Summer is just around the corner, and the biggest cause for concern in one of the wealthiest hamlets in the country is apparently the Trump administration’s crackdown on illegal immigration and what that will mean for their bottom lines.
The New York Times published a lengthy piece over the weekend about how Hamptons residents are worried about the potential loss of their landscapers, housekeepers, construction workers, and more as a result of deportations.
On Tuesday’s show, Megyn was joined by The Free Press columnist Batya Ungar-Sargon to discuss the absurdity of the piece and what it reveals about the left.
The Reporting
The headline in The New York Times on Sunday was “They Help Make the Hamptons the Hamptons, and Now They’re Living in Fear.” The sub-headline from writers Dionne Searcey and Ana Ley read, “Latino immigrants care for some of America’s most lavish beachside mansions. Their disappearance would affect the wealthy, too.”
Searcey’s beat is “wealth and power,” while Ley covers mass transit in New York. They began the piece by setting scene of what it’s like to be a high roller on Long Island’s east end:
The party dresses must be double-pressed, the hedges shaved into sharp rectangles. The hand soap and lotion dispensers must be formed into neat lines along bathroom sinks. Caterers need to slip out of view as soon as the oysters and cocktails are served.
Wealthy residents of the Hamptons demand perfection. Now, many of the people who make it so — Latino immigrants, some of them undocumented — are panicking about President Trump’s deportation orders.
That “fear” is “on display,” they wrote “outside a convenience store where day laborers sprint into a nearby field when a stranger approaches” and “in the nervous apologizing of a longtime housekeeper when she interacts with the police after a minor automobile scrape.” It also “courses through a small encampment in the woods where a landscaper is awaiting warmer weather so he can start cutting grass again to send money home to his family in Mexico.”
The writers claimed that, among the wealth of the Hamptons, “Latino immigrants make up the bulk of the work force, logging 12-hour days flipping mattresses, scrubbing toilets and hanging drywall, and in the summer tending vineyards and assembling patio furniture under the hot sun.”
Some of the workers, they wrote, “arrived illegally” via a treacherous trip to the U.S. southern border, while “some have legal working papers but are worried they could be swept up in raids.” Regardless, “the disappearance of some of the Hamptons’ most vulnerable residents would have an immediate effect on some of the nation’s wealthiest.”
This is apparently leading some wealthy residents to start making “calculations about what it would mean if their undocumented workers were deported.” After all, “who would mow the lawn?”
The quotes of homeowners all center around a question posed by the founder of Hamptons Community Outreach: “People come to the Hamptons to enjoy their houses, and who is going to take care of their houses?”
The Hypocrisy
The lack of self awareness among the residents, Ungar-Sargon said, was astounding. “A lot of the illegal immigrants are living in encampments in the woods because, of course, they can’t afford a home or even to rent in the Hamptons,” she noted. “Their indentured servants are literally homeless… It is so absolutely disgusting.”
And then there is the misconception about this labor. “There is not a single industry in America that is a majority illegal immigrant – not a single one,” Ungar-Sargon explained. “That means that every time a Democrat says they are doing the jobs an American doesn’t want, they are insulting millions and millions and millions of Americans who get a lot of dignity from cleaning toilets, or doing farm work, or mowing the lawn, or any of the jobs that these rich Democrats would rather kill themselves than do.”
It is yet another example, she said, of how the left has lost touch with the working class. “The Democrats’ version of the economy is they want everybody who they care about, all of their college-educated, professional, managerial elites, to be making $250,000 a year,” Ungar-Sargon said. “But they want all manufacturing shipped overseas to China, and all of the service industry jobs to be done by slaves who are brought here by cartels.”
“For 50 years, the Democrats implemented economic policy which was wage theft of working class people,” she concluded. “[These Hamptonites] don’t realize that what they are saying is, ‘My God, we might have to pay an American a living wage.'”
You can check out Megyn’s full interview with Ungar-Sargon by tuning in to episode 1,013 on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you like to listen. And don’t forget that you can catch The Megyn Kelly Show live on SiriusXM’s Triumph (channel 111) weekdays from 12pm to 2pm ET.