Illegal immigrants usually do not (under the table, off the books unskilled labor), and are in the US in large numbers (millions).
Not a sleight, just facts.
Not a sleight, just facts.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/food/in-an-immigrat...
If you don’t believe me, go clean a slaughterhouse one night, or pick strawberries in the hot sun for a day.
Edit: Automate these jobs.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2012/05/17/the-law-of-...
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-06-06/crops-rot....
Your choice is not between illegal immigrants and working-class citizens getting that work, it's been illegal immigrants getting the work and nobody doing it.
And it makes sense. We pay for everyone to go to 12 years of public school, learning calculus, history, chemistry, literature, etc.., only to work picking strawberries for the rest of their lives?
Fuck that.
The American labor force isn't designed for these kinds of jobs. I can't imagine any smartphone addicted millennial to do manual labor. In fact, we'd be more honest about our economy if we actually banned these jobs for Americans, and only allowed unskilled immigrants to do them, and deal with it from there.
I provided sources showing that this is, empirically, what happens, no matter what you would like to believe.
> If the pay is right, you will find plenty of people to pick produce.
Obviously! But once you do that, the produce costs so much that no one wants to buy it. That is the fundamental issue here.
I can’t read the second one, but I’ve seen the arguments in the first one a million times — a whole lot of whining about how it’s absolutely impossible to find workers. No, you can’t find them at the price you want. Show me the farmer offering $30/hour plus benefits. You can’t. Even in the first article they peg “skilled” labor at $15-20/hour with the unskilled earning less. Guess what, I can get that a McDonald’s so try harder Mr. Farmer.
> Obviously! But once you do that, the produce costs so much that no one wants to buy it.
So I take it you were against the recent ~doubling of fast food wages in some localities to $15/hour then? Nah, probably not, I’m guessing you used the same argument so many others did: “what’s your problem, it’ll add like three cents to the cost of your Big Mac.” Well, I’d argue that doubling or tripling farm labor costs would only add a dime to the price of a basket of strawberries. Who cares? Pay real wages for real work and stop making excuses for what amounts to modern day slave labor.
Whether people should be willing to may more for their produce, and whether the treatment of these workers is ethically defensible - those are separate questions. I would be totally fine with paying real wages for produce-picking and then subsequently tightening immigration, but there's the paying market we'd like to have and the one we've actually got.
the market will correct itself.
why would anyone want to pick raspberry for $10 an hour when I can get paid more working at in & out. Basically we should support shitty working conditions and black market labor because people dont wanna pay more for their produce?
...and the market of voters will "correct" the elected politicians. Which is why no politician is foolish enough to do this, and they have a monopoly on making laws.
In the long-term, automation may help.
We can also pay a tiny bit more for our strawberries. At retail level, the cost of farm labor is is tiny portion of the total cost.
Crops don't rot on the vine if farmers know the labor situation in advance. Some will decide not to grow that crop. Others will find labor, paying more if required.
Whenever the supply of illegal aliens is reduced, wages rise. The "living wage" can not happen in the presence of illegal aliens. Once wages rise, Americans take the jobs. You can even see this today in the record-low unemployment rates.
I actually agree with this, but society has decided that "food security" is an important component of national security and that the country would like to maintain domestic food production even if it is uneconomical. And that's fine, if that's what the public wants, but once you do that you have to live with the consequences, like being forced to choose between illegal labor and rotting crops.
> In the long-term, automation may help.
Maybe, but a lot of the produce-picking that can be automated already has been. What's left is crops that, for whatever reason, are much harder to automate.
> At retail level, the cost of farm labor is is tiny portion of the total cost.
I'd like to see a source for this.
> Crops don't rot on the vine if farmers know the labor situation in advance
Please actually read my two links. The first is from 2012, and the second is about how the situation persisted through 2016. You're saying four years of Georgia's law wasn't enough advance notice?
Also, I should have said "crops MOSTLY don't rot on the vine" because:
Even if the labor supply is stable, some crops will still be left to rot. The production of the land and the demands of the consumers are both subject to change. This affects the price. Given the current price, some farms may decide to not bother harvesting.
Farms aren't always 100% serious. Lots of them are almost a hobby, or for tax reasons. (if you can claim your home is a farm, you may pay lower property taxes, and there are even income tax advantages)
> Whenever the supply of illegal aliens is reduced, wages rise. The "living wage" can not happen in the presence of illegal aliens. Once wages rise, Americans take the jobs. You can even see this today in the record-low unemployment rates.
So we import our strawberries and wages will rise? How can both of these things be true? And the alternative is we won't eat strawberries anymore?
What you're proposing is setting our country up to be a worse place on the individual level "hey, why can't I find strawberries in my grocery store?" and on the national level, because we'll be beholden to whoever we're importing from.
There's a reason why a country should grow its own food. It's critical for our national security that we not be dependent on outsiders for something so basic.
Whoever told you they're doing this to "Make America Great Again" was lying to you. Not being able to buy strawberries would make America worse.
But that doesn't mean these jobs are in any way desirable.
In another instance, I see people who complain about Amazon's cashierless stores taking away jobs that people could do, but they don't seem to have an answer about how this situation could free those people up to do some other, potentially less menial job.
We do have a mismatch -- lots of employers simply aren't yet paying enough to get employees. And agricultural employers can't get any Americans, white or not white, to work for them, in part because the seasonality of the jobs and lack of health insurance makes the pay immaterial. If you work for 6 weeks you could lose eligibility for some benefits, and what are you going to do for the other 46 weeks in the year? Providing benefits not tied to employment would mitigate this problem. But it still wouldn't solve the problem of all the Americans not even looking for work because they're out on disability. These people, again, are not competing with immigrant labor, because by and large they really can't do any sort of physical labor.
There is really no competition for ag jobs. Americans really, really don't want to do them, for some rational economic reasons and some reasons of expectations/feelings about what they deserve.
That has been the case for a mere 12-18 months out of the last decade.
You know why liberals used to be against allowing vast inflows of unskilled labor? They fully understood the obvious consequences to the workers their party represented, as it pertained to wages & employment prospects. Make that labor more scarce and wages rise. It's the reason Bernie Sanders used to openly advocate against allowing large amounts of unskilled labor immigration.
No other developed nation uses the immigration approach that the US uses. Everyone else favors a merit based system and favors immigrants that can pay for their social benefits. This is why Canada is so annoyed with the US right now on immigrants crossing the border into Canada. [1] A few thousand illegal immigrants cross over each month and Canada is begging the US to make it stop. Out of the entire planet, only the US is held to a different standard, everyone else is allowed to restrict unskilled labor immigration. The US is uniquely backwards in its approach to heavily limiting skilled labor and simultaneously allowing unlimited amounts of unskilled labor.
Where's the international condemnation for Canada's approach to restricting hispanic immigration into their nation? Why are they not called racist for it? They're a mere 1.5% hispanic, specifically because they won't allow unskilled labor from Latin America into the country.
That's an extremely ugly, hypocritical double standard. If the US behaves exactly as Canada does, it's called racist, xenophobic, etc.
I'll note that the sole reason the Republicans are supporting / allowing the low skill immigration approach (and why they've blocked Trump's attempt to shift to a merit system), is that it benefits business margins: they want as much cheap labor as they can get to suppress wages. It's why the Koch brothers are such big proponents of it.
The vast, endless supply of unskilled labor that has flooded the US for decades is partially responsible for low wage growth among lower skilled workers in the US over that time. If there's always more low-skilled labor, wages will not rise for low-skilled laborers. It's basic supply and demand. As automation increasingly hammers low-skill laborers, that effect will get dramatically worse.
The other critical reason why the US is going to be forced to end its immigration policies: you can't support an increasingly generous welfare state matched against vast inflows of unskilled labor that can't pay for its own benefits programs. This is why other developed nations follow a pay-your-way merit system. If you can't support yourself, Canada generally isn't letting you in. A couple million low-skill immigrants coming into their nation would bankrupt their welfare system and collapse their healthcare system. The US welfare state is now more generous than Canada's, so how is the US expected to continue to afford it? You want universal healthcare? You can never have that unless you change the immigration system to restrict inflows of unskilled labor.
The US should flip its policies: continue to allow in some reasonable amount of low-skill labor, and allow in a lot more high-skill labor (which helps pay for the benefits cost of the low-skill labor). As the US moves gradually toward universal healthcare, and continues to increase the generosity of its welfare state, this will become a fiscal necessity, just as it is in all other developed nations and for the exact same reason.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-canada-immigration-border...
The only difference is we can't move all our food factories abroad, so the labor travels here.
But yah, open the borders. That's the only immediate solution.
The 90's had our greatest economic growth, and the borders were basically wide open then.
[0] http://www.newsweek.com/ann-coulter-shooting-immigrants-ille...
The current US policy by this administration is causing even documented immigrants to reconsider or just give up and leave.
I'm what you would call a (potential) high-skilled immigrant (STEM Phd soon completed at top tier college). Clearly, the current policies don't make me want to stay. The path to permanent residency (i.e. proper immigration) is getting harder and harder.
No longer that two days ago we got an email about "public charges" (i.e. -legal- public help that would make Dhs/State consider us a burden to the US) and how we should be careful not to use those while in the US, otherwise we can get denied entry/visa. Yikes.
Hardly any are undocumented. Of course, for many the documents are forged. Maybe they have your social security number; hope you don't mind! BTW, identity theft is illegal.
Oh, also, in all states and countries an unregistered firearm is not illegal. It is undocumented. If I enter your home without permission, I'm an undocumented resident.
13% of unauthorized immigrants have completed college, as compared to 31% of US-born and 30% of authorized immigrants.
[1] https://www.migrationpolicy.org/data/unauthorized-immigrant-...