Jon Ossoff, one of two Democratic candidates in the Georgia runoff Senate races, is promising an amnesty for illegal migrants, including “campesinos” — meaning “peasants” — according to a December 13 video released by his campaign.
“We need to pass comprehensive immigration reform … [for] the campesinos who work in the fields, enduring some of the most brutal conditions of labor anywhere in this country to keep America fed,” he told his audience, just after he announced his support for an amnesty of the illegal workers.
“My first gut reaction to hearing the use of ‘campesinos‘ for people working in the United States is revulsion, not at the [foreign] people, but as the terminology and what stands behind it,” Mark Krikorian, director of the Center for Immigration Studies, told Breitbart News on December 15. He continued:
This is the acknowledgement and even the celebration of the importation of a subordinate class [of people]. We can debate various aspects of the American character, but I think everybody agrees that a core elements [sic] of our country is that we don’t have peasants. And what Ossoff is saying is that a post-industrial, knowledge-based, continental nation like ours cannot survive without the importation of a foreign peasant class. And that’s appalling.
In the 2020 election, President Donald Trump boosted his support among legal immigrant Latinos by treating them as full Americans, with normal American concerns about jobs, illegal migration, wages, and crime.
Ossoff’s rival, Sen. David Perdue (R-GA), has repeatedly described Ossoff as a privileged “trust fund socialist who lives off his family’s money.”
Krikorian echoed that sentiment:
Calling Latin American farmworkers in the United States campesinos is exactly what you would expect from a trust fund socialist. He is virtue signaling his solidarity with the oppressed while viewing them in a sense as less than human.
This is precisely the perspective that all of our ancestors left the Old World to get away from … It’s the same old way of looking [down] at people rather than viewing newcomers to our country as potential Americans. If we decide to legalize illegal migrants — and farmworkers only make up a tiny percentage of the illegal population — we would not be doing that to make them American peasants, but rather to make them equal independent American citizens. That’s the goal of immigration, not to import peasant workers.
The runoff race concludes January 5 and may flip the Senate from GOP control to a 50:50 tie, so giving President-elect Joe Biden a working majority that he needs to pass amnesties and expand the Democrats’ political power.
Ossoff’s demeaning label for foreign farmworkers in the United States was part of a short tweeted speech in which he ignored Americans’ right to their own national labor market, to work for decent wages, and to buy hosing at affordable prices.
Instead, Ossoff depicted the migrants as toiling victims, even though the migrants are allowed by his Democratic Party — and by the federal government — to sneak into U.S. jobs, so lowering wages for American voters:
[W]hen federal agents arrive at one of these farms, it should be to make sure people are being paid the minimum wage, working inhumane conditions … We should have gratitude for those who keep us fed who would toil in the fields and show humanity and compassion for those who are a part of our society but living in the shadows.
Even as he described the farmworkers are “campesinos,” Ossoff also insisted that illegal immigrants who were brought into the United States by their parents “are every bit as American as any of us.”
Ossoff also praised younger Latino illegals as “dreamers,” even though Americans also dream of wage gains and economic advances for themselves and their children.
He further promised an amnesty for many millions of illegal migrants despite the inevitable damage that would be caused to Americans’ wages, house prices, and workplace investment by the next wave of determined foreign migrants. Ossoff said:
We need to establish a path to legal status for those who are here without proper documentation or otherwise follow the law. We need to pass comprehensive immigration reform. We need to recognize that we can’t go on like this.
Ossoff’s father runs a publishing firm and his mother created a political fund for Democrats in the state. The father went to Harvard University, and the son went to Georgetown University, both of which enforce a strict policy against outsiders improperly claiming to be Harvard or Georgetown graduates.
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