By skyforbes 
By Terry Loerch
Brooke Rollins has unveiled what may be the most staggeringly cynical and economically suicidal farm-labor strategy in modern politics: deport the very immigrants who keep America’s food supply moving, conscript “34 million able-bodied” Medicaid recipients into field labor, and trust that a magical army of robots will close the gap. She calls this “100 percent American participation,” as though forcing people into stoop labor at gunpoint is a patriotic duty. Anyone with a passing knowledge of farming, economics, or human physiology might have other words for it.
Let’s start with the brutal math she can’t be bothered to do. Undocumented workers make up roughly 42 percent of all hired crop labor in the United States. Only about a third of these essential workers are U.S.-born. That lettuce in your fridge? It doesn’t get there because it loves the Constitution; it gets there because immigrant labor picks, cleans, packs, and ships it. Even now, with those workers here, farmers report over 2.4 million open positions and a 17 percent jump in labor costs, saying flatly they “cannot find enough domestic workers at any wage.” Rollins’ plan to deport them is less a policy than an act of arson in the middle of our own supply chain.
What happens if you torch that labor supply? A Peterson Institute study projects grocery prices would rise around ten percent and gut GDP by billions. Families who just crawled out of the last round of food-price inflation would get punched in the teeth again, courtesy of a Republican policy that claims to fight for the working class while directly raising their grocery bills.
And who exactly is supposed to replace these workers? Rollins’ next genius move is to point at Medicaid recipients and bark, “Get to work!” as if millions of urban baristas, warehouse pickers, and gig workers will simply teleport to rural fields and break their backs in 100-degree heat. Medicaid covers about 78 million Americans; nearly half are children, and among working-age adults, 92 percent are either already employed or have good reasons, like school, caregiving, or illness, not to work 12-hour shifts picking melons.
Her eight-percent mythical reserve of “able-bodied freeloaders” barely exists. And within the actual Medicaid population is an enormous number of disabled Americans, many with invisible but debilitating conditions. About one in five adult Medicaid enrollees has a disability, including hundreds of thousands with conditions like multiple sclerosis. Does Rollins know what MS even is? Up to 75 percent of patients develop serious mobility problems. About half use mobility aids. Many rely on wheelchairs. Telling a person in a power chair with MS to go pick apples isn’t just ignorant, it’s ableist, offensive, and morally bankrupt.
And let’s not forget that these aren’t people who magically appeared on the rolls looking for a handout. Many paid payroll taxes for decades before becoming disabled, or they’re the children, spouses, or parents of people who did. The idea that they should be punished by losing healthcare if they can’t crawl through strawberry rows in the August sun is not just economically illiterate, it’s monstrous. It doesn’t grow food. It grows the line at the emergency room.
But Rollins assures us not to worry. Robots will do the rest. Ah, yes, automation, the standard fig leaf for politicians too lazy to design a real plan. Yes, World FIRA 2025 showed off some dazzling harvest bots. But even industry analysts admit adoption is crawling. Farmers say they’re too fragile, too slow, and too expensive — often north of $200,000 a unit. Venture investment in ag-tech is dropping, down 3.6 percent this year. These machines mostly exist in glossy demo reels and Kickstarter pitches, not in the fields of the Central Valley or Georgia’s peach orchards.
Even if the robots were ready, and they’re not, good luck with the deportations. ICE would have to increase flight capacity by over 3,700 percent just to deport the first million workers, at a cost of roughly $22 billion. And you’d still blow a hole in local economies when deported workers’ consumer spending disappears. The result? A GDP hit, soaring grocery prices, and fewer jobs for American citizens whose livelihoods depend on a functioning local economy.
Politically, it’s a strategy only someone locked in a think-tank bubble could love. It manages to infuriate farmers, who, despite their conservative leanings, know they need workers. It threatens families whose kids rely on Medicaid. It insults the entire disability community by pretending they can simply be dragged into stoop labor on command. It is, in short, a master class in losing elections while wrecking the economy and humiliating the country on the world stage.
And let’s be clear about the final truth lurking beneath this Orwellian rebranding of forced labor as “patriotism.” Strip away the hollow slogans about American jobs, and you see the same old playbook that’s been used for centuries: a rich class of landowners and corporate agribusinesses creating a captive workforce of the poor, the desperate, and the vulnerable to pick their crops for the lowest possible cost. It’s the plantation model reborn, this time sold with a wink and a press release about “automation.” The goal isn’t freedom or prosperity. The goal is cheap labor, no questions asked.
This isn’t just a bad plan. It’s not even a serious plan. It’s a moral disgrace dressed up as policy, so economically illiterate, politically suicidal, and ethically hollow that it should be laughed off the stage before it ever sees a vote. If Rollins wants to automate anything, she should start with her talking points and run them through a fact-checker and an ethics filter. Because right now, the only thing her blueprint would guarantee is a bumper crop of cruelty, poverty, and hunger, served fresh to the very Americans she claims to fight for.