This is from the NYT, about a farmer who tried to hire American workers rather than illegal immigrants:
Six hours was enough, between the 6 a.m. start time and noon lunch break, for the first wave of local workers to quit. Some simply never came back and gave no reason. Twenty-five of them said specifically, according to farm records, that the work was too hard. On the Harold farm, pickers walk the rows alongside a huge harvest vehicle called a mule train, plucking ears of corn and handing them up to workers on the mule who box them and lift the crates, each weighing 45 to 50 pounds.
The article is interesting throughout. See also Alex’s earlier post, for some added interpretation.
So much for rolling up the shirtsleeves.
This does not bode well for America’s hopes to regain it’s lost greatness.
A few obvious points. First, 96% of illegals don’t work in agriculture. Second, According to the Pew Hispanic Center 47% of crop workers in the U.S. are legal. Perhaps more relevantly, 71% of midwestern crop workers are legal. Somehow America manages to produce food, even in the bleak, barren, and unproductive midwest. Third, illegals are the cliche example of privitising profits and socializnig losses. A quote from a recent article by Ron Unz should suffice.
“Most immigrants, especially illegal ones, work at relatively low paid jobs, and the various taxes they pay simply cannot cover their share of the (extremely inflated) costs of America’s governmental structure, notably schooling. Furthermore, for exactly this same reason of relative poverty, they receive a disproportionate share of those government programs aimed at benefiting the working poor, ranging from tax credits to food stamps to rental subsidies. Immigration critics have persuasively argued that the current system amounts to the classic case of economic special interests managing to privatize profits while socializing costs, wherein immigrant employers receive the full benefits of the labor done by their low-wage workforce while pushing many of the costs—including explicit income subsidies—onto the taxpayers.”
Fourth, the plural of anecdote is not data. Philip Martin (America’s leading agricultural economist) studied “farm labor shortages” a few years ago (2007). He found scant evidence. See “Farm Labor Shortages: How Real? What Response” (http://bit.ly/rnUQDd)
“For several years stories in the media have reported a farm labor shortage. This study examines this question and finds little evidence to support this conclusion. First, fruit and vegetable production is actually rising. Second,wages for farm workers have not risen dramatically. Third, household expenditure on fresh fruits and vegetables has remain relatively constant, averaging about $1 a day for the past decade.”
That was back in 2007. Have farm wages risen recently? Any marketplace evidence of labor scarcity? Why is that the laws of supply and demand are instantly forgotten whenever the dogma of Open Borders is challenged?
Peter Schaeffer: Destroyer of Narratives
Yeah, normally long comments are just rants, but that was an absolute takedown.
“the plural of anecdote is not data”
Ah, but it is: http://www.freakonomics.com/2010/04/29/quotes-uncovered-whats-the-plural-of-anecdote/
GS,
Sorry, but anecdotes aren’t data. It they were, we could conclude that all illegals have Ph.Ds (see http://chronicle.com/article/Academic-Purgatory/127970/ although it may be a parody) or are serial killers who murder by the dozens (Angel Maturino Resendiz). Perhaps both. Really deadly Ph.Ds.
I will note in passing that the possible illegal alien Ph.D wrote his dissertation on Spanish-language popular culture. His Ph.D is in Hispanic studies.
Sorry yourself, Peter, but anecdotes are data.
The *accumulation* of anecdotes is a *collection* of data. Note the tense of the verb. “Accumulation” is the subject of that sentence, not “anecdotes,” and “collection” is the predicate nominative, not “data.” Each anecdote is a datum (singular).
We are trained not to draw general conslustions from a few specific “datums.” But if you want to use “data” as a plural noun, then anecdotes are, indeed, data.
Maybe the plural of anecdote is “bad data.”
What Ken said.
Peter, would you extrapolate from a single point of datum?
GS,
“Peter, would you extrapolate from a single point of datum?”
I try rather hard not to. I look for aggregate statistics where possible. Am I always successful? No. I have referenced the Tappan Zee bridge numerous times even though it is only one data point (and said as much). I would much prefer an urban construction cost index that goes back to the 50s or at least a pool of apples-to-apples projects.
No such luck so far.
Peter, how’s that cognitive dissonance working out for ya?
Hey Peter, that horse ain’t going to get any deader no matter how much you keep beating it.
What? The horse died? Who knew?
LOL. No matter, the horse was in this country illegally.
Whoa now, hold on – “bleak, barren, and unproductive midwest”? You mean the area that grows most of the corn, soybeans, and wheat in the country?
el, update your browser. It’s not picking up the [sarcasm] tags.
In all seriousness, how reliable is data collected on illegals?
I worry at the macro level, if not for illegals, where will our growth come from? Growth is linked to birth rates for centuries, and they’re declining. Japan’s stagnation was as much a factor of low birth rates AND LOW IMMIGRATION rates. US has historically been a growth society, since we’ve had the highest birth rates and recently, high immigration.
How do we solve our economic problems without growth? More tax cuts? Should we just dissolve the union in your view? I really should read the Great Stagnation, I can’t recall hearing Tyler’s solution now.
Getting the heck out of agriculture happens in all societies. You’ll see this pattern everywhere, including China, India, Vietnam, Korea, Japan, and everywhere else. Once people manage to get established outside agriculture, they don’t go back to the fields without some massive disaster. In some places such as China, they’ll work in the cities for awhile and go back to their hometowns, but they’ll start little businesses in the town, not go back to the fields.
I agree with the NYT. If the job consists of long hours doing backbreaking labor, we should have poor, desperate brown people do it under the table and in the shadows, where the employers are not subject to any kind of OSHA oversight or union protection.
It’s the humane thing to do.
Well, apparently you good ole boy conservative redneck types are too pussy to do it yourselves.
So, what you are saying is people should be free to work for whatever wage they choose?
There must be 0% unemployment in farm states.
Conservative welfare queens should be forced to work.
“There must be 0% unemployment in farm states.”
Close enough for government work. (That’s like a triple-pun or something….)
http://data.bls.gov/map/MapToolServlet?survey=la
I hear this crap all the time. I know plenty of conservative rednecks employed in dirty, dangerous work that John McCain says they won’t do.
Just not crop pickin’ I guess.
Too pussy.
Probably too mindless for all but an 86 IQ workforce which, given the enormous net tax consumption of such a demographic, would surely augur in favor of automation. Or comparative trade advantage with a country that has such an abundance of low MP workers that automation isn’t worth it. How is that advantage realized if I import the Third World here?
That doesn’t even make any sense. What does marginal product have to do with vagina?
Most people don’t know this, but the U.S. has a visa program for agricultural workers. It’s the H-2A program. Apparently, there are no limits on H-2A visa. However, growers don’t like it. See below for why.
From Wikipedia.
“An H-2A visa allows a foreign national entry into the U.S. for temporary or seasonal agricultural work. There are several requirements of the employer in regards to this visa. The H-2A temporary agricultural program establishes a means for agricultural employers who anticipate a shortage of domestic workers to bring nonimmigrant foreign workers to the U.S. to perform agricultural labor or services of a temporary or seasonal nature.[1] Currently in the United States there are about 30,000 temporary agricultural workers under this visa program. All of these workers are supposed to be covered by U.S. wage laws, workers’ compensation and other standards.[2]”
Imagine having to obey (or at least pretend) wage, workers’ compensation, and other laws. Why bother when you have disposable illegals?
“Employers anticipating a shortage of agricultural workers and in need must apply at least 45 days before certification is necessary. This includes a requirement of an active effort, including newspaper and radio advertising, to recruit U.S. workers in areas of expected labor supply. Such recruitment must be at least equivalent to that conducted by non-H-2A agricultural employers in the same or similar crops and area. The employer must agree to give preference and engage in active recruitment of U.S. workers.”
Imagine the hassle of having to plan in advance. No one should have to bear such a burden.
“The employer must provide free housing to all workers who are not reasonably able to return to their homes or residences the same day. Such housing must be inspected and approved according to appropriate standards. The housing provided by the employer must meet all of the Department of Labor Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) standards that were set forth at CFR 1910.142 or the full set of standards at 654.404-645.417.[8]
An alternative form of housing is rental housing, which has to meet local or state health and safety standards. In North Carolina, the current state standards include no provision for locks on doors and windows, 75 ft3 per person or 27 people per refrigerator, one wash tub per 30 people with hot and cold water, facilities for drying clothes; there are no sanitary requirements for mattresses provided, 1 toilet/15 people or 1 urinal/25 men, and 1 shower per 10 people with no privacy stalls.[9]
The employer must either provide three meals a day to each of the workers or furnish free and convenient cooking and kitchen for workers to prepare and cook their own meals. If the employer provides the meals, then the employer has the right to charge each worker a certain amount per day for the three meals.[10]”
Imagine having workers who aren’t forced to live in caves or shantytowns. That socialism.
Read it all over at “H-2A Visa” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-2A_Visa)
Did you read the freaking article? Obviously not, because your post is the SUBJECT OF THE ARTICLE.
C,
“Did you read the freaking article?”
Yes, I did. I was responding to the TC blog post. Let me quote from TC
“This is from the NYT, about a farmer who tried to hire American workers rather than illegal immigrants”
In other words, the usual lines about “jobs Americans won’t do” and “the world comes to an end without illegals”. As you correctly point out, the farmer in question has successfully used H-@A workers who are not illegals. That’s the point. Farmers have choices. They can pay higher wages and/or use the H-2A program. Illegals are a criminal exercise in expediency.
yes, and like Prohibition it’s a stupid law that they’re trying to throw money and morality at. It’s doomed to failure, in part because it makes otherwise honest farmers into criminals. And let’s not consider the parallels to marijuana and prohibition. The rural states are hardly bastions of Christian morality, as the GOP seems to dress them up.
At the orchard I worked at one summer, there were only two americans there for the summer (despite a huge sign on a local highway) and pay by the piece (that worked out about double what most starting jobs paid, if you were dilligent). Two college kids worked for two weeks, but screwed up pretty majorly the first day (ruining their entire first day’s production). They’d have lasted longer but one burst an eardrum cliff diving. They had a small handfull in the apricot packing plant for about 2-3 weeks.
I’ve never worked so hard in my life. I hauled 35lb totes of cherries from about 5 til 2-3 in the afternoon. Usually 2 at a time, after everyone hired for that job quit.
Maybe it’s not that the work is too hard, but that the pay is too low.
And the cost of working is pretty high. This is not racist. They carpool.
“each weighing 45 to 50 pounds”: aw diddums. I used to lift 112lb sacks in my summer job when I was 15. Mainly I moved them around on a trolley, but when I got “there” I often had to lift ‘em. They were filled with cement – dear God it was filthy work – cement in every pore. But it paid well for a youngster.
Hard physical work takes getting used to. Nonetheless, I suspect we’re not suffering from a huge structural unemployment problem oriented around the corn-picking sector.
Yep, clearly couldn’t get natives to do that work by, er, paying more. The laws of supply and demand are universal, except when they could be used to argue we should admit fewer unskilled workers to a country that’s rapidly losing all its unskilled jobs. Just ask open borders economists, a group that’s basically all economists, not because the open borders arguments are impossibly strong (though there are clearly some strong arguments on the immigrant welfare side) but because academics would much rather be intellectually dishonest than be disowned by all their peers. A Third-World society is a small price to pay for the right to write in the NY Times.
Which laws of supply & demand are those — the ones where demand is upward sloping (if worth hiring someone to do for $7, it’s got to be worth hiring someone for $11!) or the ones where all people have identical skills and tastes for work?
If a job doesn’t produce enough benefit to pay decent wages to those who do it, then there’s no reason it should be done. I have plenty of work for a full time maid and would gladly hire one for $2 an hour, but I don’t have some divine right to get work done for me at the price I feel like paying for it, particularly not when other Americans would have to pay for my cheapness with Medicaid and other subsidies for the people I underpaid. Farmers don’t have some divine right to get work done at the cost they’d like to pay for it either. If you want to make the argument that this should be done at a federal level some some farmers don’t have advantages over others, I’d agree with you. But the federal government has made it clear that it has no interest in helping unskilled natives or taxpayers by limiting the increase in unskilled labor.
I think the point is that some unemployment exists because people would rather have no job than a crappy job.
No one is arguing you have a right to have whatever price you want (well, not counting you, anyway). They’re arguing that if they’re willing to hire someone for $7 but not $14, and someone is willing to do it for $7, then you shouldn’t say “it shouldn’t be done!” because you think the divine right is things should cost at least $14 or not at all (at least if it’s the right group of people who want the $14)
Sure. But if you do that, and allow hiring foreigners for any price they’re willing to work for, it follows that any job will get done, no matter how low the price as long as there exists, somewhere on earth, a human willing to work for that price.
There’s plenty of people on earth who would jump at the opportunity to be a $2/hour maid in a wealthy first-world country. Seeing as you can’t live on that, they’d actually live from $2/hour + various tax-payer-paid support-systems.
Why should it be your right to have a cheap maid – and to force me (and all other tax-payers) to pay for her upkeep ?
I agree you should be able to hire anyone – aslong as a full-time-job pays *atleast* sufficient that no public support is needed. $10/hour is on the order of $1600/month with a normal work-year, and that’s borderline – it’s sufficient that you can live on it, atleast in cheaper parts of the country and being frugal, perhaps.
But $2 is right out.
Gunnar, that sounds like an argument for reducing gov’t assistance and transfer payments (and taken seriously, more an argument for reducing them for natives than immigrants, as Americans are less likely to believe they can live on $7 an hour). It’s not really an argument for forbidding mutually beneficial trade on general principle.
And I’m not really sure it actually goes terribly far towards arguing for reducing gov’t assistance when we’re talking about illegal immigrants, as the net effect on public expenditures less taxes is pretty small.
increasing wages will increase the cost of the final product. but this won’t really make the prices of the goods go up, since there are plenty of other sellers in the market too, but it does make the farmer think twice about continuing his business. if wages increase there will be fewer employers who will be capable of paying that amount and the soon market will be back to its 9% unemployment equilibrium!
soon the* market
k,
See “Farm Labor Shortages: How Real? What Response” (http://bit.ly/rnUQDd). The final price impact of higher wages is very, very small.
“Labor costs comprise only 6 percent of the price consumers pay for fresh produce. Thus, if farm wages were allowed to rise 40 percent, and if all the costs were passed on to consumers, the cost to the average household would be only about $8 a year.
Mechanization could offset higher labor costs. After the “Bracero” Mexican guestworker program ended in the mid-1960s, farm worker wages rose 40 percent, but consumer prices rose relatively little because the mechanization of some crops dramatically increased productivity.”
If ONE farm tries to pass on those costs to the consumer, it will go out of business. The difference between the wages migrant farm workers will accept, and those natives will accept, is the difference between pricing competitively and selling 0 units.
NY,
“If ONE farm tries to pass on those costs to the consumer, it will go out of business”
Yes, that’s why we have laws. Laws that should be uniformly enforced.
If the farmer had a shortage of labor, his tone would have been different.
Wouldn’t creating such a worker shortage be analogous to breaking some sulphur scrubbers?
I picked grapes one week during high school in the Central Valley of CA for my uncle in August or Sept. It was hellish. The Temp was well over a hundred degrees, and the dust or whatever got caked on my arms, which felt like the insides of a crock pot. Another time, I went out with a friend of mine and his grandfather for a couple days, only to discover that his grandfather worked about four times faster than we did. It made my job as a janitor in my father’s bars, which wasn’t all that fun either, seem relatively easy. I’m pretty sure it was around this time that I started to think about going to college.
I cannot believe that readers on this comment thread are using the “pay is too low” excuse. No – the problem isn’t that the pay is to low – it’s that the benefits received by unemployed people are too high. No reason to do real work when you can get paid not to.
That makes a nice narrative. Now all you need is data to support it.
you’re right – I should have made it explicit. this is my claim:
when faced with two choices:
a) work hard in the fields or
b) collect a check from the government
American workers are highly incentivized to choose b.
If the two choices were
a) work hard in the fields or
b) not have any way to put food on the table for you and your family.
I am quite confident that the choice would shift to a. Do you disagree? And I believe there is ample data to support my assertion – related to people finding jobs when their benefits run out.
I believe in most states you are not eligible for unemployment benefits when you quit a job. From wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unemployment_benefits) “Generally, the worker must be unemployed through no fault of his/her own (generally through lay-offs).”
I believe the choice is not between hard work and unemployment benefits, it’s more between $10/hr in the onion fields and $7/hr at McDonalds.
right – I’m guessing what happens is that the workers in question in this article are collecting UI already, see this farm job, go try it, quit right away (too hard!) and never stop collecting their benefits.
Presumably some who took these jobs had already had their benefits run out. The relevant question to your hypothesis is, did they stick around or quit regardless?
How about this?
http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2009/11/poverty-trap.html
There are two sides the the equation, right? The lack of unemployment benefits and unemployment insurance taxes is also part of the total cost of employing illegal immigrants. This is after all why the politician who hires the babysitter or cleaning lady gets in trouble.
So maybe Unz’s minimum wage proposal is a good idea after all
This is not work that should be done by Americans or illegals. This is work that should *not* be done by human beings anymore. Period. The faster the farm robots become a reality, the better.
Berry picking robot:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V4HnFgqvIKk
Wired article:
http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2007/06/robo_picker?currentPage=all
Why jibs, that’s just crazy talk. Next thing you’ll be telling me is that cotton can be picked by some sort of “harvesting machine” instead of a team of stout darkies from the Charleston slave market.
I’m a bit curious about this myself. You see, I grew up on a farm, and we farmers have had these things called “combines” for almost a century. You ride them through the field, and they cut the corn stalk, strip the ears, shell the ears, spit the cobs & husks out the back & store the kernels in a bin. You might want to look into getting one of those.
Having said that, it was, (and I bet it still is) almost impossible to do serious milo rouging by machine. That was nasty work. And no, even the neighbor kids wouldn’t work as hard as the Mexicans did. It took me a while to figure out why–turns out that I considered the field mine & that was a powerful motivator.
RWN,
I grew up in an agricultural area (Indiana) and I never heard any mention of “milo rouging”. Milo appears to be another name for what we called sorghum. It wasn’t a major crop in the area, but I did see it. I never did any farm work as a kid. However, I did a lot of landscaping (building walls out of railroad ties).
Quite a bit of work has been done on mechanizing sorghum production. See “Study on the mechanization of sweet sorghum cultivation” (http://www.fao.org/docrep/T4470E/t4470e06.htm). It’s worth noting that the U.S. government stopped funding farm mechanization research under Carter. The racial special interest group felt that it was threatening their jobs.
I’m talking about the work of going through the field to chop the shatter cane. Cane seed is almost the same size as milo/sorghum, and the plants are nearly identical until the cane outgrows the milo. But the cane drops seed before the milo is ready, so it will quickly turn into thickets if not aggressively cut out. Since running equipment through the field damages the crop, you need to have a very highly efficient alternative. There were experiments with herbicide on rollers mounted on a high-lift, but the drip-off hurt yields a lot.
Milo has sharp leaves that will cut you. It also has a very sticky sap. So, you walk from one end of a field to another (figure 1/4 mile) with no water, but carrying a machete’. You either wear clothes that are too heavy for the heat to keep the milo off, or just live with the cuts & sap. (I always did the latter.)
You can rotate wheat onto a field for two years to control the cane, but most years the milo pays a lot better. You can try running corn to put off the wheat years, but I’ve seen corn headers get fouled by cane. I’m certain that the economics varies by region, too. Where I grew up, rain was 17″/year.
Who the hell harvests corn by hand anymore?
Anyway we still have huge agricutural barries to importing Brazlian corn, so let’s get rid of those first.
Sweetcorn is still harvested by hand last I checked.
Doc: I just checked “sweetcorn harvest” on google. It’s not.
Immigration is such an appalling blind spot it’s funny. Ph.D. economists become instant Luddites lobbying for Third World levels of investment per worker when the subject comes up.
*Some* sweet corn is still harvested by hand. If you’re a smallholder selling organic corn at the local farmers’ markets for fifty or seventy-five cents an ear, it makes sense to pick a few hundred by hand just so you get some really nice looking ears. Done it myself. Back in 1983 when I got my first job, packing corn, they were still harvesting by hand even for a much larger operation (using Cambodian immigrant labor); but that, I suppose, is mechanized by now. Anyway, the point is that mechanization moves down from large to medium to small scale rather gradually.
You see these stories every so often in papers across the country. The vast majority of Americans have forgotten how to do this sort of work. In my neck of the woods we’ve had fields lay fallow for two years now, as the farmers can’t get people to pick. We made national news two years ago as a farmer just said the heck with it and told people to come out and pick what they want.
Best,
D
It’s not just the US. A few years ago I read a similar story about farmers in the UK struggling to fill their positions with domestic workers. I can’t find the story anymore, but this one is similar.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/8533172.stm
I noticed this from your link:
“If wages went up, rather than employing more British people, automation would increase.”
That’s what I can’t understand about the immigration debate. I assume Tyler, Alex and their readers are familiar with capital investment per worker in the industrialized world and can rebut the Luddite fallacy. But when it comes to immigration, apparently we’re all Luddites now, and the industrialized world needs to match Third World levels of investment per worker.
What’s the motivation for this? Is ethnic diversity such a positive good that no level of cost and rent-seeking is a concern? Are all these low MP workers supposed to bail out our bankrupt social safety nets for us–because immigrants never get old and sick and always pay taxes? What? I just see no advantage to a higher median IQ country importing millions of people from a lower median IQ country.
Because you need the wombs….In Humans Being, reproductive biology trumps IQ, except in forums where elites argue among themselves
Much of this work on produce farms is now done via “contractors”.
A contractor contacts a farmer and says he will provide x number of people for 10 hours per day at cost Y. The farmer pays the contractor who is supposed to pay the workers. The contractor provides meals, lodging, and transportation to the workers. That is the theory.
In reality, we have re-created the migrant worker scenario from The Grapes of Wrath with a middleman between the growers and workers while adding true indentured servitude to the mix. See, the contractor is also a coyote and the workers are indebted to him or someone he works for bringing them illegally across the border. These workers are essentially slaves to the “contractor”. The growers have a hunch what is going on, but are able to deceive themselves into thinking they are not complicit.
I don’t understand the legality of thee kinds of work arrangements from the growers perspective, but I assure you they are commonplace.
RP,
“I don’t understand the legality of thee kinds of work arrangements from the growers perspective, but I assure you they are commonplace.”
They are. What you are missing is that the “The Grapes of Wrath” is now a fairy tale with a happy ending because it suits the combined interests of the cheap labor lobby and La Raza.
It seems like finding workers and matching is a high cost in this endeavor, thus the contractor. Also, immigrants are by definition already away from home so their costs of moving around are relatively lower. Together these would tend toward fairly stable migrant worker groups who are immigrants.
We are also dealing with selection bias here. You’d need to see the first-time dropout rate of immigrant workers controlled for their costs of dropping out. If you are in a house and there is one car and 10 workers, for example, you pretty much work where all the other guys work.
Honestly, I can’t believe that farmer has people pick his corn. I can understand needing cheap labor for harvesting fruit, but for corn? There have been mechanized corn pickers since the early 1900′s. After the 1950′s, combine harvesters that can be used for corn and soybeans. It seems odd to me that any farmer would have people manually picking corn, unless of course he’s Amish.
Alabama has enacted a terrible law, which will be viewed with the same contempt we currently hold for segregation. Looking further back in history to the early 1870′s, you’ll notice many similarities between what is happening against the Hispanic community and the anti-Chinese movement then.
The Amish don’t necessarily harvest corn by hand (though they would be more likely to, what with larger families and smaller scales of operation). Just today I drove by a curious horse-powered contraption that could mow and harvest one row of corn at a time, driven by an Amishman. There are a lot of ground-drive mechanical implements that the Amish use (i.e., they draw power from the wheels as the wheels are turned over the ground by the horse); less powerful than a real tractor by far, but still serviceable.
If it’s cheaper to haul in a bunch of Third Worlders and offload their costs on the public than to run harvesters, that’s what the farmer will do. Having Uncle Sugar pay you to grow corn probably distorts the business plan too.
Speaking of the Amish, why don’t those troglodytes take advantage of higher population density and immigrant labor? Really, there ought to be a law against such bigotry.
This is for sweet corn you buy on the ear. Not kernel corn cut off the cob. One is mechanically harvested, the other is not.
If the farmer can’t find enough legal people to pick his corn or berries or whatever, then he must go out of business. Why do we *need* agriculture? Why not just import more food? I am happy to eat Brazilian corn or Chinese fish or African millet or whatever.
Oh, I see, American corporations are moving jobs to Asia because we’re just too darn lazy. It has nothing to do with their lack of labor protections or poverty-level standard of living.
Germany is faring much better, with a record low rate of 6.6%. Could a German-style solution work in the U.S.? http://bit.ly/qi5LGu
So Tyler’s theory is that we would solve our unemployment woes if laid off workers (many in their 50s) whose skill set used to justify 45K/year would just be willing to work for $10/hr in the fields with no benefits or vacation (and by the way, the work is seasonal)?
This is pretty close to being immune to parody at this point. If you want to claim that there is a significant problem in the United States with people not wanting to work hard, you need to identify the set of people for whom taking this work would not represent an enormous reduction in actual or expected productivity. If we took the 4% of the workforce that is unemployed today and gave them $10/hr farm jobs how much would median wages in this country drop? If that’s the best solution you have to offer, uh, how about no thanks?
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Hey, I’m no economist, but my grandfather was in agribiz, and he would always justify the poor wages on the grounds that the Mexican laborers were actually saving up their money to spend at home, where it went way further. So, 4/hr here doing backbreaking labor, which no American would work for, would turn into a good bit more once they hit the border, depending on the exchange rate. Crazy?
Not a fair comparison. Those Mexicans who toughed it out probably grew up in pueblos or villages and were experienced farm hands. They weren’t taken advantage of by the gringo farmers, by the way. Any work on this side of the border is going to pay much, much more than Mexicans would make in their own country picking peppers and beans. Believe it or not there are still white Americans that do farm labor.
One more thing. The author is kidding himself if he thinks the majority of immigrants work on farms. It’s just not so. Many Mexicans have displaced Americans on roofing crews, construction crews, and other jobs. I don’t know how they did it but they did. I witnessed it first hand in late 2004 after Hurricane Ivan. We had plenty of locals whose jobs were blown away along with their roofs. Many contractors came in days later from out of state with crews of Latinos. Local people weren’t needed and weren’t wanted.
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