cancer. It causes leukemia. It causes Parkinson’s disease, and we cannot get it banned in California. We know that when plants are planted, when food is planted, the pesticide is already in the seeds. We were trying to stop that in Washington, D.C., and were unable to. We were even just trying to get them to put information on it, so when you go in to buy your fruit, it would have a sticker on it that said, “This particular fruit or vegetable has been treated with this pesticide.” It’s in the fruit when you eat it.
Just recently, we had about four or five young people in their late 40s, early 50s, all have died of cancer, and they’re from Delano, California.
Are these farm workers?
No, but when they spray this stuff, it also goes into the towns. So nobody’s really safe from it.
Is this pesticide issue something you could collaborate or find some common ground with the Trump administration?
Yeah, we would love to. But you know what? It’s not going to happen, because pesticides really come from the petroleum industry.
Have you discussed this with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., or would you be open to meeting with him? I know his father was a friend of yours and a great champion of your cause.
I imagine, maybe, when we talk about this issue. I wouldn’t agree with Robert Jr. on the issue of vaccinations, or fluoride in our drinking water, et cetera, and some of the issues that he espouses.
I know him. I’ve known him for many, many years. I haven’t spoken to him. He did try to contact me when he was running, and I didn’t respond. I knew that the family, that Kerry and Ethel and the rest of them, were not happy about his supporting Trump.
But you haven’t spoken to him since he became HHS secretary?
No. I know people that have spoken to him.
The labor movement as a whole has an unusual relationship to Donald Trump, who claims to champion the working class. Do you think union leaders have more to gain by working with Trump, or by opposing him? What explains his appeal to many union members?
Well, I can’t speak for the Teamsters. I think there was a kind of a betrayal of the working people, because I know the majority of the labor unions went against Trump and endorsed Biden [in 2024]. I think that was very damaging.
I think a good comparison is if you look at what they’ve done in Mexico with Claudia Sheinbaum and the president before her. They’ve done incredible work in Mexico right now because it has been very labor-focused, very working people-focused, in contrast with what’s happening here in the United States, where we are very billionaire- and millionaire-focused. And so you can see in Mexico they’ve been able to increase pensions, increase the minimum wage, increase benefits for the working people.
Last question: You’re 95, what’s your secret? What do you eat?
I’m a vegetarian, and I just stay busy. I think you just have to stay busy.
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