Curious to see what comes home to roost. I mean when, for example, you clear out the agriculture workers of the U.S. without any thought as to how or what you are going to do to replace them, well, expect higher grocery prices I guess?
> I mean when, for example, you clear out the agriculture workers of the U.S. without any thought as to how or what you are going to do to replace them, well, expect higher grocery prices I guess
Most ag workers are here on... ag work visas. There are processes in place to facilitate this seasonal work.
"No more strawberries/lettuce/etc when you kick out all the illegals!" has been a rallying cry on lefty social media for the last few years and it... hasn't happened?
Turns out assuming all the brown farm workers are here illegally is not only extremely racist but fundamentally a misunderstanding of how the system works.
It's even more puzzling that people are cheering on the false premise of keeping people here in the shadow of the law as indentured servants so they can save 10 cents on tomatoes at the market.
It hasn't happened because no President has been stupid enough to deport them en-masse. Even the current guy has admitted that he won't focus on agriculture workers because it would be bad for business.
Nobody is hiring illegal workers to save 10¢. They are getting paid significantly less than minimum wage.
> It hasn't happened because no President has been stupid enough to deport them en-masse.
Britain enters the room...
Short-term farm labourers like fruit pickers weren't deported as such after Brexit (I think), and they were earning roughly double the minimum wage, but the jobs were seasonal so many workers spent the winter in their home countries.
After Brexit:
> A shortage of farm workers created by Brexit led to 8,000 tonnes of berries going unpicked last year.
The EU citizens have been replaced by labourers (with the appropriate visas etc) from Asia, but the wages have gone up and the costs of travel.
(I don't know how this affected fruit/vegetable prices. There were other causes of inflation at the same time.)
>They are getting paid significantly less than minimum wage.
Which is bad for everyone except business owners who vacuum up all the profits from exploiting below minimum wage labor, and then socialize the cost of taxless under the table work of illegals to the state and by extension to the taxpayer.
> "No more strawberries/lettuce/etc when you kick out all the illegals!" has been a rallying cry on lefty social media for the last few years and it... hasn't happened?
Why would it have happened? "All the illegals" have not been kicked out, so what are you basing this statement on?
And yet I go to the market every week and the shelves are stocked so full they have to throw out or donate the produce that starts to go bad.
That article puts forth the tired trope that "crops are rotting in the fields". If that was true or so extensive as they portray, the shelves would be empty, not simply more expensive. They're not.
> If that was true or so extensive as they portray, the shelves would be empty, not simply more expensive. They're not.
When chickens were being culled because of the bird flu, the supply of eggs dropped significantly. Prices of eggs also rose significantly. As a result, shelves were often full of eggs that were priced so high that they weren’t being bought as often. Production dropped, prices rose, demand dropped, surplus remained fairly constant.
If I understand the case with Hyundai correctly, the problem is not that people work without proper visas, but the interpretation of visa terms by ICE, which means that if they are to meet deportation KPIs, this may impact those who are working legally. The only racist angle to that will be if ICE is using racial profiling to pick the targets (for non-American it’s actually quite uncomfortable to see racism popping out of nowhere in many conversations, just like in your comment; we know that the unscientific and harmful concept of race is somehow important to Americans, but why are you always paying so much attention to it?). Why the only? Because ag workers in many countries are foreigners on ag visas, it is common, it is about cheap labor, labor code violations and sometimes human trafficking, and it has nothing to do with race, just with economic situation in workforce donor countries.
Anna Sorokin abused visa waivers to live and work in the US illegally for years. Somehow she still hasn't been deported despite being a felon and has even been frog marched to the airport where she was bizarrely allowed to refuse deportation. Nobody at ICE is apparently checking for that form of abuse.
It's probably not your intention, but I greatly dislike this argument, as it's similar ones were made to justify previous inhumane practices that were legal before the conclusion of the US Civil war.
If manual labor is required for agriculture, let the market absorb the real cost and pay the workers the correct wage instead of exploiting them.
The process can be orderly. I live in a town with a couple of commercial orchardist, and they get their apples picked by workers on temporary work visas every year for decades now. These commercial orchards are apparently economically viable, even though they are smaller than a typical commercial orchard in Washington state, for example.
As with tariffs, I can imagine this situation being less orderly or predictable now. But I've seen both theory and practice work as intended.
A countries agricultural base being dependent on undocumented migrant workers is bad and should be corrected. However simply deporting all the migrants overnight with no further action doesn't fix the underlying problem, doesn't help the industry, and doesn't help the consumers.
All things being equal, people will generally choose to follow the law. So figure out why the migrants and their employers are choosing not to follow the law and fix that.
You could do like Australia, offer a working-holiday visa with the possibility to renew it for up to 3 years on the condition that you spend a certain amount of time working on a farm/ in rural area.
Loads of people do it in Australia and it helps tremendously. It's not perfect for sure, but it's something.
Consider this vague hypothetical, because I'm not American and don't care about the specifics:
Country A, average wage X; country B, minimum wage for legal residents 2X. People from A can on average get a pay rise by working in B while undercutting legal residents of B. Citizens of B then get the stuff cheaper than they otherwise would have, but also might not be as easy to employ.
Are current employment stats accurate? As in do they tell the right picture or is this a case of "lies, damn lies, and statistics"? Lots of people say it's the later, and unfortunately I'm not qualified to explore anyone's arguments.
I suppose that's fine if that is your solution. It's easy for me to say "things should probably cost more" because I can afford it.
If I'm allowed to fret a bit for my fellow countrymen, I confess I am saddened that they will have to decide between food or rent in the coming months/years. When my single mom raised my sister and I she had to make that same choice at times.
Ah, but you see the thing is here in the land of the free, we consider this type of thinking to be "Communism" and must be purged without any further thought.
Not picking any particular dog in this fight, but the western labor market also has become very adversarial.
I knew a guy whose family had a tree nursery in Texas and they stopped hiring citizens and eventually white people outside of blood relatives completely. They tried for quite a long time, including raising prices, long training periods and safety equipment purchases, etc.
Eventually after several dozen people "accidentally" shear off a tiny piece of their pinky to seek a Workers Compensation claim only weeks into the job trying to claim permanent disability, you either stop putting yourself at risk or you go out of business.
They even won most of the cases, largely because they would usually catch these dummies on camera doing it intentionally, but the legal defense itself is still quite expensive and draining...
The citizenry has to plan for a future in their home economy. That make labor intensive minimum wage jobs a bad option if you need to hold two jobs to get ahead. Migrants can tough it out for a few annual trips and return with more savings than they could generate at home.
This argument (which I’ve heard many times before) is easily refuted by looking at YouTube videos for “commercial xxx harvesting” where xxx is the vegetable or fruit in question.
For instance the carrot harvester that can harvest tons of carrots each hour: you could pay the driver $126k per year and the carrot price per pound would not even move 2 pennies at retail.
Not everything can be harvested with big machines. Pretty much all tree fruits, asparagus, peppers, etc are harvested by hand. If you want blueberries or strawberries that look nice enough to be sold to consumers whole, those are hand-harvested every time.
There are some things that are harvested by hand; even in those cases, you can watch a typical process and determine the small labor component.
Asparagus for example is harvested in less than 20 seconds per bunch. Even at $50/hour that is a cost of less than 30 cents per bunch; which sells for how much in the store?
1000s of workers harvest over 9 billion pounds of apples every year-again the labor component is smaller than you’d think.
Oh I agree with you. I'm not saying the labor component is necessarily expensive, I'm just stating the obvious that for many crops they are still human labor intensive.
Asparagus harvesting may be fast, but you have to do it every day. You have to keep people employed throughout the entire season. There isn't just a few-week harvesting period.
That last statement isn’t true. I know people with a blueberry farm that machine processes (with extra human qa step) blueberries packaged for retail sale.
You can do some casual searching and find that I'm right about this in most cases. If your prices are high enough you can tolerate a lot of waste, but for most farms the economics favor hand harvesting. We're talking about at least 20% waste when you're machine-harvesting and even then a significant amount of what ships to retail has internal bruising.
Maybe that farm is selling in an area where consumers are less choosey? I certainly prefer hand-harvested blueberries (and can tell the difference)...
Certainly machine harvesting is an increasing share of the market, but it is still predominantly hand-harvested.
All the big brains in Silicon Valley can invent a bl*wj*b machine that is sync'd to a cloud-connected VR headset but can't build a machine to pick apples or tomatoes efficiently?
Perhaps our priorities as a society are misplaced.
Yeah but you still need people to do it and paying a bit better is not going to get an immediate response of many tens of thousands of workers to quit their jobs to do seasonal and migratory work across multiple states living out of vans and campers with no insurance and increased workload and injury rate. Many crops are just going to rot, output will be lower, and prices will still rise. At some point years down the line sure things might improve and settle out and more US people can fill a larger number of those roles, but it will not happen quickly, especially not for token wage increases, and will likely never gain the workforce numbers that migratory farm workers offer who travel not just across the US but also throughout Central and South America. A US citizen is never going to work in Mexico or Brazil during off seasons for US crops because it basically represents a net-zero or negative wage converting it back into US currency to come live back here.
Ive done farm and trade work my whole life, physical work is not a problem, but even if you doubled the pay for picking tomatoes and other fruits and lettuces, I would not consider for a second joining that workforce even if I was otherwise homeless. Im not even sure being a row crop farmer that doesn't even need extra labor is worth the effort. Farms are getting the least and smallest margins by far for food production out of anybody in the food logistics supply line and there is no potential windfall for workers and no career path to work up from picking fruits.
Would I like people picking fruit to earn more money and have stables lives and not have to migrate across the country living in vans? Of course, 100%. But without a huge overhaul of our economic priorities and policies towards worker rights and wages, which is the exact opposite direction from where we have been heading the last 60+ years, none of that is going to change regardless of what prices people are willing to pay for food. The base of the agricultural market of farms and the workers directly harvesting food is and has been running on thinner margins than pretty much any other industry in existence. A 2% return on a farmer's seed and fuel and fertilizer inputs is considered a great success.
We can quadruple the farm worker day rate and it would not significantly impact consumer prices. The floor price of unskilled labor is mostly a function of its market value. Increasing the labor pool via immigration decreases the value of the labor.
I too would like to see farm laborers have more comfortable lives
I believe it will effect prices far more than you think it would, or likely should, because all the middlemen between farm and the person actually eating it are not going to just accept lower margins themselves if prices rise, and they some might even demand higher margins on food because they know it is in short supply and there won't be enough available for new competitors to jump in and try to undercut them. The redistributor, the processor, the packager, and the retailer side are not going to accept flat profits with lower margin percentages when they have a supply during an overall shortage of those same goods.
If farm laborer wages just went up and nothing else changed, it would probably be fine. If wages could stay the same but there was a small decrease in productivity from less experienced workers filling in, it would probably be fine too. But if the lack of workers is what is causing both production shortages and sharp labor cost increases at the same time, the only people with any power to wield in this situation are the large corporate middlemen who hold tons of supply contracts with legally binding guarantees for product and an entire logistical network developed over decades to transport and sell these goods that can't just be spun up in a few weeks by other people.
Directly yes but there are knock on effects. What you say is true only when labor is not scarce.
The consequences of having insufficient labor is a large price factor. If you can only harvest 30% of your crop and the rest rots in the field because there's no one to pick it, that is outsized.
My undersanding is that Biden's admin estimated 10-11 million undocumented migrants in the USA, and that these migrants represent a critical percentage of some agricultural roles.
It wouldn't simply be higher prices, it would be shortages.
I think there's about 50m or so documented migrants, but as many of the targets at Hyundai were documented but apparently wrong somehow, the USA may find its economy and workforce suffering catastrophic reductions in this term of office, even just from people asking "should I leave on my own terms or risk being thrown out?"
So you are saying that you are ok with people smugglers making a buck while encouraging foreign citizens to break the law just so we don't have to find solutions for this sort of problem?
It's the same story everywhere in Europe. When people say they want less migrants or illegal people in their country, the-pro immigration parties come out and ask the same sort of questions: who is going to care for the elderly, clean the toilets, take care of the kids, pick up the rubbish and so on?
As if, the only purpose of these migrants was to to do all the shit jobs nobody else wants to do. If it wasn't so vile and despicable, it would be laughable.
Here is a tip, if you want more people to do bad/hard jobs then the solution is not to encourage illegal immigration so that these people can be exploited, it is to raise the wage of these jobs so that people would actually consider doing them in the first place.
Most ag workers are here on... ag work visas. There are processes in place to facilitate this seasonal work.
"No more strawberries/lettuce/etc when you kick out all the illegals!" has been a rallying cry on lefty social media for the last few years and it... hasn't happened?
Turns out assuming all the brown farm workers are here illegally is not only extremely racist but fundamentally a misunderstanding of how the system works.
It's even more puzzling that people are cheering on the false premise of keeping people here in the shadow of the law as indentured servants so they can save 10 cents on tomatoes at the market.