[astrange]

The model that Americans would take any job if the wages were high enough is simple but obviously false. For manual labor there's no amount of money you could pay Americans to be farmworkers. For desk jobs there's no amount that'll overcome Americans' cultural belief that you can't do math unless you were born as a special sort of person who is "good at math".

[ryandrake]

> For manual labor there's no amount of money you could pay Americans to be farmworkers.

If you don't think Americans are willing to pick fruits and vegetables, go find a farmer, have him put a sign at the edge of his property that says "Free fruits and vegetables, you pick them yourself" and watch how quickly the field is emptied.

[Analemma_]

This is obnoxious pedantry which is ignoring the parent's obvious actual point: food obeys a demand curve just like every other product, and what the parent clearly meant was that, at the labor price native Americans would want for these jobs, the resulting food price would be such that not enough people would buy the food to make it worthwhile.

And while this may have been idle speculation a few years ago, we now have pretty solid empirical evidence: when food prices increased by 10-20%, even in the middle of the fastest-growing wages in decades, the country had a collective temper tantrum.

[AnimalMuppet]

The country had a collective temper tantrum. They didn't stop buying food, though...

[red-iron-pine]

cuz they get to keep the fruit.

no one legal is taking this as a job to pay off a mortgage or a car loan.

[mantas]

1 million/year? There’s definitely an amount that’d allow to find enough workers locally. The other question is how much would the produce cost and how many people would be willing to pay.

[astrange]

Once it gets that high, they don't need to work because they can retire.

(Or buy the farmland themselves and resume paying migrants to do it.)

[mantas]

More like living costs would balloon. And farm workers would become middle class. Which IMO makes sense, since it’s a damn hard job.

Land price would also balloon.

Or local farming would collapse and 99% of food would be imported. But massive import taxes are more likely since this is national security question.

[johnnyanmac]

>For manual labor there's no amount of money you could pay Americans to be farmworkers.

In this market? Throw me a hoe tell me where to dig. I just need to pay rent.

[astrange]

Well that's probably part of the problem. You have to live within commute range of the work to do it, and people don't want to live in small towns or Central Valley CA unless they're in the respected local landowner class.

I know there are people who do part-time work in oil fields or fishing ships, so that's always possible if you want to move to North Dakota or Alaska temporarily.

[AStonesThrow]

I don't know about the rest of the nation, but in the American Southwest, there's a distinct socio-economic class of "migrant farmworker" with a long tradition. And it's a Hispanic cultural tradition.

There would be basically zero chance of anyone in my urban high school, or circle of friends, to turn around and say "I'm going to be a migrant farmworker when I graduate!" and it's unclear whether any non-Latino could even achieve such a career. GP indicated that urban/suburban living wouldn't be possible. You'd certainly need to move around, and you'd be an outcast if you didn't speak Spanish, if you weren't nominally Catholic, or celebrate holidays like a Hispanic. Your children would come to learn Spanish and cultural customs, but they'd still be outcast because of racism. You'd have a weird relationship with the overseers, because they'd be more like you, so neither side would really accept you.

(Sub)urban White kids are usually groomed to go to college and get a white-collar or office job, and the dropouts do some kind of tech vocational path, or end up doing clerking minimum-wage to get by. So you have a spectrum of white/blue collar, but there's no path to "migrant farmworker" or other sort of laborer, because my people Just Don't Do That. It's unthinkable.

Even agrarian Native American communities have a huge problem with "brain drain" there, because the opportunities on the Reservation are zilch, unless you want to work at a casino? So young Natives dream of leaving at the first chance, going into the city, and assimilating, losing their culture, because it's a survival thing. Their agriculture isn't sustainable, no matter how you slice it--what are they going to do, hire from outside?

Since the 80s we've had White people who said that migrants come to steal our jobs. Or they say they're taking jobs no American wants. But realistically, even if American wanted those jobs at those wages, they couldn't have them, because of the ethnic hegemony in certain industries.

[johnnyanmac]

I see. Yeah, that's tricky. It's less of "I don't want to" moreso than "I literally* cannot move". I'm paying off a house and moving to another state to pay rent on top of that mortgage ruins the point. For 200k, sure. But I know that's not realistic even if I was the best farmhand.

*Okay, I can "literally" talk with family about selling the home. But I do just need some steady work during the downtimes. I'm not at a point where I feel I want to uproot my entire lifestyle, career, and livlihood just to do blue collar work.

[lurking15]

I'm not sure how this applies to what I said.

[bsder]

> For manual labor there's no amount of money you could pay Americans to be farmworkers.

Ever worked a blast furnace? Or a coal mine?

You absolutely can pay enough money to get Americans to do really shitty manual labor.

[red-iron-pine]

that may be manual labor but it requires skills, and comes with real risks.

and mines have a lot, like a LOT, of labor laws behind them. you know, the whole sending 10 year olds down the shaft thing and then literally covering up what went wrong.

[mythrwy]

If I could make what I make in tech picking fruits I'd be tempted to switch to be honest. At least for awhile. I'm sick of sitting in a chair.

[iwontberude]

100% on your last sentence. There is a massive misplacement of ego in our fellow countrymen that loves to posture as an arbiter of morality and rationality, but has no pomp left over for their individual upward mobility. Very very bizarre and self defeating.

[kristjansson]

You wildly underestimate American avarice.

[astrange]

I know a fair number of Silicon Valley "townies" and they are not trying and failing to get into tech companies. Only the Asian ones with tiger parents are even considering it.

The hippie aligned ones just want to get infinite degrees in something natural like forestry management. The rest are nurses or civil servants if they want a career, or real estate agents or artists or game streamers otherwise.

If anything I think younger Americans tend to go for the kind of vulgar Marxism where everything bad is caused by "corporations", and women in strongly prefer work that comes off as being good for society, which means they won't even consider it.

Same for me of course; I work in tech because I was on the computer too much, not because I was greedy and looked up good careers.

[CapstanRoller]

Please don't troll.