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.
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.
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.
Illegal immigration, especially in America, is modern day slavery that has been co-opted by the left for their own political gain.
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.
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...
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.
they don't need it per se but sure helps the bottom line
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.
How do you reach this conclusion?
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 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.
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 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.
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.
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?