The Associated Press has a happy-talk story about African refugees being given plots of land — from “federal grants,” aka tax money — to grow vegetables, as if nobody else was responding to the increasing demand for fresh veggies.

Is farming a job Americans don’t want to do? Must we import illiterate foreigners to grow vegetables?

On the contrary, where I live in northern California at least, farmers’ markets have stalls of growers who are English-speaking Americans.

Below, Judith Redmond, a farmer at Full Belly Farm, selling her wheat berries and vegetables at the farmers market in Berkeley, California.

In addition, news outlets like stories of bored professionals who have chucked their office jobs for the the outdoor life. The BBC reported last year about The US professionals quitting the rat race to become farmers.

The New York Times described the modern locavore trend in At Midlife, Called to a New Field:

In recent years, as the local food movement has grown and farmers’ markets have proliferated, a new breed of back-to-the-landers has emerged. Some, like their predecessors in the 1960s and ’70s, are earnest, college-educated young people, turning their backs on professional career paths in favor of a life of hardscrabble idealism. But many others, homesteaders in their 40s and 50s, have already enjoyed the perks of professional life, and may even have made a fortune, or at least a comfortable nest egg.

To a large degree, the AP story is simply promoting Washington’s refugee program, which imports tribal people unlikely to assimilate, at the direction of the United Nations. The Rwandan woman described is typical of many refugees who have an “agrarian background” which presumably means little if any education.

America as the world’s flophouse! Let’s celebrate diversity!