King attacks Vilsack on Sherrod, immigration

In two press releases Wednesday U.S. Rep. Steve King criticized the U.S. Secretary of Agriculture and former Iowa governor Tom Vilsack for his comments on the connection between immigration and the nation’s food supply and the handling of a U.S. Department of Agriculture personnel matter involving former employee Shirley Sherrod.

King, a Republican representing Iowa’s 5th District, is well-known for his strict stance against illegal immigration. As such it comes as little surprise that King took exception to Vilsack’s assertion in Politico that without undocumented workers in the agricultural sector “you would be spending a lot more — three, four or five times more — for food, or we would have to import food and have all the food security risks.”

U.S. Rep. Steve King, R-Kiron

Vilsack, according to King, misrepresented the impact of immigrant workers in agriculture to push for immigrant amnesty.

“Data from the Secretary’s own Department of Agriculture and the Bureau of Labor Statistics show that labor costs only represent six-percent of the price consumers pay for fresh fruit and vegetables,” King said. “Based on a 2007 report by the Center for Immigration Studies, if there was a 40-percent increase in farm wages, this would only raise consumer spending on fresh fruit and vegetables by $8 a year.”

King added that the cost of granting amnesty to “12-20 million illegal aliens currently living in the United States” would be devastating to the economy, both because more American jobs would go to such workers and also because immigrants would be eligible for social safety-net programs.

“This would place a larger tax burden on the already strained wallets of Americans,” King said.

The controversy of immigrant farm workers has historically been limited to predominantly fruit-producing states such as California and Florida. Due to nation’s aging rural population, however, the issue is now a topic of discussion for Iowa farmers.

In October 2009, while meeting with U.S. Rep. Bruce Braley to discuss fluctuating raw milk prices, Clinton County dairy producer Ben Blanchard noted that the available workforce pool in his area has changed.

“The way I feel, and I know that others may not feel the same way, but there needs to be legislation to allow [immigrants] to come over and not just on a work permit or whatever for six months,” Blanchard said, adding that the existing options barely allow time for him to train workers and for his cows to adjust to the workers before he has to start the process again.

Many of the farmers in attendance spoke of a need for immigration reform that would allow the aging, rural areas where they are located to tap into a stream of willing workers.

Although King’s second press release does not contain the word conspiracy, it makes a clear that King believes there is one in relation to former USDA employee Sherrod.

“Before the press conference, we knew that Mrs. Sherrod was hired three days after being awarded $13 million in the nation’s largest civil rights case, Pigford v. Vilsack (sic). We knew that Mrs. Sherrod was forced to pull over to the side of the road and send in her resignation. We knew that she had maintained that the White House pressured her to resign immediately.

“After all the friendly gestures between Secretary Vilsack and Mrs. Sherrod, there are still several questions unanswered. Why is Secretary Vilsack taking responsibility for the decision when Mrs. Sherrod has maintained she was contacted by the White House? Did the White House demand Secretary Vilsack fire Mrs. Sherrod? Is she still being paid by the federal government? Has Mrs. Sherrod agreed not to file another lawsuit against Secretary Vilsack or the federal government? Was Shirley Sherrod granted an additional settlement in exchange for her silence and an agreement not to sue Vilsack again? Why is Mrs. Sherrod filing suit against Andrew Breitbart, but hugging the man who fired her?

“Without transparency, the American people will never know the truth behind the thousands of fraudulent Pigford claims for $2.3 billion, will never know who really fired Shirley Sherrod and will never know if other potential agreements were made to keep Mrs. Sherrod quiet.”

Sherrod, who formerly served as the USDA Georgia Director of Rural Development, was attacked by conservatives, including Fox News, after a severely edited video of her speaking to an NAACP audience was published on a right-wing blog. The edited clip was published at roughly 11 a.m. on July 19 and, within minutes, was picked up by additional right-wing blogs and Fox News — none acknowledging that the clip had been edited, and all accusing Sherrod of engaging in racism against white farmers. That same afternoon, news outlets reported that Sherrod had resigned amid the flap. The clip as well as the accusations continued to be passed along through both blogs and traditional media outlets throughout the evening.

The following morning Sherrod, while being interviewed on CNN, noted that the video from 1986 had been edited so that her comments would appear to be racist. In a later interview that day, which also appeared on CNN, Sherrod recounted that it was Cheryl Cook, the USDA deputy under-secretary, and not anyone from the White House, that asked her to resign.

Breitbart, the conservative blogger who initially launched the smear campaign, is now being sued by Sherrod.

Yet even as the allegations of racism against Sherrod were dwindling, she was attacked by conservatives for her participation in a discrimination lawsuit — the Pigford v. Glickman suit erroneously referenced by King in his press release, but not for the first time.

On July 22, just days after Brietbart first aired the edited video clip, King was interviewed by Ben Shapiro, who is also affiliated with Brietbart’s blog, on his conservative talk entertainment show about the Pigford case. King contends that those close to the case have told him that somewhere between 75 and 99 percent of the claims that were settled as a part of the consent decree stemming from the class action lawsuit were fraudulent.

“We know that there were attorneys advocating within the black churches, especially in the south, telling people that this is your 40 acres and a mule, you’ll be compensated for the sins of the fathers of the people that are paying the taxes today. In other words, that they would be compensated by the descendants of slave owners and everybody else for that matter,” King said during that interview.

“What we are doing is paying every black farmer in America out of the U.S. Treasury because of something that some might consider to be, I guess, white guilt.”

The person who pushed to allow more black farmers to join the case and for more money to be set aside for settlements was Iowa’s own U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley. In a February press release, Grassley noted that “many people were shut out of the process,” which previously ended in 1999.

When asked by Shapiro specifically about the case settlement that was awarded to Sherrod, her husband and their company, New Communities Inc., King laughed before indicating that the settlement paid to the Sherrods brought up many questions about the motivation behind the Obama administration’s hiring of a black woman.

“I think [Obama] has, all of his life, been a beneficiary of playing race politics,” King said during speculation of how Sherrod earned her job in the USDA.

Spokespersons at the USDA did not immediate respond to The Iowa Independent’s inquiry for this report.