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Comment by billfruit | Hacker News Reader

Or US government can start to issue large number of temporary "fruit picker" visas.

New Zealand does exactly this, and I’m of two minds on it. On the one hand, it seems easy to say that if you don’t have enough workers, you’ve got to raise your price - it’s a free market, right? Except it’s not. NZ has a very generous welfare system (compared to its very small GDP) and this means that being un- or under-employed is a viable option.

On the other hand, the jobs also bring in a lot of money for the islanders who perform them, and the wages are relatively high by international standards due to NZ’s high minimum wage.

We already have a cost of living crisis, and raising the price of fruit and vegetables by removing these visas for seasonal workers seems like it would hurt everyone without helping anyone in particular.

> We already have a cost of living crisis, and raising the price of fruit and vegetables by removing these visas for seasonal workers seems like it would hurt everyone without helping anyone in particular.

It helps local labor sellers to be in higher demand and hence negotiate higher prices who may have taken the option to pick fruit and vegetables.

I understand that argument, but the very high minimum wage and availability of state support means that in practice there is no market-clearing price for this labour. New Zealanders simply don’t want to do these jobs.

So maybe those jobs shouldn't be done? It doesn't sound like a complete disaster ...

Or maybe having them done by people who are willing to do them would be good.

That’s exactly right. There’s no market-clearing price because of regulatory distortion. You’re free to like or dislike that as a policy, but it is clear that it removes the information value of the price signal.

The is a price but regulators cap it off. It may not be a good business but a lot of things aren’t a good business if you actually have to pay market wages.

I would bet quite a bit of money that if you start paying $100/hour, start selling fruit at luxury prices, and ban all cheaper imported fruit, the market will clear very quickly. Then again the government may lose the next election because of that.

Sweden also. Berries and mushroom are picked almost exclusively by foreign workers. The government even had to open an exception to COVID restrictions to allow those workers to come in and to their job, as otherwise a whole harvest season could've been lost as there's no way swedes would do the job themselves.

I kind of dislike these industries that depend on imports of cheap labor from poor countries and the governments pandering to them because the locals won't do that kind work, since in that case, the government (read, the taxpayers) is subsidizing unprofitable business that cannot survive in free market conditions by manipulating the labor market in the favor of business owners through the import of cheap labor below local market rates.

This practice should be stopped, or we should reconsider the so called "free market" if the government can manipulate it to bail out the business owning class whenever they're not profitable.

We should just be honest and call I’ll the exploitation and arbitrage market

Sweden and most of Northern Europe would have no farms anymore if it were not for plenty of government subsidies and protectionism. It's a lot cheaper to farm where the weather is not just barely above freezing and there's plenty of sun.

I'm confused by this part: <<NZ has a very generous welfare system (compared to its very small GDP)>> Did you mean to say "GDP per capita"? To me: The generosity of a social safety net is about two things: (1) culture (do you care about non-family) and (2) GDP per capita (can you afford it).

This is exactly what the US government does with H2A visas.

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