Who will pick our apples, who will build our homes, and who will mow our lawns—if not for immigrants?

Variations of this question are asked by liberal politicians—and repeated by members of the mainstream media—to disarm anyone who questions the illegal immigration crisis at the Southern border.

We are supposed to disregard the elitist or racist tones and any long-term concerns about demographic, cultural, political, or social changes, all for the short-term benefit of cheap manual labor. The underlying message is that the jobs immigrants fill are beneath everyday American citizens.

Former President Bill Clinton and U.S. Rep Jerry Nadler have both publicly said the quiet part out loud recently, but the ideology trickles down to the Democrat voter block—to my once favorite journalism teacher sharing a meme stating “the immigrants ruining your life are Rupert Murdoch, Elon Musk and Peter Thiel. Not the apple picker…” Even my mother—who moved to Houston from Cleveland—now has “Leo” mow her grass for $25.

Image by AI.

“I could never mow your lawn for that here,” I say, with here being Ohio, where I own a landscaping company that includes employees on payroll and taxes.

My mother thinks having access to Leo is great. The cheap labor keeps her prices down. Our family wants my mother to move back to Ohio. I know she is contemplating it—she sends me links from Zillow of houses she looked at that might be more up my alley.

“I could never afford in Ohio the house I have here,” she says. “This house has granite countertops.”

Then she says something that makes me sad and makes me pause. “I couldn’t afford the house on Concord.” She’s referring to the house I grew up in 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 dirt cheap.

Hiring was bad before COVID, and telling people to stay home and collect checks sent it into overdrive. In early Spring 2023, when I pulled up a list of past employees in our database we might rehire, I was stunned by the number who have died from the heroin and opiate epidemic in the 15-plus years we have been in business.

It seems as if someone should fix America and what ails us—and not in some superficial, temporary worker kind of way.

Maybe it is the drug epidemic, the destruction of the nuclear family, the nearly 1 million abortions America now conducts annually, the cost of living, or the constant messaging hammered into school children (especially girls) that babies are a burden and a nuisance, all of which have seen Americans stop having babies like they used to.

Then, Democrats tell us that Americans do not have enough babies to replace our current population, so we must have mass immigration to replace them and replenish the tax or voter base.

While campaigning for Kamala Harris, Former President Bill Clinton suggested Georgia college student Laken Riley might still be alive if her killer had been properly vetted—something that did not take place under the Biden and Harris term.

“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.”

On October 12, Vice President nominee J.D. Vance sat down 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 reengage 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 responded. “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… 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.”

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 migration and the hiring of illegal migrant workers. It is often coupled with the implication that Americans will not do the jobs they cannot 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.

There is fundamental dignity in work. In all work.

A strong argument could be made that there is more dignity in the work done with your bare hands than, say, that of selling insurance or pharmaceuticals, lawyering, brokering mortgages, or working in permanent Washington.

And yet you will hear various demeaning, overtly racist or elitist iterations from leftists to the question of who will pick our produce, build our homes, or mow our lawns if we do not allow for illegal immigration? Americans, they imply, are too good for that kind of work.

And who will do that cheaply?

In January, U.S. Rep. Jerry Nadler 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,” Nadler 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 what Nadler insists is the only way to manage a business. Hiring foreign workers is essentially the business model throughout the “Green Industry” and is 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 the 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 what is known as 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.

Matt Keener is a writer and small business owner from Ohio. His work has also been featured at The Federalist, American Spectator, American Greatness, RealClearPolitics, and WND. You can find him on Twitter @keenermb and on Truth Social @mattkeener