On September 30, Esquire revealed that Rep. Devin Nunes’ (R-CA) family’s farm was deeply dependent on undocumented immigrant labor. Yet immigration-obsessed Tucker Carlson didn’t ask Nunes a single question about that during a friendly interview with Nunes Tuesday night.
October 17, 2018

On September 30, Esquire revealed that Rep. Devin Nunes’ (R-CA) family’s farm was deeply dependent on undocumented immigrant labor. Yet immigration-obsessed Tucker Carlson didn’t ask Nunes a single question about that during a friendly interview with Nunes Tuesday night.

In his Esquire piece, reporter Ryan Lizza found that Nunes’ family had secretly moved the family's dairy farm from the California district he represents to Iowa, the district that anti-immigrant fanatic Steve King represents. The NuStar farm is owned by Nunes’ parents and his brother and sister-in-law, not Devin Nunes. But it is, as Lizza wrote, “central to his identity and a feature of every major political profile written about him.”

When Lizza went to Sibley, Iowa, the northwest town where the farm moved, he found that all the dairy farms in the area relied on undocumented immigrants:

In every conversation I had with dairy farmers and industry insiders in northwest Iowa, it was taken as a fact that the local dairies are wholly dependent on undocumented labor. The low unemployment rate (it’s 2 percent in Osceola County), the low profit margins in the dairy business, and the global glut of milk that keeps prices low make hiring outside of the readily available pool of immigrants from Mexico and Guatemala unthinkable.

[…]

One source, who was deeply connected in the local Hispanic community, had personally sent undocumented workers to Anthony Nunes Jr.’s farm for jobs. “I’ve been there and bring illegal people,” the source said, asserting that the farm was aware of their status. “People come here and ask for work, so I send them over there.” When I asked how many people working at dairies in the area are documented citizens, the source laughed. “To be honest? None. One percent, maybe.”

If there’s one thing that seems to animate Tucker Carlson, it’s whipping up hatred for immigrants, even legal immigrants. He has used distorted data to bogusly claim that non-citizens are “far more likely” to commit crimes; he has blamed immigrants for the polarization in the U.S. and, in the same segment, said that welcoming immigrants is a “recipe for civil war.” Carlson even gave his stamp of approval to Rep. King after he tweeted, “[C]ulture and demographics are our destiny. We can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies.”

So if Carlson were interviewing a Congressman whose family had just been exposed as relying on undocumented labor – in King’s district, no less – Carlson would surely at least ask what the heck is going on with that family farm even if the Congressman is a Republican, right? Wrong.

In his nearly four-minute discussion with Nunes, Carlson didn’t ask one word about that.

See for yourself above, from the October 16, 2018 Tucker Carlson Tonight.

Crossposted at News Hounds.
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