So, what’s Rep. Jasmine Crockett’s excuse going to be for this one?
Because, make no mistake, this is one of those situations where she’ll need an outlandish excuse to get herself out of her own words. It’s just like when the Texas Democrat was forced to defend calling her state’s Republican wheelchair-bound governor, Greg Abbott, “Hot Wheels” late last month.
Crockett attempted to defend herself by saying, ““I wasn’t thinking about the governor’s condition — I was thinking about the planes, trains, and automobiles he used to transfer migrants into communities led by black mayors, deliberately stoking tension and fear among the most vulnerable.
“Literally, the next line I said was that he was a ‘Hot A** Mess,’ referencing his terrible policies,” she added. “At no point did I mention or allude to his condition.”
One problem: She’d liked posts calling him “Hot Wheels” in 2021 — before Abbott had begun the illegal immigrant transfer programs — on social media, when it was clear they were about his wheelchair-bound state. Whoops. So much for that excuse.
Well, now Crockett has a chance to rectify that incompetence in CYA-ing now that she’s gone viral in a bad way — again, yet again — for telling an audience in Connecticut that “we done picking cotton” here in America, so we need illegals here to do it for us.
Speaking at Grace Baptist Church in Waterbury as part of their 125th anniversary program, Crockett told the audience how she “had to go around the country and educate people about what immigrants do for this country, or the fact that we are a country of immigrants.”
“The fact is, ain’t none of y’all trying to go and farm right now,” she continued to some laughter. “OK, so raise your hands.”
After looking around and apparently finding none: “You not! You not! We done picking cotton!”
“We are,” she continued, shrugging. “You can’t pay us enough to find a plantation.”
The reaction from the right was — well, what you might guess:
NEW: Rep. Jasmine Crockett suggests the United States needs illegal immigrants because “we done picking cotton.”
Crockett made the argument that the U.S. needs immigrants for farming while speaking at Grace Baptist Church in Connecticut.
“So I had to go around the country and… pic.twitter.com/DUEZ4PskEg
— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) April 7, 2025
Rep. Jamsine Crockett: We need migrants to pick our cotton
— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) April 8, 2025
Jasmine Crockett: “So I had to go around the country and educate people about what immigrants do for this country… The fact is ain’t none of y’all trying to go and farm right now… We done picking cotton.”
Oof.
pic.twitter.com/NSNgU2ZI8f— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) April 8, 2025
Now, her chances of extracting herself from this are slightly better than “Hot Wheels,” but not by much. At least she didn’t say the obvious unsaid part, which is that if “we done picking cotton” — “we” being any subgroup of American citizens, one assumes by the context here — we need illegal immigrants to pick our crops at below-market rates with only the most desultory checks on where they come from or how many come.
Do you support Donald Trump on illegal immigration?
There’s also the more problematic part of this, which is where it was said and what crop she used. According to CT Insider, you will not be surprised to learn that Grace Baptist is a mostly black congregation. Crockett is, of course, black. One can perhaps do some math here and say that, if she didn’t specifically want to refer to black slavery, this was certainly not the place to drag that analogy out, because the event certainly leant her remarks that aura.
Picking cotton on a plantation is, however you want to slice it, inextricably linked with the specter of slavery and sharecropping, whatever race the sharecropper might be. Thus, what Crockett is saying here is that slavery is over for us, so we need to … um, import more slaves and sharecroppers, only this time ones that will work for well below the legal wage in this country.
That’s certainly the obvious inference from context, given that 1) the Trump administration is cracking down on illegal immigration, and 2) it’s a tired trope that we need illegals to pick the crops we won’t. The only difference to this is the obvious dog-whistle — really, just a whistle — to slavery, which means Crockett doesn’t necessarily mind the practice just so long as this cup passes from her. To call this comment rebarbative is an understatement — and yet, she’s merely saying the quiet part out loud on the Democratic position on illegal immigration, just saying it a lot louder than we’re used to hearing it.
Beyond all of the externalities of illegal immigration that go solely beyond the cost of labor, I don’t think that Crockett wants to remind us who the party of Jim Crow actually was by saying that the reasonable and empathetic thing to do is to keep the illegal immigration spigot on to import wage-slaves to America. (Hint: It wasn’t the Republicans.)
One doesn’t wonder what she’ll say to defend these remarks, merely how she’ll try to escape by retconning what she actually meant in order to defend herself. However, it’s pretty clear what she really said: “We done picking cotton,” so we need illegals to do it. Excellent work yet again, Rep. Crockett. You’re a national treasure for all the wrong reasons.
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