Hallie Shoffner, the Arkansas Democrat running for U.S. Senate against incumbent Tom Cotton, went on Andy McNeill's "Free Arkansas" radio show and said this about undocumented farm workers: "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."
Five to one. That's the exchange rate on American citizenship according to a woman who wants to represent Americans in the United States Senate.
Shoffner, who served as executive director of Seis Puentes, a Little Rock nonprofit, has a long trail on this subject. Back in 2012, she told the Arkansas Times about helping "undocumented Hispanics." She described growing up "in an immigrant community" where "the farm workers for all the farms were generally from Mexico and Honduras." None of that is new. What's new is she attached a number to it — and the number says Americans are worth twenty cents on the dollar.
The interview didn't stop there. Shoffner told McNeill that "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." Then she went further: "I would vote to defund ICE as it exists right now."
Once the clip circulated Shoffner scrambled to clarify. "I don't want to defund ICE," she said. "I want to reform it." The classic backpedal: say the real thing on a small radio show, then issue the sanitized version once people are paying attention.
The H-2A Agricultural Visa Program already exists for exactly the situation Shoffner described. Farmers who need seasonal workers from other countries can sponsor them legally. The pathway she demanded — "Why is it that there's no pathway for them to work here legally when they're good workers?" — is already there. It just requires paperwork and following the law, which apparently qualifies as "absolutely ridiculous" in Shoffner's framework.
This is someone who wants to unseat Tom Cotton by running on the argument that enforcing immigration law is the problem, that ICE should be defunded or "reformed" into something that doesn't enforce immigration law, and that illegal immigrants are literally worth more than the citizens she'd be sworn to represent. She said the quiet part out loud and then tried to stuff it back in.
The five-to-one ratio is useful, though. It tells you exactly how the math works for a certain kind of Democrat. Americans aren't the constituency. Americans are the obstacle between them and the constituency they actually want.