This Republican Governor Wants to Make Illegal Aliens Second-Class Citizens Instead of Deporting Them

In an interview with the Fox News Rundown Podcast, Gov. Jim Pillen (R-NE) advocated for a “pathway” to let people remain in the country illegally—just never be allowed to vote, run for office, or receive government benefits. Unlike permanent legal residents who may apply for citizenship after five years, Pillen is advocating for what is the essential definition of second-class citizenship for foreign farm workers.

Pillen said he views immigration enforcement as a matter of safety, adding “I’m certainly not supportive of loading folks up on a bus and taking them out.”

Pressed on whether he thinks Americans don’t want to do farm work or would if the wage were right, he said, “I think we’ve got to get rid of goober politics,” which he apparently defines as advocating for American citizens filling American jobs.

The governor noted the Dominican Republic’s model shows even poor countries need a foreign underclass to do the hardest agricultural jobs. “Guess who carries the bananas out of the plantations,” he said. “The Haitians do.”

Nebraska Gov. Jim Pillen (R)

“Anybody who knows anything about feeding the world and how it works knows it has been an immigration industry for cutting meat, processing, making steaks and bacon, and it’s an immigration industry, and it’s been that way forever,” he added.

Those with American-born fathers, grandfathers, and uncles who worked as livestock workers and butchers would beg to differ.

Even today, despite Big Agriculture’s efforts to undercut American workers, over half a million American citizens work as farm laborers. 65 percent of manual livestock workers are American-born. One might be excused for assuming Pillen’s view comes from being the governor of the “Cornhusker State.” Elected officials are supposed to represent their constituents’ interests.

Among his farmer constituents, Pillen’s family counts among the wealthiest, but his subsequent comments show he doesn’t approach immigration purely from personal or electoral interests. Rather, he is simply a liberal on immigration.

The Ultimate Big Ag Governor

Pillen has been a highly successful businessman and once served as president of a local Chamber of Commerce. He and members of his family have at various times operated 108 different hog farms, and the Nebraska-based Aurora News-Register alleges he is more closely tied to Big Agriculture than any other U.S. governor.

According to the agricultural magazine Successful Farming, 36 “pork powerhouses” own or manage 4.2 million sows—70 percent of American breeding inventory.

“A 2,000–3,000-sow farm 30 years ago was a huge farm,” said Patricio Vidal, a senior vice president of production operations at a large farm. “Now, we have several 10,000-plus sow units.”

Pillen Family Farms has 78,000 sows and ranks 14th nationally.

The rise of this level of agricultural wealth inequality curiously coincided with the mass replacement of American farm workers by immigrants.

In the 1990s, Pillen created Progressive Swine Technologies and copied the tactics of hog farmer Chuck Sand, whose operation he then managed. Sand practiced shared ownership and controlled his own farm management firms to skirt a Nebraska law aimed at curbing corporate farming.

In 2007, a judge struck down the law, allowing Pillen to consolidate his farms and vertically integrate within the industry. This included purchasing the swine semen company DNA Genetics and founding Wholestone Meatpacking, which slaughters over a third of his hogs. In 2013, he rebranded the company to Pillen Family Farms.

Bill Bullard, CEO of the cattlemen trade association, R-CALF USA, told the Aurora News-Register, “The growth and development of the industrialized model that [Pillen] represents has really taken away economic opportunities for literally hundreds of thousands of hog producers in the United States.”

Reminding People Where Their Food Comes From

Although Sand and Pillen were simply reacting to national farming trends, Pillen’s control of the state’s regulatory agencies as governor has understandably raised eyebrows. In response to criticism of this potential conflict of interest, Pillen’s daughter and Pillen Family Farms co-CEO deflected, arguing her family feeds millions of people annually and provides jobs in rural Nebraska.

Many of those fed, however, are in Vietnam, and—according to her father’s interview—those rural jobs aren’t for Nebraskans.

Additionally, her implication that the public owes multimillionaire farmers for “feeding” them is not only arrogant but anti-free market—as if farmers give away their livestock to cure world hunger. This serves to dismiss criticism of controversial business practices like hiring illegal aliens and is transferable to other industries that can portray themselves as engaging in public service rather than good, old-fashioned capitalism.

For Pillen, It’s Ideological

Pillen himself makes that leap. Regarding workers in other industries like hotels, he said:

If everyone was deported out of the country, there’d be no one left to make the beds and clean the sheets. If everyone was loaded up and deported out, all our roofs would leak, because there’s nobody to put shingles on. And we’d go hungry because we’d lose a lot of workforce to be able to process and turn cattle into steaks and pigs into bacon.

Pillen seems blind to the fact that millions of Americans work these jobs and millions more remain out of work or underemployed because immigrants fill these roles. Claiming Americans will have no hotels, construction companies, or meatpacking plants if they rid themselves of illegal aliens is insulting enough to American workers, but it also reveals a lack of understanding about the free market.

Why Are We Hearing the Nebraska Governor’s Thoughts on Immigration?

Fox News interviewed Pillen because he’s making a minimum-security prison available as an immigrant detention center, which will be known as the “Cornhusker Clink.”

President Trump previously wanted an additional 50,000 beds for immigrant detainees. Gov. Ron Desantis (R-FL) quickly had Alligator Alcatraz built and is offering a second facility at a state prison near Jacksonville, which will be known as “Deportation Depot.” Naturally, more Republican governors would offer help, but why would Pillen?

Alligator Alcatraz offers 5,000 detention beds, and “Deportation Depot” will offer 2,000—a real dent in how many Trump wants to add. Pillen’s “clinklet” will have a grand total of 280 beds.

Pillen has already weighed in on how he expects his Cornhusker clinklet to be used. According to Omaha’s WOWT, Pillen “stipulated that the detainees there would be criminals arrested for crimes other than simply being in the country illegally,” suggesting it would house mostly drug dealers and sex offenders.

Providing a detention facility—even a tiny one—breeds good will, opening opportunities to influence immigration policy rather than letting hardliners like Desantis hold the floor.

The “Cornhusker Clink” is just small enough to prevent it from facilitating roundups of local farm workers who don’t commit crimes—other than being here illegally—and just large enough to gain a national policy platform.

Department of Homeland Security Sec. Kristi Noem recently thanked Pillen for helping remove “the worst of the worst” from the country. But deporting them and leaving the worst will not force the economic restructuring needed to provide millions of low-skilled Americans looking for work with jobs or move millions who are not looking for work into the economy.

America First conservatives face two ideological threats to making their government and economy work for their fellow citizens.

On the Left, residual Marxists still do not accept the existence of the nation-state and wish to break down national barriers by amalgamating people into global citizens. Flooding America with immigrants and encouraging them to naturalize—but not assimilate—creates new Americans who will vote against conservative policies.

On the Right, corporate monopolists like Pillen with liberal views on immigration want to give de facto amnesty to non-criminal illegal aliens. Keeping these amnestied workers in a non-voting, second-class status ensures they and their children will never become a political threat while still doing their jobs for less than American workers would require.

Both ideologies battle against American workers who believe in the American Dream, bettering oneself through hard work. Both work against American small business owners and small farmers who seek a non-monopolistic, equal playing field. Finally, both work against the interests of all Americans who don’t want their country colonized by foreigners, who will never assimilate, because American business owners and farmers are too cheap to pay their fellow countrymen market wages.

(READ MORE: Make Food Great Again by Making Farmers Hire American Again)