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Comment by zzzeek | Hacker News Reader

> In the agricultural sector, labor shortages are increasing the need for automated harvesting using robots.

This is about Japan, but like the US, Japan has a restrictive immigration policy and an aging, not-replaced population that's at the core of this issue. Japan has been toying with expanding immigration in the area of health care workers [1] recently, but like in the US, there really isn't a labor shortage issue if immigration policy is liberalized.

So this is like so many other things a complex and mediocre technological solution to what's actually a political issue.

[1] https://www.bpb.de/themen/migration-integration/regionalprof...

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I agree about immigration, but the world has a large amount of very fertile land in places with very high costs of living. Bringing in large numbers of new immigrants at ultra low pay will have big consequences in most high-cost countries. It's worked well in the US, but that's because of our (former) identity as a nation of immigrants and the massive overlap between US and Latin American culture. In other nations, the outcome could very well be a racially/culturally incompatible underclass working the lowest paying and least consistent jobs, with little-to-no chance of fully integrating.

but Japan is actually relaxing immigration rules due to the need for younger workers. I bet they can pay them pretty well for less than the R&D, maintenance, and loss of productivity of the robots costs

Long term.. not sure that I agree. The cost of creating robots is going to go down. It's already relatively cheap to produce most of the robot, it's more down to the software development itself at this point. Also, even if a robot costs 2x what you would pay a person in a year at half the speed of a person, that robot can work effectively 4x as many hours a week as a person can.

My bigger concern to me is a conglomerate like ConAgra for robot farming comes in and only leases access to these machines instead of being able to buy/maintain/adapt them on the farms themselves. Leading to one more point of pressure against smaller farms in favor of larger conglomerates squeezing every bit of value from the middle out.

I can understand culturally incompatible, but what on earth is "racially incompatible"?

> working the lowest paying and least consistent jobs, with little-to-no chance of fully integrating.

It depends who the immigrants are. If your immigration laws favour highly skilled immigrants that is not going to happen.

In the UK people who live in ethnically mixed areas tend to integrate. In fact, I think most people integrate but the minority who do not are just more noticeable and used politically (not by just one side either).

> I can understand culturally incompatible, but what on earth is "racially incompatible"?

It's racists, being racist, and likely conflating skin color with cultural differences.

Some of this is showing in a lot of places already. Cultural adoption as part of migration is important and you can only bring in so many migrants while maintaining anything resembling a national identity. Not to mention secondary effects of bringing a literal under-class of migrant workers into a society already facing the aftermath of heavy inflation combined with wage stagnation.

Nope, it's a technological issue. Increasing immigration might address some of the symptoms of the issue, but it does nothing to address that a human being still needs to do this labor. Frankly even if you were to liberalize immigration laws, convincing people to upend their lives and move to a high cost of living country where cultural integration is difficult at best just to pick tomatoes is not exactly a trivial task. Even if you do get people to come for menial labor, as you say there are plenty of other areas like healthcare where labor is in high demand, so you're likely still going to be faced with labor shortages in less desirable fields. Immigration is a treatment, automation is a cure.

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