Yes. It is estimated that for produce, like lettuce, labor accounts for only 10% of the final cost. So if a head of lettuce cost a dollar, and we decided we had to double the wages paid to pick the lettuce, a head a lettuce would then cost a whopping $1.10. Triple it and you’re up to $1.20. Some foods, like nuts, have a labor cost of about 30%, but most produce is just 10%.
I realize that I’m just a product of the American educational system so my maths aren’t as good as some Mexican laborers, but isn’t what you just said the same thing as saying “The cost of lettuce would go up by 20%”? That sounds serious - like the kind of thing that could have ramifications for the economy if it were magnified on a national scale and applied to all other crops like corn and wheat, etc.
But it’s an irrelevant point anyway, since its not really the wages of immigrant labor that make them popular and necessary, as already noted. Its their willingness to work, their work ethic, their general education level and past experience. Top of the list - just their willingness to work. You can’t fill several buses every morning in a US city with hard workers who are ready to get up at 4 AM and go work in the fields for a meager wage and also be reliable, consistent, hard workers. You could fill any number of hundreds, or thousands, of those buses up in Mexico every single day with people willing to risk their lives and leave their families just for such a golden opportunity.
As long as Americans are unwilling to do the work, someone will take the jobs and it isn’t about salaries. If they tripled the wages there would still be unemployed ‘consultants’ and ‘HR associates’ sitting at home on the internet, milking their unemployment until they manage to find the next, perfect, sweet gig with good benefits. They all really can go out and meet the buses at 5 AM and go pick fruit, right now - they don’t want to, and they wouldn’t do it for triple the standard pay.
Just because not everybody would do that work, doesn’t mean no one would do it.
Certainly but those who would, apparently, aren’t making themselves known to the hiring managers. Because the jobs are there and they go on every day. Triple the wages, and you might convince some to take a job they hate just for the money. Sometimes, when they really have to. Like all other employers they are hoping to find consistent, reliable and even enthusiastic people to work for them.
And the smiling brazeros do it because they love that kind of work? There is a wage below which even they won’t work.
Yes, they love having work. Liking or not liking the work isn’t really something considered by most workers in the world, and that gets right to the point.
But again it doesn’t matter, quadruple the wages, 4 times minimum wage, and advertise the jobs with instructions to meet the buses at 4:30 AM. You will have fruit rotting in the fields across the country while people on unemployment complain that immigrants are taking away all the jobs.
Maybe, but not for the reason you are saying. Most of the vacated jobs would not need to be filled because, with 11 million less mouths to feed and bodies to cloth, you have a lot less demand for goods and services, and thus a lot less need for workers. A lot of low income US citizens would be laid off from places like supermarkets and dollar stores because the customers had gone back to Mexico and Guatemala and Ireland. (Just as middle class Americans who manage those stores, and drive trucks to service those stores, and manufacture food for those stores, would lose their jobs.)
Me too.
Now, if I was hungry enough, I guess that would change. But so long as we are going to have any kind of safety net, I’m with you. I can’t take the hot sun and am convinced of (and a little ashamed of) my inability to do it.
To some extent, crops would have to be picked by machine at higher cost. And, to a larger extent, we would just import more of our food.
It’s not obvious to me. People who entered the US, or remain here, illegally, have an unusally low incareceration rate. They pay taxes but are less likely to receive services, whether it be social security disability benefits, or even stuff I do like going on a White House tour or borrowing library materials for the Kindle. So I’m going to say that loss of the part of their taxpaying that goes to support prisons, minus the cost of incarecerating a small number of them, may net out to an economic harm to citizens like myself.
That would be $30/hr. There wouldn’t be enough buses to handle the turnout.
You really think 11 million of them? Every day, ongoing? I would be very interested to see it happen but I doubt it. I think we’d see fields full of very happy immigrants and Americans still saying immigrants are stealing all the jobs, when we are really saying “Its worth it. I don’t want to go out in the fields and pick fruit even for 50.00 an hour”. Of course in the real world there is no reason they should offer 4 times the standard wages. Even minimum wage is a bounty worth risking life and limb for among millions of able and ready workers just lining up for the chance. It seems a little arrogant for an American who is unable to find any other work to demand four times the minimum wage before even considering work that isn’t worth that much by any standard, not just immigrant standards.
Americans who are willing to work for the standard wage that those jobs offer, or skilled jobs that require education and experience, are under qualified and have higher expectations than their immigrant counterparts.
Businesses all over the world, our own government, and employers of immigrants, all say the same thing - they can’t find enough Americans who are both qualified, and willing, to fill the jobs that they have available.
Maybe yes, maybe no. But since nobody would offer the $30/hr, what’s the point? In the OP scenario, we just expelled millions of people, most commonly to Mexico. The Mexicans would have little choice but to farm marginal land down there, for less money than they made here, so that the crops can be exported northwards. Crops rotting in the field? This would only happen if the mass expulsion of undocumented workers was instantaneous, instead of, as is actually happening, more gradual. Over a period of years, we would switch to a some combination of greater farm automation and increased food importation.
Come on now this is America if one source of cheap exploitable labor goes away we’ll find another, it’s what we’ve always done.
Pass legislation to go back to prison labor on large scales, create some new draconian laws to force the less desirables into prison and with a few years we’ll have a whole new crop of slave labor.
Increasing wages and costs are out of the question when we can maintain our lifestyles on the backs of others.
Every single undocumented immigrant I know works in blue-collar jobs, restaurant jobs, or cleaning. (I must say, it pays to have kiddos in the food industry. Free dishes. :D)
No one is in the fields, and as their children grow up in American schools and in the American standard of living, uh, they definitely aren’t headed to pick tomatoes.
And those jobs even more so than farm jobs are available right now, at fair American wages, to the public at large. Nobody is stealing the job they are just doing the job. Farm workers, railroads, construction, food service - basically anywhere there is work going on, you will find immigrants delighted to have a chance to do it. And they will have a generally better looking resume for the work than a typical citizen who is in a position to be looking for that same work.
No it isn’t; in places like Arizona you have thousands of workers leaving both legal and illegal.
The fact of the matter is no matter what people want to pretend, the illegal immigration issue is in reality primarily a race issue. In the OP’s scenario you will see massive fear among Hispanics no matter how legal they are, and a great deal of harassment of racial minorities. Because that’s the point.
For example, as of 2005 they were paying 7 billion a year into Social Security.
While I am definitely on the side of compassion for undocumented workers, the issue is a bit more complicated. Because undocumented workers are easily exploited, their presence can depress wages. This is the most plausible explanation for the big difference in janitor’s wages between Los Angeles, where there are many workers here illegally, and New York City, where it it is quite hard to get such jobs without high-quality ID. From the New York Times, 2006:
The answer is not mass expulsion, but amnesty combined with stronger employer sanctions to reduce hiring of exploitable workers.
Is this one of America’s most urgent challenges? No. Draconian solutions would be worse than the problem.
I don’t think the wages of illegal field workers is as low as many think. Nor are the wages of illegal construction workers.
What leads you to believe this is an issue of the immigration status of the workforce rather than the relative strength of unions in the two places? There’s certainly no shortage of immigrant workers with no legal status in NYC.
The US is a welfare state that “levels up” the standard of living of people to a certain level. Although illegal immigrants are not eligible for some kinds of public assistance, they still benefit from the progressive tax system that ensures the poor pay very little for public goods like roads, schools, prisons, healthcare in certain situations, etc. As a result there is some income level below which a person is a net cost to other workers whether he is here legally or not. An illegal immigrant above that level is a net benefit and one below it is not.
Well, since you obviously hang out with the underemployed youth–how many of them have actually applied for those jobs?
The main problem with US born workers [those whose parents, grandparents were the legal immigrants] is they are being educated and told by their parent/s grandparents that they are essentially too good for manual labor. Remember the whole “I came to the US and scrimped and saved so you could go to college and get an education so you wouldn’t have to do a manual job like me …” bullshit? Being informed that “get an education, get a high paying job” and the whole school/high school essentially forcing kids into the mold of “go to college, get an office job, get married, have kids” instead of having the ones with the upper end of mental capacity being channeled to college and those with lesser mental capacity being channeled into vocational education.
It is as if manual labor is dirty, not suitable for US born people … for immigrants and illegal immigrants only.
[I got put to work in a manual labor job, as did my brother long before I ever went to college or ended up in office jobs. I personally see nothing wrong with reorganizing school to at about the age of 12/13 running all the kids through several batteries of tests to decide university track or vocational track.]