Immigration raids leave crops unharvested and California farms at risk
japantimes.co.jp
japantimes.co.jp
Presumably, there will be bigger pocketed entities waiting in the wings to snap up some distressed assets.
Very few U.S.-born workers respond to job ads for seasonal crop work, Show up when work begins, or Stick around through the harvest season. "Even when wages reach—or exceed $20–$30 per hour, seasonal U.S. workers overwhelmingly opt out of field labor. That persistent gap is why American agriculture depends so heavily on immigrant and guest‐worker programs, and why mechanization continues to accelerate."
It would require less billionaires and less chatgpt wrappers with billion dollar valuations.
There is a reason European farmers are deeply subsidized.
A few less iPhones and a few more automated farms. Billionaires would be hardest hit unfortunately.
They trust that their bigger political clout will let them continue to employee undocumented migrant workers at wages no one else will work for?
They wait for the political climate to change, and then they'll go back to business as usual?
They wait for produce prices to skyrocket/the job market to crater, and then pay minimum wage for the jobs?
Something something, AI/robots?
Yes, this is exactly what will happen.
America's prison industry, one of the Trump administration's biggest profiteers, might have some relevant answers for you. ;)
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penal_labor_in_the_United_Stat...
I'll turn it around: how long do you think the time to get those crops harvested is? People didn't show up for work, the clock is ticking.
I was responding to someone that seemed to imply that resources were on STANDBY to swoop in and harvest the crops. That is completely untrue and just dumb.
I read GP's comment as saying that large investors will be happy to buy "distressed assets", eg. the bankrupt farm itself, after its ruined crops caused bankrupcy.
They don't care about the crop ; the same way that a speculator might have bought LA real estate for a symbolic dollar after the house itself had burnt down. They don't care about the family house, they care about buying the underlying asset (the land) for cheaper than its real value.
They raise funds from large pools of capital, like endowments and pension funds, and they invest it into assets they identify as undervalued or underproducing.
When there is a crash in an asset class, private equity has often stepped in to buy assets at firesale prices from forced sellers.
California’s farm workers are not slaves…
It was basically three months of sun up to sun down work. At the end of the Summer, the family would celebrate and put on a huge fiesta and cook food for everybody. The farmer paid them extremely well and they would leave and go back to Mexico in August, fondly talking about coming back again the following Summer when the farmer needed them again.
This was my first exposure to migrant labor. It was clear the farmer took the appropriate steps to get visas and paid the family well for their efforts. Likewise, the family was thankful for the work, good pay and with the relationship.
When I moved back to Minnesota after college, I started playing hockey again and two of my teammates had done something similar and worked on poultry and cattle farms in the southern part of the state. Their stories were the complete opposite of what I had experienced. Illegals were used all over the operation. They were paid roughly $3/hour cash to work 12-16 hour shifts. If they spoke up about safety issues or the pay, a supervisor would pick them up, buy them a ticket back to the border and drop them off at the bus station.
The stories they had were pretty eye opening to say the least. I felt dumb for being so naive to think farmers just did everything legally.
It's possible to point out that there are problems with migrant labor without making such an inflammatory and inappropriate claim no one can really engage with you seriously.
So far there have not actually been any mass raids on farms in Washington, and not many cases of migrants being arrested when driving from California to Washington for the cherry harvest but the workers know what is happening in California and are afraid it will happen in Washington so many are staying away.
What was baffling is that many of the farmers put the blame for this is on bad actors on the left spreading fear among the workers.
Do we really need to rely on stoop labor to hand-pick crops, or has a relatively cheap labor pool allowed farmers to avoid the costs of automation?
If labor is to be in perennial short supply in the future, I wonder if American farmers will simply be forced to turn to crops that allow machine harvesting.
> One, age 54, has worked in U.S. agricultural fields for 30 years and has a wife and children in the country. He said most of his colleagues have stopped showing up for work.
> "If they show up to work, they don't know if they will ever see their family again," he said.
> The other worker in the country illegally said, "Basically, we wake up in the morning scared. We worry about the sun, the heat, and now a much bigger problem — many not returning home. I try not to get into trouble on the street. Now, whoever gets arrested for any reason gets deported."
Heh, heck of a job Donnie, creating an opressive regime. Anyone remember the 1990's Claire Danes/Leonardo DiCaprio "Romeo and Juliet", which is the Shakespeare play but set in the modern era, with cars and guns? Maybe somewhere out there is a little Latina girl doing a reimagining of "Diary of Anne Frank", but the book will be called Diary of Ana Franco?
Yeah, people just don’t care. Myself included.
If you want to come to america, come here legally.
We all want a better life for ourselves and family. Illegal immigrants “dreamers” are no different in this regard.
Well, except the fact, they snuck into a different person’s home (country) while hundreds of thousands are waiting in the legal line.
A lot of people voted to have their business ruined, and seem upset that it happened.
Unless you’re a Native American, you’re an immigrant too.
We might be next door neighbors some day!
Not true - false analogy
> while hundreds of thousands are waiting in the legal line.
Again - the legal line is fake too
Second, there is no "legal line" for immigration. The closest you get is that some visas where conversion to a permanent residency (green card) has an annual quota that is so heavily oversubscribed that there is a permanent backlog which stretches, in the most extreme cases, to over 20 years long.
Third, even when you're dealing with the legal immigration processes, that process is a bureaucratic hell that I don't wish on anybody. If you don't have anybody willing to descend into paperwork hell for you, then there is no way for you to immigrate to the US.
There aren't all that many farmers. Americans love the idea of them, but they aren't actually a significant voting bloc. If they had been, we'd have had a more realistic position on migrant farm workers. Any complaints the farmers may have will be drowned out by the sound of how happy people are with the raids.
Those farmers are mostly in deep-red districts. Even if they're unhappy, they're not going to vote for the Democrat -- if there's even one on the ticket. The few who cross party lines won't suffice to to change the outcome in the district.
For the rest of the country... if it results in higher food prices, that might make a difference. Though perhaps less than you'd think. People's perceptions of inflation are only loosely correlated with the actual cost of things. Inflation of "only" 5% doesn't result in massive sticker shock, by itself. It's filtered through people's expectations. If people are generally happy, even substantial inflation will be passed off as merely trying times (for which we must double down on our bootstraps). If people are generally unhappy, it's easy to single out some specific item that has gone up in price and make it the be-all and end-all of consumer budgets.
The balance is close enough that at least one house will likely turn next November. But I've seen nothing to suggest it will be any kind of landslide. It's just enough to nudge a few 51-49 districts to 49-51 instead.
The system of rules they are breaking is kept slow, arbitrary, and complex so that we can benefit from their labor without granting all the rights of being US citizens. This is so that they can be illegally exploited, but also because of the anxieties Americans have about the dilution of their culture (and to some, their bloodlines) by other ethnicities.
We didn't always have a system like this. It evolved into what it is, and now people feel morally righteous about upholding laws their own ancestors never were subject to.
And not a small number of people who did navigate the system but want everyone to have to pay the same dues. It's reminiscent to me of the folks with 4 year engineering degrees feeling salty that other folks have gotten into the industry through bootcamps, for a fraction of the time and money.