Arkansas Democrat Senate candidate Hallie Shoffner’s campaign is defending her comments about immigrant farm labor after she said farmers would trade five Americans for one ‘undocumented immigrant,’ but the campaign did not say whether or not Shoffner herself employed illegal immigrants.
Shoffner, who is running to unseat Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR), said on September 9, “Every farmer will tell you at one point, we did, or still do, employ undocumented immigrants, and it’s absolutely ridiculous that these folks are being rounded up because they’re hardworking people. They’re some of the best people we know, and honestly, we’d trade five Americans for just one of them because of how hard they work.”
“And why is it that there’s no pathway for them to work here legally when they’re good workers? We pay them well. They spend money here. They have family here,” she continued.
Cotton’s campaign seized on the unanswered question.
“Shoffner’s campaign isn’t denying that Hallie Shoffner employed illegal immigrants. Nor did Hallie Shoffner’s campaign even try to walk back her claim that a single illegal immigrant is more valuable than five American citizens – in fact, they’re doubling down,” said Cotton campaign spokesman James Arnold. “Arkansans deserve to know how many illegal aliens Hallie Shoffner employed, how ‘well’ she paid them, and how long they worked for her.”
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In response to the backlash, Shoffner campaign manager Anna-Lee Pittman accused Cotton of taking Shoffner’s comments out of context and said the candidate was describing a conversation with another farmer about labor challenges.
“If Tom Cotton were a football coach, he’d be the easiest to defend because he only has one play. He is not spending his days working to bring down the price of gas, groceries or health care for Arkansans. If he had anything to be proud of about how he’s spent 14 years in Washington, you can bet he wouldn’t shut up about it. But he can’t point to one thing he’s done to improve the lives of Arkansans,” Pittman said.
“So he spends his days combing through video clips of Hallie Shoffner to find any possible inelegant phrase or line that he can chop up to misrepresent an hour long conversation and present it with no context. In this case, Shoffner relayed a conversation she had with another farmer about challenges with labor. Most Arkansans want to have a serious and thoughtful conversation about immigration. Farmers do. Small businesses do. Workers do. Communities do,” she continued.
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“But it’s clear Tom Cotton doesn’t want to have that conversation or fix the immigration system because he wants to go on cable news and complain about it and leverage it for political points and attack Shoffner. Hallie Shoffner has been clear about what she believes, and said so in the podcast being referenced: our border should be secure, our laws should be enforced, and we need an immigration system that actually works for American farmers, businesses, workers, and communities. That means having an honest conversation about the workers our agricultural economy relies on and creating a legal, functional system instead of using immigration as a political weapon,” Pittman said.
The campaign’s statement did not clarify if Shoffner’s earlier statement that “we pay them well” referred to workers employed by her own farm.
Shoffner has previously defended both illegal aliens and foreign agricultural labor. In June, she said immigrants “whether they have documents or not” are essential to the country’s “social, cultural, and economic fabric,” and said she would vote to “defund ICE as it exists right now” and “would not spend one more dime on ICE.” She later denied wanting to defund the agency, saying, “I don’t want to defund ICE. I want to reform it.” Shoffner has also said she grew up around farm workers from Mexico and Honduras, “many of them” undocumented, and described the H-2A program as “how farmers get labor,” saying the United States relies on foreign-born workers and should create an immigration system responsive to farmers’ labor needs.
