Donald Trump is once again under fire for making what many are calling a straight-up racist comment — this time claiming that migrant workers are “naturally” suited for grueling farm labor.
The president made the eyebrow-raising remarks Tuesday on CNBC’s Squawk Box, during a discussion about the labor shortages in U.S. agriculture caused by his own immigration policies.
“We can’t let our farmers not have anybody,” Trump said. “You know … these people, you can’t replace them very easily. You know, people that live in the inner city are not doing that work. They’re just not doing that work. And they’ve tried, we’ve tried, everybody tried.”
Then came the kicker.
“These people do it naturally — naturally,” Trump said, referring to migrant laborers, most of whom are Latino.
“I said … to a farmer the other day, ‘What happens if they get a bad back?’ He said, ‘They don’t get a bad back, sir, because if they get a bad back, they die.’ I said that’s interesting, isn’t it?”
“In many ways they’re very, very special people,” Trump concluded.
The backlash was swift. Social media exploded with condemnation, with many users comparing Trump’s remarks to pro-slavery rhetoric from the 1800s — when enslaved Black people were said to be physically “built” for manual labor.
“Only someone as grotesquely amoral and mindless as he is would even think of saying something like that,” wrote one user.
“He’s talking about them like they are a different species wtf,” said another.
“This is just fancy words for slavery btw,” one person wrote.
“Did he really just say that? Sounds less like a policy comment and more like a dystopian movie script. These are human beings not machines,” another added.
Historically, this line of thinking isn’t new. In 1964, Sen. George Murphy (R-Calif.) was widely reported to have said that Mexican farmworkers were ideal for the job because they were “built low to the ground” and could stoop more easily — a quote he later denied, but one that has stuck around as a marker of America’s ugly history of racial labor stereotypes.
Trump’s latest remark is being slammed not just by critics on the left, but also by some on the right. He’s now being called everything from “grotesquely amoral” to a “Batshit crazy pre-Boomer racist.”
