Oh, I read this as "disease killed the fruit=>the packing companies went bankrupt=>the farmers stopped growing=>no one needed a seasonal workforce=>all of the people who served the seasonal workforce lost their jobs."

Something like this for oranges: https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2026/04/florida-oran...

The thing about the "wages are low because of immigrants" is that it neglects that all of those immigrants are consumers just as much as they producers. They need food, medical care, places to relax, places to live, and so these immigrants employ plenty of native born people, people who would not have jobs if those immigrants weren't there consuming. Even if you could get higher wages to draw other native born people in from another part of the country, then you are just stealing the people and all of this sort of consumption from another part of your same country.

I’d imagine many of them are immigrants that either fled, were deported, or decided not to return for the picking seasons.

Higher wages means higher prices. At a certain point your price is uncompetitive with imports. You can use tariffs to protect a local product against an imported one, but that would require a competent leader who doesn't get emotional and declare a war (bomb-based or trade-based) when his feelings are hurt

Technically yes, but it still isn't a quick fix. Seasonal and temporary workers still need other seasonal work or jobs that let them leave for seasonal work and need the capital investment to be able to travel for work and live at different farms. A single seasonal job paying good won't by itself get someone to invest into van-life, its maybe 2 months out of 12 and not entirely predictable work/profit just from yield variability. And most modern jobs don't let someone leave for weeks at a time to work elsewhere, atleast not any that are near the price range of basic physical labor.

You also lose a significant amount of productivity from first-timers in any process, and other full-time jobs taking away your expe

Depends on the staffing issue, but many cant be solved by raising wages without going out of business.

Not every industry has tech level profits.