President Donald Trump made the racist claim Tuesday that migrant laborers are “naturally” suited to physically arduous farm work — and is being torched on social media as “grotesquely amoral and mindless.”
Trump appeared on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” and was acknowledging that his crackdown on immigration has impacted U.S. agriculture, as much of that workforce is Latino, when he assured viewers that American farmers will get to keep these “very special people.”
“We can’t let our farmers not have anybody,” he said. “You know … these people, you can’t replace them very easily. You know, people that live in the inner city are not doing that work. They’re just not doing that work. And they’ve tried, we’ve tried, everybody tried.”
“These people do it naturally — naturally,” Trump said of the migrant laborers. “I said … to a farmer the other day, ‘What happens if they get a bad back?’ He said, ‘They don’t get a bad back, sir, because if they get a bad back, they die.’ I said that’s interesting, isn’t it?”
“In many ways they’re very, very special people,” the president concluded.
The comment reminds of antebellum justifications for slave labor, when proponents used baseless science to claim Black people had a higher tolerance for heat, pain and physically strenuous work — and thus weren’t suited for much else.
Social media users were quick to note this and excoriated Trump for his bigotry.
“Only someone as grotesquely amoral and mindless as he is would even think of saying something like that,” wrote one user on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, with another person commenting: “He’s talking about them like they are a different species wtf.”
“This is just fancy words for slavery btw,” wrote another, with a fourth person commenting: “Did he really just say that? Sounds less like a policy comment and more like a dystopian movie script. These are human beings not machines.”
The racist notion that Latinos are inherently suited for this work isn’t new. Sen. George Murphy (R-Calif.) reportedly argued in 1964 that Californians need Mexican farm workers because they’re “built low to the ground” — “so it is easier for them to stoop.”
Murphy denied at the time ever making that remark.
Trump’s comment seems to have frustrated both sides of the aisle, however, as critics called him a “Batshit crazy pre-Boomer racist” — while his supporters consider the potential amnesty for migrant laborers as a reversal from Trump’s staunch deportation policy.