Agriculture has automated tremendously. A century ago, close to 50% of the population worked on farms. Today it is <2%. That’s all due to automation. Crops like corn, wheat and soybeans are almost totally automated. But it’s proven difficult for fruit and vegetable crops to pick them without bruising. Go out to a pick your own strawberry farm and think about how difficult it would be to design a machine that could recognize the berries and pick only the ripe ones without bruising them. No one has invented one, but you are welcome to try. Let me know how you do,
Our area is a big apple growing area and I know a couple of local farmers. One hires Jamaicans (legally) who come for the season to pick and prune the trees. The same guys come every year. It’s actually skilled work and the guys who are good can make $20/hour. He once offered jobs to local kids. Only one took it and he quit at lunchtime.
Unfortunately, if you denied these farmers immigrant labor, they would shut down and you would have apples from Chile or Argentina instead of local ones, which would be a shame, not only economically, but from a culinary and nutritional standpoint, because fruit from thousands of miles away is never as good as local.
Interesting that you blame the illegal who takes a job at the low wage offered to him, instead of blaming the employer who offers the lower wage to an illegal in the first place. It is the employer who has control of this dynamic, not the worker.
Every effort to penalize or tighten controls on the industries that mainly hire these people (construction, hotels and restaurants, landscaping, meat packing, etc.) have been shot down by their lobbyists.
Good job, TPM. Way to put the clamps to the little guy. Now watch as all these companies become draconian in their practices, while Mr. Trump shrugs this off like nothing happened.
From CNN (Sunday 8/2/15):
"Effective immediately, Sam Nunberg, a Trump political adviser, is “no
longer associated with the Donald J. Trump for president campaign,”
Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski confirmed to CNN. "
This is the guy busted for describing Obama in very disparaging terms that at various times we have heard Trump himself use (not all in the same sentence as Nunberg did, however). Nunberg called Obama a Kenyan socialist, alluding to Trumps famous obsession with Obama’s birth status. Curious isn’t it that out-Trumping Trump will get ya fired?
Nobody outworked our laborers when they were paid good wages with benefits, vacation time and insurance. Once they got rid of the unions, the race to the bottom began. Yes, the Mexican laborers do work hard, as I see them around me all the time. If the employer wanted American workers, who would do just as well as anyone else, all they have to do is pay well and offer benefits. You know, help the country out, not just themselves.
