Three months ago, Georgia Republicans proudly passed House Bill 87, an Arizona-style anti-immigrant bill that, among other things, requires employers to use E-Verify to confirm the legal status of their employees.
Today, Georgia farmers (most of whom voted for those Republicans) are leaving hundreds of millions of dollars of crops rotting in the fields, unable to find the manpower to do the grueling work of harvesting in 100-plus-degree weather. Republican Gov. Nathan Deal has even pushed unemployed criminal probationers out into the fields to little effect: The work is just too difficult.
“Those guys out here weren’t out there 30 minutes and they got the bucket and just threw them in the air and say, ‘Bonk this, I ain’t with this, I can’t do this,” one probationer told The Washington Post. Early reports suggest that just half of probationers even bothered showing up a second day. Farmers aren’t happy either. “The plan to put probationers on farms ain’t gonna work,” a farmer told the Gainesville Times. “I want to be a farmer; I don’t want to be a warden.” Even under the best-case scenario, the 2,000 unemployed probationers in south Georgia are just a fraction of the (at least) 11,000 farmhands who have disappeared from Georgia fields, according to the state’s agriculture commissioner.
