Donald Trump and JD Vance have a lot in common in addition to sharing the 2024 GOP presidential ticket. There are the obvious ways, like they both have undeniably close ties to Project 2025 and they’re both really weird. But perhaps less obvious to some observers, despite their non-stop vilifying of immigrant communities, they’ve both exploited the labor of immigrants to enrich their own pockets.
CNN released new details about how Vance, a protégé of tech billionaire Peter Thiel, invested in a startup “that promised a high-tech future for farming and for the workers of Eastern Kentucky,” including investing in local jobs. CNN said, “Vance was an early investor, board member and public pitchman for the indoor-agriculture company.” But as any of the farmworkers who feed us and sustain our nation’s food supply will tell you, agriculture is tough and oftentimes dangerous work. Vance’s startup, AppHarvest, reportedly failed to properly care for employees, including neglecting to provide workers with proper training or protection against stifling heat.
Some got very sick. When workers began to leave their jobs and the company appeared to be panicking about a potential labor shortfall, migrant workers were then quietly brought in and sometimes hidden away by management.
WORKERS COMPLAINED ABOUT UNSAFE CONDITIONS, SOME COLLAPSED FROM HEAT
“AppHarvest employees said they were forced to work in grueling conditions inside the company’s greenhouse, where temperatures often soared into the triple digits,” the report said. Former crop care specialist Shelby Hester told CNN that “workers were routinely taken out of the greenhouse by medical personnel because they were suffering from heat stroke symptoms. Those who went to the doctor, she said, were told by managers that a doctor’s note was not a sufficient reason to miss a shift.”
Heat-related illness, in case Vance was unaware because he was busy being a complete fraud on the opioid crisis, is very real and very deadly for millions of U.S.-born and immigrant workers who labor outside. “On average, 43 farmworkers die from heat-related illnesses every year, according to studies,” Reckon reported last year. “They are 20 times more likely to die from heat than civilian employees.” On New Year’s Day 2023, Florida farmworker Rafael Barajas died on his first day of work at a bell pepper farm. Struggling to keep up his work in 90-degree heat, Barajas collapsed in the fields.
Basic protections against heat, including frequent water and shade breaks, can mean the difference between life or death – and that is true for all American workers. But as CNN reports, AppHarvest workers filed complaints with state and federal officials alleging “they were given insufficient water breaks and weren’t provided adequate safety gear.” Investigative reporting from Louisville Public Media last year initially detailed how “stress of the work environment led to panic attacks, ideation of personal harm, and relapses into addiction.” So much for Vance being a champion of the U.S. worker – or the migrant workers brought in to help save AppHarvest.
‘WHAT MIGRANT WORKERS?!’
Facing a potential labor shortfall (gee, wonder why), AppHarvest began to bring in migrant workers, many from Guatemala and Mexico. Now, the simple fact is that immigrant workers, with their spirit of entrepreneurship and skills, have helped keep our economy afloat, including by filling vacant job positions. We should be thankful to them. But when this reality runs counter to political gamesmanship, these workers get burned. Over at AppHarvest, they got hidden away – literally.
Shelby Hester’s husband, also a former AppHarvest employee, “told CNN that the migrants were kept in separate bays from other workers and were sent away when bigwigs came through the warehouse.” One of the most shocking incidents came ahead of a visit by the Republican Senate Minority leader in 2021.
“That juxtaposition with the company’s public messaging on jobs was on full display when Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Kentucky Republican, toured the greenhouse that November,” CNN reports. “‘They brought Mitch McConnell into the greenhouse, and they sent every single Hispanic worker home before he got there,’ Hester said. ‘He then proceeded to have a speech about how we were taking the jobs from the Mexicans.’ At least five workers confirmed Hester’s account of McConnell’s visit to CNN.”
Louisville Public Media’s report detailed how workers were sent back to motels where they lived “four or five to a room” as the remaining AppHarvest employees – mostly all white, of course – were put on display for McConnell’s visit. “We had very little time,” recalled an unnamed former worker who had to sign a nondisclosure agreement (how “American heartland,” JD). “We had to get them off the premises and away before he [Sen. Minority Leader McConnell] got there.”
VANCE LEARNED FROM THE BEST (THE WORST)
As America’s Voice has detailed for years, Trump has hated immigration, except when he’s loved profiting from the labor of immigrants. Trump and his businesses have had a long history of hiring and exploiting the same undocumented workers he’s spent the last decade demonizing for political gain. They have built his empire, quite literally.
Decades ago, it was undocumented workers – “nicknamed the Polish Brigade because of their home country,” the Daily Beast reported in 2015 – who demolished the building that would eventually become the site of Trump’s crown jewel and symbol of his wealth, Trump Tower (though it could at risk due to his civil fraud trial – that’s a whole other story). Unsurprisingly, many of these laborers were underpaid – or not paid at all. Trump would later settle with them for $1 million, documents revealed.
We also know about Trump’s use of undocumented labor because of brave workers like Victorina Morales, who stepped forward to speak out about working as a housekeeper at his Bedminster golf resort in New Jersey. She worked so closely to Trump that she made his bed, cleaned his golf trophies, and even washed the bronzer stains off his clothes. Morales knew she did fine work. “There are millions of us here without papers, and the country depends on us,” she told Vox in 2019. In addition to a pattern of recruiting, hiring, falsely documenting, exploiting and then firing undocumented immigrant workers primarily from Latin America, the Trump Organization requested, and received, visas for foreign workers well into his presidency. And while he sought to restrict so-called “chain migration,” the reality is that Trump’s family is in the U.S. because of it, including his current wife Melania. Vance’s wife, Usha is also a child of immigrants.
‘WE WERE ALL SOLD ON THIS BEAUTIFUL PIPE DREAM’
The most significant economic policy that Trump and Vance are advancing is that they plan to deport millions of undocumented immigrants. Such an action would derail the national economy, reignite inflation and represent a mass family separation program despite the fact that both men have benefitted from the labor and skills of these workers. Vance, in particular, has echoed deadly, white nationalist conspiracy theory to frame immigrants as a dire military-style threat. In reality, mass deportation would not only devastate families and communities all across the nation but would inflict unprecedented damage on the economy and U.S. industries, forcibly expelling millions of workers who sustain our nation’s food supply, teach our children, care for the elderly, build our homes and repair our roads, care for our children and work in our hospitals.
“My whole view of AppHarvest was we were all sold on this beautiful pipe dream,” one former worker said in the Louisville Public Media report. “This is sustainable, this is new, we’re going to make it. It turned out to just be a fucking nightmare.” It’s not that different from the false vision that Trump and Vance are trying to sell to the American people.
