Can America's Farms Survive the Threat of Deportations? | Hacker News Reader

Can America's Farms Survive the Threat of Deportations?

theatlantic.com

36 pointspmcpinto51 comments

I'm sympathetic to farmers and immigrants both - but the current situation seems completely against every principle America and the constitution stand for. Undocumented immigrants seem pretty close to a slave class. They don't get a vote, they don't get basic rights like a safe workplace, and they can't rely on the protection of the law.

If a worker can't go to the cops for fear of deportation, why should an employer pay their last paycheck, or compensate them if they lose a hand in an unsafe machine? Much cheaper to just tell them to take a hike.

And it's not just employers - someone doesn't like your political opinions, or your driving, or the colour you've painted your front door? Better watch out!

Seems to me there's never going to be a serious political effort to allow seasonal migrant workers in legally, when employing them illegally gives you so much more power. Proper enforcement of existing laws could be a catalyst for reform that sorts out H2-A and actually gives these guys a basic set of rights.

I think the US should have a more generous immigration policy and actually let people in to the society in an easier way.

However, isn't undocumented just another word for illegal? At least that is what it means in my country. If a person is breaking the law and is being in a country even if they're not allowed maybe they just have to suit themselves?

The use of the word illegal is unpopular in the US because it is politically incorrect to refer to a "person" and not an "action" as illegal. There are all kinds of politics involved: identity, race, and the belief that the left wing sees them as a voting base and the right sees them as cheap labor.

Either way, they are being exploited to their fullest potential, and will continue to be exploited until they are no longer useful to the political parties (frankly.)

Interesting, as it's only in American English that I hear it used in this way.

Yeah sure, but isn't it the action of being in the country that you refer to as illegal? A person cannot be illegal, that makes no sense.

I guess they are but even if my country has one of the softest immigration policies we also have undocumented people that are here illegally. However, I want my government to remove these people in my country from my country since they are breaking the law by being here.

I understand if there's people in the US that think the same way. Altough you have much, much stricter immigration rules than we do.

"Since 2000, legal immigrants to the United States number approximately 1,000,000 per year, of whom about 600,000 are Change of Status who already are in the U.S. Legal immigrants to the United States now are at their highest level ever, at just over 37,000,000 legal immigrants"

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_to_the_United_St...

The person employing them is also breaking the law and on a much larger scale since they employ many illegal immigrants.

I agree, if the American agricultural business can only exist because of breaking the law, then there's something completely broken with the system. In this view, the increased pressure on undocumented immigrants might even be a good thing in the long run, since it increases the pressure to change the current system (e.g. establishing a legal framework for foreign workers, resulting in more protection).

This could be rephrased as "can Amerca's farms exist without breaking the law". The answer to which is, of course, yes. It is illegal in this country to employ a noncitizen without a work visa. It is also illegal to pay less than minimum wage. I'm not even talking about the ethical aspects of pulling the rug from unskilled domestic workforce by hiring illegal workers. Not even Obama hesitated to deport illegals in record numbers.

>"can Amerca's farms exist without breaking the law". The answer to which is, of course, yes.

How do you reach this conclusion?

They could exist that way in the past, and they could feed the country, and even provide a surplus. What has changed in the laws of nature, that it is no longer viable, to produce food without importing slave workforce? I thought the USA had a civil war to end the kind of thinking you are representing.

Maybe the age of cheap food (a lot of which is thrown to the waste) ends, but it has never existed in many parts of the world.

> I thought the USA had a civil war to end the kind of thinking you are representing

I think you're over-reading the phrase "How do you reach this conclusion?". The author didn't suggest that it was necessary, only that they were interested in seeing your reasoning. The world is a complicated place, so it can be reasonable to assume a default position that either thing is possible.

They were not competing with food from abroad at that time.

It is my understanding that the US farming sector has always relied on continued access to large amounts of underpaid or slave labour.

Not really. The current situation is tail wagging the dog scenario. Between the politics of water in the west and decades of the Feds ignoring migrant workers, farms are fully corporate.

When you buy a container of strawberries in the market today, you're contributing to a global supply chain where companies own farms all over the Western Hemisphere. Operating companies like that which are like little command economies is expensive, and you as consumer don't want to pay for the layers of administration and attorneys needed.

So the workers pay.

Importing large numbers of foreign migrant workers is a recent phenomenon in agriculture. Farms managed just fine 20 years ago.

So why did the U.S. sign the Mexican Farm Labor Agreement in 1942? The Migrant Labor Agreement of 1951? Why did the UFW hold protests at the U.S. border in 1969-1973? Why did the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 specifically address agricultural workers?

Importing large numbers of foreign workers, migrant or otherwise, has been the backbone of the agricultural labor market in the U.S. since the country was founded. It's not necessarily a good thing, just not a recent thing by any means.

Mexican agricultural workers have always been a thing. But the concentration of farm output to a few regions of California is a recent phenomenon, and the resulting industrialization of agriculture was a thing.

When I was a teen in the early 90s, I worked on a 500 acre farm in upstate ny. At that time it was possible to support a family and a few workers on land like that with a diversified crop of dairy, hay, something like oats and a few other things. The neighboring farm grew vegetables.

That is no longer possible. 90% of farms within 75 miles <250 acres are hobby farms, growing subsidized corn, or are legacy dairy farms that will be subdivisions when the farmer is too old to work or his equipment wears out.

Of course they could survive - they'll just have to raise prices accordingly. So far the American system has prioritized cheaper food over paying workers a decent wage, it seems like now we're on the trend to reverse that.

they'll just have to raise prices accordingly

But without matching the price rise with some sort of import tariff, would people still choose the more expensive American produce over the cheaper imports?

But the thing is, farmers don't really have that much control over the price.

We have millions of people who aren't working. Shipping in people from El Salvador is just a way to have a cheap, easy to control work force.

This argument is similar to the one used to justify Brexit, that immigrants are in some way taking farm jobs away from locals.

The reality though is very different. The jobs that are seasonal, tough, and do not pay well. Literaly the way nature works requires a transient workforce to harvest produce.

We need to accept that many farms are reliant on cheap migrant labour and that this needs accommodating.

We're putting our ability to feed ourselves as a country at risk.

If you need illegal immigrants, paid absymal wages, and not subject to worker protections (aka. slaves) to produce food, then you are not feeding yourself. Your slaves feed you.

Another alternative is buying the food from the market, from other countries, until the prize is lower than the price covering the costs for the farms to use legal workers.

Agree with this.

Illegal immigration, especially in America, is modern day slavery that has been co-opted by the left for their own political gain.

> The reality though is very different. The jobs that are seasonal, tough, and do not pay well.

I've never understood this line of reasoning.

Given the crucial nature of food, I would expect that were illegal immigrants to leave the picture, the agriculture system would adapt by some combination of (a) higher wages and (b) more automation.

Presumably this would lead to food becoming more expensive (at least until automation improved), but I doubt we'd see famine.

> The jobs that are seasonal, tough, and do not pay well.

When I was a kid, kids on summer vacation did exactly this kind of work.

To me, far more likely is that locally grown food would be displaced by food grown in lower cost countries. That already happens to quite a degree in the UK, but it's mainly to make things available "out of season" from what I've seen.

A significant hike in UK grown food costs, would just lead to more being imported, unless of course you start going down the line of more import tariffs which is of course possible but tends to have other consequences in terms of things like trade wars and reciprocal tariffs on UK produced goods.

Of course you could eschew tariff protection and allow food production to move to other countries, but that in itself has potentially serious consequences as a trade war or some kind of event which disrupts supply from those other countries could endanger the food security of your country...

I downvoted your comment (which I do rarely) and would like to offer an explanation.

You're having a conversation about immigration, in a thread that talked explicitly about illegal immigration. But you decide to conflate the two, and start talking about "immigrants" without specifying whether you're talking about illegal or legal ones.

In my opinion, this lowers the level of conversation, regardless of your political views. Please, don't do that.

Why does the transient workforce have to be undocumented migrants from a different country, and not people from a poor part of the US with high unemployment?

minimum wage laws, safety and security laws, etc

they don't need it per se but sure helps the bottom line

Or at least documented migrants. There is a visa for seasonal agricultural work already. But that also means having to pay a fee, not abusing the workers, probably paying taxes and so on

"ability to feed ourselves as a country"

What do you mean? In times of war, foreign imports would stop?

For reference, the US presently has a surplus of food. It exports more than it imports.

And your argument is not new either. It was used to justify slavery.

Of course they could. In Japan it's unusual to see a non-native worker in much of the service industry despite low unemployment combined with low birthrates. So, despite that, employers who provide service jobs are not going broke for having to pay somewhat higher wages nor are people not participating in the service economy.

As it is the slice of earnings which go to food is historically small, therefore a modest increase in price to be able to afford to attract American workers is not extraordinary.

They know where the farms are that employ the illegal immigrants, so why not arrest the employers? They're clearly breaking the law. I have sympathy for how hard it must be to run a profitable farm, but if it has to be done with illegal labor, then clearly we're not paying the true price of what the produce should cost.

Hire people who can work here legally. Pay them at least minimum wage. If that means apples cost $20 / lb, then the market can decide if we value apples enough to pay that.

Yes, some farms will close, but if they're only able to be kept open by exploiting vulnerable workers who don't have the legal protections that everyone else does, then they probably should close.

Yes, there are plenty of students who could really use seasonal jobs now taken by illegal aliens.

IIRC what my mother said, sixty years ago high schools let students attend half days so they could do seasonal farm labor. That seems like something that could be re-instituted in areas that need seasonal farm labor.

A lot of pro-immigration people quote that figure about illegal immigrants paying taxes, as though paying even a single dollar in tax represents a new benefit to government finances. However, the government needs to collect more tax than they spend for an immigrant to be a net benefit.

The $11bn in tax revenue works out at around $600 / capita per year (there are around 17 million people living in illegal immigrant headed households).

For reference, the (limited) welfare state in the US spends around $3,000 / capita and total government spending is around $17,000 per capita.

It is not just the US having this problem. We have same situation in South Africa. Currently, majority of waiters and farm labourers are illegal immigrants from our unfortunate neighbouring countries who are experiencing political challenges. I doubt even the poorest locals will even want to work for what these illegal immigrants are working for. There is no political will to end this modern day slavery because it is profitable and making things cheaper. Cheaper to those using them because the benefits are not trickling down to the consumer.

From time to time, there will be xenophobic attacks because of this problem and scores of illegal immigrants will be killed. For over 10 years now, the problem is still there and no political will to solve it. In turn, we decided to make our borders porous. Allowing them to get in. We do deport them from time to time, only for them to come back. Problem is that not every illegal immigrant is here to work for peanuts. Some come to conduct the business of crime. Which is a bigger problem than someone stealing jobs locals aren't interested in doing.

I am starting to believe that the whole capitalism system thrives on slavery of some sort. Cheap labour results in good profit.

> I am starting to believe that the whole capitalism system thrives on slavery of some sort. Cheap labour results in good profit.

It does, though it isn't an inherent part of capitalism - just the obvious outcome if nothing is done to prevent it. The market puts a strong pressure on lowering costs, and it takes only one bad actor to throw away some ethical value to cut costs, and all the other players need to either follow suit or face being priced out of the market. The solution is to make it so that throwing away ethical concerns doesn't reduce costs.

The point I'm making here is that this is not the fault of capitalism per se, much like gasoline is itself not "evil". It's the fault of irresponsible application of capitalism, without covering the spots where it leads to dangerous outcomes. Much like putting gasoline in a properly designed combustion engine leads to a different outcome than pouring it on the floor and lighting a match.

(The solution is further complicated by that, in a globalized economy, it takes one country to refrain from protecting the workers and most of the abuse will quickly shift to that country. See e.g. how clothes are made.)

Of course they can. The only drawback could be slight increase in food prices, for which Americans pay too little anyway (compared to the rest of the world)[0], but it's a small price to pay for abolishing slavery.

0. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/12/this-map-shows-how-mu...

Would you let a stranger sneak in your house? That's pretty simple, nowadays people are like poor Mexicans, don't deport them : Who is going to work in our farms, wash our cars, clean our shit? So fucking racist, in the other side, one of the country that deport more inmigrants in LatinAmerica is Mexico

To adapt a youtube meme: "Article starts at the second chapter".

If you take the principle "No taxation without representation" seriously, then it seems like you have 3 choices: A. Give illegal immigrants the right to vote B. Give them huge tax breaks or C. Deport them.

A allows you to stuff the ballots by importing people from regions that tend to vote for your ideas. There's, what, 20-30 million illegal immigrants? So not a trivial concern. And since they have shared cultural backgrounds, there are correlations in how they vote.

B is unfair to the existing citizens, who pay taxes that the immigrants benefit would benefit from. 73% of Central America & Mexican immigrants use some kind of welfare: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4u1J6EEhkyM

C could lead to a situation where everybody wants an existing population of immigrants to stay, and yet they have to be deported to conform to some abstract principle. If e.g. the state of California wanted unlimited immigration, agreed to pay for sufficient tracking(to the satisfaction of the other 49 states) to guarantee that they stay in the state and didn't vote in federal elections, should they be allowed to keep a underclass of foreigners that consent to it?

Also on C, is it inhumane to allow illegal immigrants to work without benefits, below minimum wages, and without any say in their community, even though it's with the consent of everyone directly involved? It sounds unintuitive to me, but I suppose you already have that problem with existing employment law(Why is it illegal for certain employers to offer jobs without healthcare coverage, even though all involved consent?)

For the farms mentioned in the article, probably stepping up enforcement on existing illegal farm workers but making it easier to get an H2-A would be uncontroversial. The workers would probably leave after the harvest season anyways, if they could be assured to easily return next year? And the employer could be taxed rather than the worker.

The political representation of immigrants will be one main civil rights issues in the future. It does not only affect those that are in a country illegally: three million EU citizens in the UK now face being stripped of their rights after Brexit, without their having any say in the matter.

Of course they don't have a say unless they have a legal residency according to the new laws. But, afaik, those have not been drawn up, there is no consensus of how the situation will be handled and I would expect the status of foreign EU citizens in the UK to be one of the major points in the upcoming negotiations between UK and EU.

Unless, of course, you know something the rest of the EU does not yet know?

Your question re point C is a good one. Some might call it inhumane, but the reason everyone directly involved consents is that the workers have it much better doing this work than their alternatives back home. So is it more humane to take away the better job?

Also along this line of questioning, is it reasonable to call them slaves because they choose a job that others find inhumane but is much better than what they had before?

The argument that they should come to the US, because farming jobs are there, is a bit circular.

If the US suddenly loses a lot of cheap labour, that means some other country gains it, and can run farms using it, exporting the produce to the US. I.e., the jobs can move.

>There's, what, 20-30 million illegal immigrants

No, there are not. Much fewer, around 11 million: http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/sep/...

An additional option is D) make iimmmigration easier.

How many undocumented people would be willing to become citizens? My guess is the % is quite high.

That's the same as A.

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