There are not many Americans who want their kids to grow up to be farmhands or migrant workers. If you can speak English, you're better off in retail. For immigrants, there is a valuable benefit that makes it all worth it: being able to live in the US. Without that incentive, it's going to be really tough.
[1] https://www.latimes.com/projects/la-fi-farms-immigration/
Annual subsidies to US farmers is of the order of $25B+ per year. This includes non-tariff barriers such as price supports for sugar, import barriers and quotas such as on lamb and beef, export supports, crop insurance and other benefits.
The DoA has been doing this for 75+ years and the majority of farms are now corporate-owned. The majority of these taxpayer subsidies are directed straight into the hands of corporate shareholders.
Redistribution from the many to the wealthy few isn't socialist redistribution.
There is no such thing as “unregulated workers”, just employers that don't obey the regulations applicable to their workers.
In the middle of the US, there are lots of (white) Americans that work in these jobs. Many are very proud of their profession.
Next time you want to go on a trip to "expand your horizons", go to a podunk town in a fly-over state and get to know your fellow Americans.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_agricultural_universit...
And its not just the owners, it goes right down to a lot of the year round labor.
The American people you see doing this stuff are by-and-large the family of the land owner or teenagers whose backs are still functional (and have school duties during the off-season).
If you have a family, then you're going to need either a primary job, or an RV to move around. The only people making money farming are the land owners, and even then...
It's really just about the bottom line. Exploiting people is cheap. Paying or treating people properly is expensive. That's it. Tim Cook or your California farmer don't give a flying fuck about these people.
It's just about the $$$. Immigrants work hard for cheap.
This is not true. Farming has always relied on exploited labor in some form. Once easily exploited labor disappears with no machinery to replace them, so too does an agricultural industry. Lots of developed European nations are facing this exact problem.
Paying people proper wages will either cause food to get massively more expensive, or will migrate production to crops that are more readily harvested by machines. So grains will still be dirt cheap, but meat and vegetables will be very expensive.
I personally lack a romantic attachment to these industries, but in general people seem fairly happy to support something like the dairy industry.
Do you support slave labor?
If you want to support an industry, you subsidize it, you don't import workers to work for breadcrumbs in terrible conditions.
What data supports this frequently touted conservative notion? There could be other factors. Like for e.g. tomatoes can only be sold at $2/lb before they run into competition from imported tomatoes. So the max anyone can afford to pay is really $X/hr. If they could only find someone at $2*X/hour, they would either not farm tomatoes or invest in machinery.