President Donald Trump detoured from touting his tariff-based economic policies to make a plainly racist claim about migrant laborers during his Tuesday morning appearance on CNBC’s “Squawk Box.”
Echoing the bigotry of centuries past, the president claimed that migrants are uniquely suited to physically strenuous farm work, asserting that it comes “naturally” to them.
“In many ways,” Trump added, “they’re very, very special people.”
The comment came as Trump acknowledged that his severe crackdown on immigration, including arrests of people who are following judges’ orders, has impacted U.S. agriculture, which relies heavily on migrant labor. Much of that workforce is Latino or non-white.
“We’re taking care of our farmers. We can’t let our farmers not have anybody. … These people, you can’t replace them very easily,” Trump said on CNBC.
“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. They don’t do it,” he went on.
“These people do it naturally — naturally,” he said of the migrant laborers.
Trump then recalled asking a farmer what happens to such workers 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.’”
The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that around 40% of farm laborers are working in the country without proper authorization; farmers report difficulty in finding enough local workers to help them at harvest time.
In recent decades, the U.S. has seen a surge in migrants fleeing economic instability and violence in South and Central America, although numbers have plummeted since Trump retook office with the promise of mass deportations.