Look Over There
A person crossing the border today who’s 22 years old was born in 2004. After 9/11. After NAFTA shipped our manufacturing overseas. After stock buybacks were legalized. After decades of policies that concentrated wealth at the top while hollowing out the middle.
Every structural problem destroying American economic opportunity was already decades old when they took their first breath.
Companies have been moving our jobs overseas for 40 years. Now they’re replacing the ones that are left with technology. And politicians who need someone to blame are pointing at the people who can’t fight back.
The Actual Causes
The problems we feel every day didn’t come across the border. They were made here, by policy, over decades. These pages go into what’s actually broken and how we fix it:
- Economy — how wealth gets extracted from communities like ours and concentrated at the top
- Jobs & National Service — AI is replacing jobs the way computers did in the ’90s, and we need our own path forward
- Healthcare — insurance costs that break families have nothing to do with who’s crossing the border
- Housing — we can’t afford the homes that survive the storm, and that’s a building problem, not a border problem
- Energy — gas prices go up like a rocket and down like a feather, and that has nothing to do with immigration either
What I’ve Actually Seen
I ran Cricket Wireless stores in Florida 3. During growing season, a bus would pull up — this happened regularly at three of my stores — and twenty guys would pile out. They’d buy phones and sign up for service so they could call and text home to Mexico, sometimes clean out our entire inventory in one visit. Work the harvest, go home. Next season, same faces. They were the best-behaved customers I had.
I’d see them out in the fields with a school bus parked nearby — roof sawed off to hold the watermelons they were picking. One customer had been here fifteen years taking care of horses. His English was passable. I never asked about his status.
A few months ago, my landlord had the roof of this house replaced. Every worker on the roof was from Central America. Every supervisor on the ground was American. They were focused on their work. It’s not just farms.
That’s what I’ve seen. Other people have different experiences. But every state that cracks down on immigration suddenly has employers who can’t find the people to do the jobs they’ve got.
In Our District Right Now
Most of what I hear about immigration in Florida 3 comes through a screen. The camera finds the most desperate-looking people it can and someone tells me what to think about them. The farmworkers who showed up at my phone stores, bought what they needed and went back to work, never made the news.
The Florida Highway Patrol is making immigration arrests in Alachua County under a federal agreement. The sheriff’s office has made dozens of immigration stops since last summer. Farmers across the state are cutting the acreage they plant because workers aren’t showing up — even the ones with legal guest-worker visas are afraid to come back. And Florida spent $573 million from its emergency fund — the same fund that pays for hurricane preparedness — to build detention facilities.
The enforcement is real. The cost is real. And the crops that don’t get harvested are real. Watermelons and blueberries have harvest windows measured in days — miss the window and the whole season is gone. And it’s not just farms — roofing crews, construction, landscaping all run on the same labor. When the workers disappear, the work doesn’t get cheaper. It stops.
And then there’s what it’s doing to us. We hold people accountable for mistreating animals — and we should. But those coming across our border are people. When the enforcement overreaches to get the job done, Americans wind up in the crossfire — detained by mistake, harassed, sometimes worse. Between this and everything else chipping away at our lives — our phones tracked, our data sold, our movements monitored — where does it end? At some point we have to decide what kind of country we want to be, because the line keeps moving and nobody’s asking permission.
We Still Need a Real Policy
Separating immigration from scapegoating doesn’t mean ignoring it. We need a comprehensive immigration policy that treats immigrants as the people they are — not as a political prop and not as invisible labor we pretend doesn’t exist.
I’ve put together a plan. It’s not a bumper sticker — it covers seasonal workers, a path to citizenship, how entry method should matter, and the hard questions nobody wants to answer. It’s a starting point, not the final word.