President Donald Trump said the quiet part out loud when it comes to why immigrants tend to work farm jobs instead of Americans.
During a Tuesday phone interview on CNBC, Trump was asked if he had changed his position on deporting undocumented farm workers.
“Mr. President, I just want to hear you clearly,” one CNBC host said. “You’re saying the people who have been here for years and who have been even paying taxes, you’re going to look at them very differently, and maybe they belong here in the workforce?”
“I want to work with them, and in some cases we’re sending them back to their country with a pass back in legally, and we’re doing things that are that are very difficult to do and very complex, but it works really well,” Trump replied. “We can’t let our farmers not have anybody, you know, these people, you can’t replace them very easily.”
“You know, people that live in the inner city are not doing that work,” he insisted. “They’re just not doing that work. And they’ve tried, we’ve tried, everybody tried. They don’t do it.”
Immigrants, however, “do it naturally,” Trump claimed.
“I said, what happens if they get it to a farmer the other day? He said, they don’t get a bad back, sir, because if they get a bad back, they die,” the president continued. “I said, that’s interesting, isn’t it? You know, these are very, you know, in many ways, they’re very, very special people.”