September 3, 2026
The Cheap Slave Labor Catechism™
By: Idaho Senator Brian Lenney
Two of Idaho’s ag men recently sat down on a podcast and laid out the whole case for keeping cheap slave labor flowing into this state. Worth listening to. Worth answering, too.
So here’s every argument in the Cheap Slave Labor Catechism™, and what’s wrong with each one.
“A federal problem that needs to be fixed federally, and it needs to pay attention to our industries.”
There it is, in one sentence.
Notice the order of the clauses. First, the nation has a problem. Second, the fix has to be tailored to the convenience of the men who profited from the problem.
For 40 years the American worker has been told the border needs a “comprehensive solution,” and every comprehensive solution shows up with the same two halves: amnesty now, enforcement later. Reagan tried that in 1986. Three million people who broke the law to get here were legalized, employer sanctions went into the law, and then the sanctions sat there for four decades doing nothing, because they were never meant to do anything, and we’re still paying the bill and so are our kids.
Anyone offering to run it again is either a fool or is counting on you being one.
“That’s what Trump did. Shut the gate. That’s all we had to do.”
Great. So why is the very next paragraph a request to prop it open for one privileged category of employer?
That’s a service entrance with a key that goes to whoever keeps a lobbyist in Washington.
And a border enforced by executive discretion expires with the administration that ordered it, which the men who want permanent access to cheap slave labor understand better than anybody. They’re happy to let the gate close for the evening news and then go negotiate their own door around back.
“Find me a first world country where you’re not going to find immigrants doing some of these jobs.”
Ooh, my turn…
Find me a first world country where the median man can buy a house on one income the way his grandfather did.
That comparison cuts harder the other way and everyone knows it.
The premise is wrong anyway. For decades (before 1965) this country ran the tightest immigration regime in its modern history, and that stretch produced the largest expansion of the American middle class ever recorded. A tight labor market is the only reliable friend the working man has ever had. And every person who tells you otherwise is buying labor rather than selling it.
“Our kids don’t want to do those jobs, because they have better opportunities.”
Americans won’t do the job at those wages, in those conditions, next to people who were brought in specifically to hold both down. Say the whole sentence out loud and the argument falls apart.
There’s no such thing as a job Americans won’t do.
But there are definitely wages and conditions Americans won’t accept, and keeping both exactly where they are is the entire point of importing the labor.
Ask what happened when Congress killed the Bracero program in 1964. The growers swore the tomatoes would rot in the fields. Instead the harvest got mechanized and California grew more tomatoes than before. Scarcity of labor is the mother of invention. And cheap slave labor in unlimited supply is the mother of doing it in 2026, which is exactly what the industries that have imported wage slaves for 60 years are still doing.
And follow their own logic out a few years. If cheap foreign labor is the entry ramp to a better life, and our own kids have already climbed off it, then we need another wave in 20 years. And another after that. Forever. It’s a supply chain with a constant drip of foreign wage slaves, and a country that has to import a permanent underclass every generation to protect its margins is eating itself.
“Calling it slave labor? Are you kidding me. They’re well taken care of.”
The objection was never that any individual employer is cruel. The objection is that labor tied to one employer by visa status can’t bargain and can’t quit without leaving the country, so it can’t do the one thing free labor does by its nature, which is push wages up.
That’s the whole point of the arrangement. It’s not a bug, it’s a feature.
And that’s just the legal half. Dairy doesn’t even get the legal half, because H-2A covers seasonal work and cows get milked in February, so the dairies are locked out of the program entirely.
But they’ll say the quiet part in our own Capitol if you sit through enough testimony. Bob Naerebout of the Idaho Dairymen’s Association told legislators that as much as 70% of the industry’s workforce might be here illegally. The IDA’s own commissioned report puts dairy at 90% foreign born with roughly half being illegal. Their economist warned that enforcing the law would cut dairy output 45%. Nobody’s denying that. They’re describing a dependency they built on purpose, on the record, and then asking us to protect it.
Ask anyone who works the borders (I did a few months back when I spent time with law enforcement in Arizona) and they’ll tell you that nobody crosses without the cartels allowing it and taking their cut. Not a single person.
So the foreign workforce that shows up here is already owned by somebody, with a debt attached, no papers, and no standing to complain to anyone about anything. Call that a labor market if you like. I call it a trafficking pipeline with a milking parlor at the end of it.
So when a man tells you those workers are “well taken care of,” understand you’re hearing an old southern slavery argument. George Fitzhugh, the Virginia lawyer who wrote the most thorough defense of slavery this country ever produced, made the same case in 1857:
“The slave is taken care of, whether employed or not.”
He wasn’t lying, either.
He was describing a real feature of the system and offering it as the reason you shouldn’t look too hard at the rest of it. That’s what “well taken care of” has always been for.
“The far right wants to hunt them all down, and that’s not Trump’s position.”
Correct. That’s the problem.
The gate got shut, and the part that actually mattered never showed up. Nobody indicted a dairy executive. There was no serious I-9 audit program. E-Verify still isn’t mandatory, and the ag and LEO lobby kills it in Boise every single time it’s introduced. And 287(g) still isn’t mandatory either.
You could end this in 18 months without one dramatic raid by making it a felony to profit from illegal labor, then convict somebody prominent enough that the rest of the industry reads the news and does the math.
People who broke the law to get here should go home.
All of them.
There’s no version of a country with borders where the penalty for crossing one illegally is a work permit, a benefits package, and free stuff. Removal is the ordinary operation of immigration law, and calling it an atrocity is how you get 20 more years of nothing.
But the man who hired them should be in worse trouble than the trafficked person he hired. He’s the citizen. He took the oath, he knew the law, and he broke it in his own country for profit. Here’s a video of Charlie Kirk unpacking this exact sentiment at a conference of roofers who admit that they hire illegals to prop up their industry:
The problem is that every enforcement regime since 1986 has pointed at the workers and left the employers alone. There are dairies in Idaho running the same arrangement they were running 30 years ago, and it lasts because the ag lobby pays for legislators who protect it. The lobby writes the talking points. Their legislators repeat them in committee and the enforcement bills die, often without a recorded vote. Cheap labor stays cheap. Everybody at that table knows the deal, and none of them ever have to say a word about it in public.
The Farm Bureau guy is right that Trump isn’t saying what the base is saying.
Trump didn’t go far enough, and the half he skipped is the half that would’ve worked. The base is the people who lost the plant and watched main street hollow out and voted for the one man who’d say build the wall without apologizing. They voted to get the country back, and a photo op at the Rio Grande with a carve-out for agriculture is, and I want to be precise here, not that.
America First means America First. It doesn’t come with an exemption for whoever keeps the best lobbyist in Boise or DC.
“Go back to Mitt Romney. That’s your adult in the room.”
Mitt Romney ran on self-deportation in 2012 and had abandoned it by 2013, when he joined the chorus for the Gang of Eight bill. He’s the mascot of the Conservative Inc. Republicanism that lost the country: fight to the death over the marginal tax rate, surrender without a shot on the border, the trade deficit, and the wars.
If he’s your standard for a statesman, the word doesn’t mean anything anymore.
“A state legislator making noise about immigration is looking out for their publicity, not your interests.”
Here’s the thing about the man who says that. The Farm Bureau guy on the podcast was publicly thanked, by name, alongside the lobbyist for the Dairymen’s Association, for his work on the Securing Agriculture’s Workforce Act. The President of the Farm Bureau even went on record backing it too. So the CEO telling Idaho legislators to stay in our lane has been working a federal legalization bill for the workforce his members employ.
He’s not against politicians getting involved in immigration.
He’s against the ones he can’t control (or, buy).
And it’s funny coming from a man sitting in a studio with a multi-millionaire commercial developer, recording an episode of the developer’s podcast, in the middle of a three-week guest-hosting run the developer announced in the intro, while the two of them wax eloquent about the new headquarters going up next to the Capitol, sited there because, as he puts it, “Boise is where the laws happen.”
Then they get to immigration, and the problem is that state legislators are seeking attention?
It isn’t even an original line.
The dairyman lobbyist says the same thing, word for word: “This is a federal issue, not a state issue.” Same script, same legislators repeating it, same bills dying.
The claim underneath is that Idaho has no legitimate voice on the one question that most reshapes our schools, our hospitals, our towns, our families, and what a working man in this state gets paid, because it’s a federal matter and we should leave it to the professionals. Yes, the same professionals who’ve refused to act for four decades. And the same ones his own federation lobbies to keep refusing.
So Idahoans get no representative anywhere. Convenient.
But 287(g) is a federal statute written so state and local agencies can act, and more than 1,400 of those agreements are live across 40 states, including the Idaho patriots who didn’t wait for permission: sheriffs in Kootenai, Franklin, Caribou, Washington, Bonneville, Bingham, and Owyhee counties, plus the city of Post Falls, whose police department signed on in June with Mayor Randy Westlund and Chief Mark Brantl backing it publicly.
Florida required its counties to sign, all 67 complied, and Florida now runs the most saturated enforcement footprint in the country. Georgia and Texas did this too.
So the idea that an Idaho legislator has no business having an opinion about this is laughable, and the people making that argument know it’s laughable. It’s a request that we sit down and be quiet.
I sat through hours of testimony on the immigration bills we brought a few months ago, so let me tell you how this actually works.
Everybody shows up. The Idaho Sheriffs’ Association came out hard against our 287(g) bill, put it in writing, an open letter to the whole Legislature saying they were unequivocally opposed. The police chiefs lined up the same way. Their reasons were the ones you’d expect: it costs money, it pulls deputies off patrol, they weren’t consulted, they don’t want to be bound to whatever the feds decide five years from now. Fine. That’s how it’s supposed to go, and I’ll argue with them (and I did) openly any time.
And The Idaho Dairymen’s Association shows up too. They’ve been testifying against these bills for years, not just this last session. E-Verify comes up, they’re there. Anything that touches their members’ workforce, they’re there. In February they held a press conference in the Capitol to roll out a report they paid for, warning that enforcement would cost the state $5.1 billion.
So this isn’t a smoke-filled room.
That’s the part people get wrong when they imagine how the sausage gets made.
Here’s what actually happens. A man walks into an Idaho committee room and tells elected officials, out loud, on the record, that a large share of his industry’s workforce is here illegally. His own commissioned report says half the dairy workforce is unauthorized. Their own guy told legislators years ago it might be 70%. And then, having said that, he asks us not to pass a bill that would check.
And we don’t. That’s the part you need to sit with. Not that anybody lied… but that nobody had to. The admission and the request go in the same breath, into a microphone, in a building full of Republicans who ran on the border, and the bill dies anyway. Sometimes without a recorded vote, so there’s nobody’s name to look up afterward.
That’s the game. It isn’t hidden. It’s just never punished.
“The right raises money off it, the left raises money off it.”
Half true, and the false half is the important one. The two parties aren’t opposites here. They fight about the paperwork and agree completely about the flow, because the donor class of both of them wants the flow.
The Chamber of Commerce and the immigration lawyers are two hands on the same body, and the fundraising theater exists to hide how much they agree.
The people aren’t divided on this one.
Washington is united against them.
“$20 milk. Lettuce from Mexico.”
The price on the carton is the smallest part of the price.
Add the schooling. Add the emergency rooms. Add the housing pressure in every Idaho town within driving distance of a big dairy. And add the wages held down across every trade that has to compete with subsidized labor.
Idahoans pay all of it, while the savings go on one set of books and the costs go on everybody else’s.
Then the argument eats itself.
Farm Bureau guy says he wants the food grown here, by people paid decently, so we aren’t at the mercy of Mexico for lettuce. Good. That’s economic nationalism and he’s right. But he wants it grown here using the same cheap foreign labor he’d be buying if the farm were in Mexico, so the deal hasn’t changed at all, he’s just moved the border so the cheap part happens on our side of it, with our schools and our hospitals absorbing the difference.
You can’t wave the flag to keep the farm and then dissolve the country’s labor market to keep the margin.
It’s a passive-aggressive threat: vote our way or your groceries get expensive.
A country is a people before it’s an economy. But once the people are an input cost, there’s nothing left worth defending.
