Which is kind of my point. Maybe they won’t stick entirely to migrant labor if able to legally immigrate, but, as both you and @74westy describe, it will hardly be some seismic change to the American job market. Many of the jobs they might expand into are still very much the kind that will expand commensurate with the population. So a growth in those kind of workers isn’t such a shock to the system if it accompanies a growth in population.
I would argue that neither option is inherently morally superior. Therefore we should look at outcomes.
Whatever option ensures that more people have access to affordable, healthy, and varied food sources, that we can survive bad harvests, and that maximizes other things we view as good, such as the freedom for people to do as they’d like, would be superior.
It seems to me that reducing the labor requiried for food production would reduce the scarcity of food. Other considerations, like how the food that is produced is distributed, also need to be taken into account, but that can be an issue even when most of the population is involved in food production (see: feudalism). So I don’t see these issues as directly related to who is producing the food.
This. So much this.
Oh, I agree.
It seems that where we disagree is how best to accomplish that. But that would I think be a topic for another thread; which I don’t feel like starting, at least not right now.
Here’s the issue- you are paid by how many bushels/etc you pick- if you do not perform, you are not hired. Leisurely picking berries for a couple of hours can be fun (for me, it was blackberries) . But one time I went out for a day helping gleaners pick almonds. Afterwards, I needed a chiropractor, 4 ibuprofen, a jacuzzi, and a nap- and I was sore for days.
And we’re currently trying to get the job done with not enough people; which is why, in order to make enough money, it’s necessary to work too fast.
Plus which, of course, most of the money isn’t going to the harvesters, but to someone else somewhere along the chain. Some of that’s unavoidable, but the current system exacerbates it.
Of course. If you try to spend an entire day doing anything physical – whether sport or labor – that you’re not accustomed to, you’re going to feel awful afterwards, and most of the time during.
Which is one reason I said you can’t turn out random office workers or modern high school students and expect them to get a crop in. Your body needs to learn muscle skills, and also to have time and practice in order to strengthen the specific muscles a particular job calls for.
Again – I used to train farm interns. I didn’t have them on the same job all day, and I tried to ease them into the work; but they’d be exhausted, if not sore, for several days. And then, on about the fourth day, I’d hear them start saying “I feel great!” even though they were doing more work, not less, than they had been. (They’d also suddenly start eating a lot more than they were used to. Building muscle takes calories.)
I think we could look at the refugee and family immigration situation to get an idea of what open immigration would be like. Refugee immigration is when the US allows large groups of people from troubled countries to come to the US. Family immigration is when a native or naturalized citizen brings over a foreign relative. Looking at those immigrants, they generally don’t seem to go into migrant farm labor. They get typical jobs like store clerk, mechanic, maintenance person, etc. If they don’t speak English, they get jobs in places where they can speak their native language. For instance, many Ukrainian refugees went to the Ukrainian sections of various US cities, like the East Village in NYC. They have normal jobs working in Ukrainian restaurants, hair salons, real estate offices, etc. It seems like immigrants coming over from an open immigration program would be pretty much the same. They’d stay with family or go to a city where they best fit in and find a typical job.
Oh bullshit. There was a time when I would have.
I remember in 2008, McCain argued that Americans wouldn’t take those jobs, even for $50 an hour.
Ten years earlier, I’d been making $26,800 a year teaching at a small Christian college. That’s the equivalent of $12.88 an hour. I’d have jumped at the opportunity to do field labor for $50/hour. In fourteen weeks of hard labor, I’d have made more money than I was earning in a full year of teaching.
Since then, I’ve been in a much more remunerative career, so I’d have no interest in that now. (Not to mention, I’m nearly 70 years old, and the body can’t deal with as much shit as it once could.) But the notion that you couldn’t get Americans to do that sort of work at any pay is bullshit.
It’s part of the idea that certain types of people (generally aligned with skin color) are better suited to certain types of work. They’re only really comfortable with immigrants if they can treat them like beasts of burden.
Well, sure, if you set no realistic ceiling on the pay. Not sure what acknowledging that proves other than a technical, pedantic point. That Americans generally won’t do certain types of work at any pay level that’s economically viable seems like a testable assertion.
Anyway, if we have to pay strawberry pickers $50 / hour, ain’t nobody gonna see any strawberries at their supermarket any time soon.
I’m missing what this has to do with a debate on the unsustainable immigration quota elimination idea which fortunately has no chance of being tried. But wages do go up, in both higher wage and lower wage countries. As they go up in higher wage countries, there will be more imported strawberries in first world markets, and more use of mechanical pickers. Switching from human picking, to somewhat higher paid device configuration, repair and manufacturing jobs, and much higher paid mechanical and software engineering jobs, is both inevitable and positive.
Farmers have tried several times. There are even articles about it, if you want to search.
No one is saying “at any pay”. Farmers work on a small edge, they simply cant afford to pay what pampered Americans would want for that sort of work.
Hmmmmm
You’re right. John McCain didn’t say “at any pay.” He specifically said $50/hour. He was not ‘no one.’ He was, at the time, the GOP nominee for President of the United States.
And you yourself said that even if wages were improved, Americans still wouldn’t do those jobs. So I said that if they were improved to the level that McCain said Americans still wouldn’t do those jobs at, then yes, this American would have.
Now if you want to take up your argument with John McCain, you’re welcome to visit his grave and shout at it a bit.
And that is correct. Any sort of reasonable wages that still allows the farmer to make a profit.
$50 an hour is a fantasy .
If wages went up across the board, so would prices and there’s be fewer strawberries sold. But i doubt it would drop to zero. And wages for crop pockets are a very small portion of the cost of food. Transportation, storage, distribution, marketing… I think those are all larger components.
Certainly. But first of all, they dont pay by the hour, they pay by the bushel, etc.
And a modest increase might not hurt, but quadruple?
It’s not going to be quadruple the price in the grocery store. That’ll go up, sure; but not by anywhere near that much. Not even for strawberries, for which the labor cost is a higher percentage than for most crops.
The question to be answered for strawberries (or for any product) is, how tight are the margins? There is no shortage of contemptibly greedy corporations willing to exploit desperate workers just so they can get an 18% ROI instead of 15%. There is likewise an abundance of businesses with very tight margins where any substantial increase in labor cannot be sustained.
This is further complicated by how elastic the demand for the product is. For some products, even a relatively minor increase in price will decrease demand to a point where suppliers are no longer interested in investing their capital to produce.
The point is that a one-size-fits-all solution of “just pay more if you want to attract employees” is naive. It is indisputable that a large enough wage increase would get American workers into industries they currently have no interest in. The devil is in the details as to whether or not this is anything other than a self-evident assertion.
If hand-picked produce gets too expensive to pick in the US, then crops which are hand-picked will be yet another industry which moves to other countries. US farming may eventually just be the crops in which a handful of workers can harvest hundreds of acres on their own with the help of million-dollar machinery, such as corn and wheat. It will be similar to how the US lost many industries to countries with lower labor costs, such as textiles, chip manufacturing, parts manufacturing, etc. There may be some specialized production still in the US, but for the most part, these products made for general consumption are manufactured in other countries and imported here.
As long as we as a society value low prices above all other considerations that will be true. And as long as business profits are seen as more valuable than are take-home wages this will be true.
Both of those things are political / economic decisions, not immutable physics.