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There is always a desperation factor: how badly the worker needs the income from a particular job's wages to get by, or in come cases, support their entire family. Farm work is seasonal, physically exhausting, hazardous to health, requires long hours, offers no long-term advancement, and the job sites often vary and are far away. One only need look at the EU, an advanced economy that (mostly) offers freedom of movement across its diverse constituent states, to see how legal workers from less prosperous areas travel to more prosperous areas to perform skilled manual labor. In the EU's case, the internal economic disparities are often severe enough that the marginal utility of increased income to be gained elsewhere is very high, therefore internal migration is commonplace for blue-collar work. In the US, this (mal-)adaptation is largely absent and is relegated to a few high-risk, high-income categories of manual labor, e.g. oil field roughnecks, Alaskan fishing; and to the similarly time-intensive long-distance truck driving. The phenomenon of a family's primary income-earner relocating elsewhere, leaving the family behind to perform a standard day's shift of blue-collar work is commonplace elsewhere in the world, but among non-immigrant legal US residents. |