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Who will pick our apples, build our homes, and mow our lawns if not immigrants? Liberal politicians frequently ask this question, and the mainstream media repeats it. The goal is to disarm anyone questioning the illegal immigration crisis at the southern border.

Never mind the elitist or racist undertones, to say nothing of any long-term concerns about demographic, cultural, political, or social changes all for the short-term benefit of cheap labor. The underlying message is that these jobs, filled by immigrants, are beneath American citizens.

Someone should fix America and what ails us — and not in some superficial, temporary worker kind of way.

Former President Bill Clinton and U.S. Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) have both recently said the quiet part out loud, but this ideology trickles down to Democratic voters. It’s reflected in people like my once-favorite journalism teacher, who shared a meme saying, “The immigrants ruining your life are Rupert Murdoch, Elon Musk, and Peter Thiel, not the apple picker …”

It’s even in my own family. My mother, who moved to Houston from Cleveland, now has a man named Leo mow her grass for $25.

“I could never mow your lawn for that here,” I tell her, speaking from Ohio, where I own a landscaping company with employees on a real payroll with real payroll taxes.

But Mom thinks it is great. Cheap labor keeps her costs down. Our family wants my mother to move back to Ohio. I know she is thinking about it. She sends me links from Zillow of houses she looked at that might be more up my alley.

“I could never afford the house I have here in Ohio,” she says. “It has granite counter tops.”

Then she says something that makes me sad and makes me pause. “I couldn’t afford the house on Concord.”

That’s the house where I grew up and the one my parents, now divorced, sold for under $150,000 in the early 2000s. Houses on the same street now regularly sell for $300,000.

In the long term, my mother has less buying power than she did before, but Leo mows her lawn for practically nothing.

Hiring was bad prior to COVID — telling people to stay home and collect checks sent it into overdrive. In early spring of last year, when I pull up a list of past employees in our database we might rehire, I was stunned by the number who have since died from the heroin and opiate epidemic in the more than 15 years we’ve been in business.

And it just seems like someone should fix America and what ails us — and not in some superficial, temporary worker kind of way.

The birth dearth

Maybe it is the drug epidemic, the destruction of the nuclear family, the nearly 1 million abortions America now performs annually, the cost of living, or the constant messaging that babies are a burden and a nuisance that is hammered into school-age children — especially girls — but Americans are not having babies like they used to.

Democrats will even tell us that Americans are not having enough babies to replace our current population, and we need mass immigration to replace them and replenish the tax base.

While campaigning for Kamala Harris, Bill Clinton suggested Georgia college student Laken Riley might still be alive if her killer had been properly vetted — something that the Biden-Harris administration neglected to do.

“Well If they’d all been properly vetted that probably wouldn’t have happened,” Clinton said regarding Riley’s murder before suggesting we still need immigration. “But if they are properly vetted and that doesn’t happen. … And America is not having enough babies to keep our population up, so we need immigrants that have been vetted to do work.”

Clinton’s recent campaigning sounds a lot like “replacement theory” — the native population needs to be replenished and replaced by foreigners — although Wikipedia assures me that this is a “far-right conspiracy theory.” That’s a relief!

Jobs done with your bare hands offer even greater dignity than those in fields like insurance, pharmaceuticals, law, mortgage brokering, or the permanent bureaucracy.

Republican vice-presidential candidate JD Vance sat down recently with New York Times reporter Lulu Garcia-Navarro to discuss the immigration crisis.. Garcia-Navarro seemed to bristle at the idea that American citizens could fill the jobs needed in the housing sector.

“You could absolutely re-engage American workers,” Vance said while alluding to re-engaging those who have willingly checked out of the workplace or those struggling with mental health or addiction.

“To work in construction?” Garcia-Navarro replied.

“Of course you could. … This is one of the really deranged things that I think illegal immigration does to our society is that it gets us into the mindset of saying that we can only build houses with illegal immigrants — when we have 7 million, just men, who have completely dropped out of the labor force,” Vance said.

“People say, well, Americans won’t do those jobs. Americans won’t do those jobs for below-the-table wages. They won’t do those jobs for non-living wages,” Vance continued. “We cannot have an entire business community that is giving up on American workers and then importing millions of illegal laborers. That is what we have thanks to Kamala Harris’ border policy.”

Dignity in work

I have heard different versions of the question of who will perform the work elitist leftists deem unclean or undesirable repeated often to defend mass immigration and the hiring of illegal immigrant workers. It is often coupled with the implication that Americans will not do the jobs they are unable to perform from the comfort of their home office and Zoom — farming, construction, or landscaping.

“Every MAGA I’ve ever seen complain about immigrants taking American jobs would never do this,” a viral tweet reads as the workers in the video harvest what appears to be broccoli.

It is somewhat laughable when I hear it, largely because I would put preparing and planting a new lawn from start to finish or building a paver patio — something we have done in the last few weeks with American employees — right up there with roofing, concrete, and indeed farming broccoli as extremely difficult and physically taxing jobs.

Work has inherent dignity — all work does. One could argue that jobs done with your bare hands offer even greater dignity than those in fields like insurance, pharmaceuticals, law, mortgage brokering, or the permanent bureaucracy.

And yet you will hear various demeaning, overtly racist or elitist iterations from liberals to the question of who will pick our produce, build our homes or mow our lawns if we do not allow for illegal immigration? And who will do that cheaply?

What Americans will and won’t do

Jerry Nadler in January provided one the most transparent examples, saying American produce would rot in the fields if it were not for illegal immigrants.

“We need immigrants in this country — forget the fact that our vegetables would rot in the ground if they weren’t being picked by many immigrants, many illegal immigrants,” the New York congressman said. “The fact is that the birth rate in this country is way below replacement level, which means our population is going to start shrinking. And the ratio of people on Social Security and Medicare is going to increase relative to the number of people supporting them.”

I have wondered what it would look like if I ran my business like that.

Many of my peers or friends in the industry have done just that — as hiring foreign workers is essentially the business model throughout the “green industry” and commonplace at nurseries or with landscaping contractors.

On a cold and rainy March morning in Ohio this spring, I called a friend who also owns a landscaping company to see how he was handling the start of busy season.

“I am dropping off a load of plants,” he said.

I was shocked because at the time, I was wondering if the rain coming down might turn into snow.

“Our guys would quit,” I said, half joking, half not.

His guys were the eight Hondurans he was dropping off plants to.

They are all here legally through the H-2B program for temporary workers.

He houses them on his property — he is required to provide them with housing — and charges them rent. There was a season when he rented them a camper. This year he bought them a house.

If you zoom out — or took a drone image — of the modern business with a staff comprised of foreign workers toiling in the fields, doing the jobs deemed unworthy while living in a camper or a house out back, it must in some ways resemble a reimagining of the Southern plantation.

Maybe we should not live like that, and that business model should not be the goal. Maybe we should fix what ails us here.