Hacker News Reader

Comment by Afforess | Hacker News Reader

Setting aside the moral component, and focusing on the economic; the Trump deportation plan is red carpet invitation for consolidation. Agriculture today is a declining mix of many medium and small growers, with a few mega growers that have increasingly concentrated their market share of output. Deportation will greatly accelerate this trend, consolidating most agriculture under a few mega growers. Small and medium sized farm operations can’t afford the capital for complex automation to replace manual labor - but mega corps can.

View on HN

Lots of smaller farms are family run. It's the mega farms that excessively rely on outside labor, particularly during critical seasons. They're 4.4% of farms, but 47.6% of production. There's a lot of data here. [1] I think there's a reasonable argument that deportations could instead work to decentralize things by effectively increasing labor costs. Hard to keep massive farms running (and offering cheap crops) without large labor pools willing to work for what is literally pennies per bucket of crops that they harvest.

[1] - https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/ag-and-food-statistic...

The Trump team has already stated they are limiting deportations to criminal illegals, so I guess just people who are in the US illegally and have committed a separate crime. This is before any real opposition has been mounted where it’s expected he’ll cave anyway. Trump is more likely to start a war with Iran than he is to do any sort of mass deportation.

Also a weird thing is happening with automation, it’s getting a lot cheaper, bespoke tooling and machines are going through a substantial revolution. And that is not including any AI stuff. The price of small batch electronics and machines are dropping fast.

> limiting deportations to criminal illegals

That's where they're intending to start (deporting those convicted of, possibly charged with, other crimes). Neither he nor his representatives have said that that's where they'll stop.

I guess we could assume he is pretending to bend towards the middle in order to avoid spooking people prior to consolidating power in the executive, after that he will pivot and cross the Rubicon. But Trump is no FDR so I don’t see him being able to pull that off even if he wanted to.

Aren’t these people being deported already? What’s new about this?

Can you explain more about changes in automation in farming?

> The Trump team has already stated they are limiting deportations to criminal illegals

The same one Trump promised would be "the largest deportation program in American history"?

We've already had years of the Trumposphere emitting contradictory bullshit, and whenever you are considering an entity that that does not care about truth or honesty or ethics, it's sensible to assume that the outcome will be less than good.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com