Jorge Arbusto is going to import more of the Mexican peasantry to pick crops:
The Bush administration today plans to announce the most significant overhaul in two decades of the nation's agricultural guest worker program, in a bid to dramatically increase the number of legal foreign laborers available to harvest crops.The revised regulations, many months in the works, would make it easier for growers to bring foreign workers to the United States and could alleviate the critical farmworker shortage largely caused by the U.S. crackdown on illegal border crossings.
Steve Sailer remarks:
Don't you love that phrase "chronic farm labor shortage"? It's like golf course owners complaining about the chronic daylight shortage that keeps golf courses closed an average of 12 hours per day and demanding that therefore the government must build them giant floodlights so they can stay open 24 hours per day. There is no farm labor shortage, chronic or otherwise, there's just a higher market wage than the wage the growers would prefer to pay (which, by the way, is $0.00 per hour).
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H-2A workers are paid prevailing wages set and monitored by the government. They aren't "slave wages," although admittedly not wages most people would be willing to accept for transient, seasonal work that occurs in hot agricultural fields.
So who's going to do the work, if it's not the immigrant labor force? Most teenagers now are averse to hard work, let alone low pay. We live in a materialistic society -- thanks to Reagan, Bushes, Clinton -- and there's no going back. Say what you will, but the immigrant laborers are the only ones who are willing to sacrifice for the good of their families. Perhaps we can learn a few things from them. Most people on this blog are middle-class conservative types who must yearn for the 1950s, or at least lives where they would not be burdened by the problems of the rest of the world. At what point are we called to be the Good Samaritan, or perhaps we prefer to be the rich man in the story of Lazarus.
It's hard to find studies on the internet describing what the labor cost of produce is. The only one I remember seeing was for lettuce, though, which indicated the price of non-illegal lettuce would amount to about 5c more per head.
I imagine some things would be more expensive than others. Lettuce is mechanized, I think. Still, though, it seems to me virtually all Americans would pay up to 20% more for produce if the labor was all legal, whether because they would like less illegal immigrants, or because they would like to see agricultural workers treated better.
For what it's worth, I think *both* goals need to be achieved. And heck, for $12 an hour this freelancer could probably be pursuaded to get out there every once in a while for three hours a day, two days a week.
Most teenagers now are averse to hard work, let alone low pay.
Ande, in California there is a burger chain called In'n'Out. They are far and away the best burger chain in the state. The company is family owned, not a giant franchise corporation.
If you go into an In-n-Out, the workforce will reflect the neighborhood, a lot of local kids/young adults. Hispanics in a latino neighborhood, Asians in an Asian neighborhood. When I lived in San Diego, my local In-n-Out seemed to be staffed largely by the spouses of Navy enlisted men, on enlisted guys themselves moonlighting. Generally any of these groups will be native born Americans , judging from the unaccented English they speak.
Why is this? Well In-n-Out does pay more per hour, I've seen up to $9 starting per hour, about half again Cali's minimum. But the Burgers are still cheap, no doubt because a crew turns out hundreds of them during a shift -- labor is a low per unit sold cost. Moreover, because they are private, you don't get franchisees essentially favoring one ethnic group. If you get a franchisee from Mexico, or a restaruant manager from Mexico, they are going to favor the carnales, that's just the way it is. The monoglot American born kid ain't gonna get hired.
The issue of social cost must also be addressed. The 30 year old burger flipper with two kids in school simply is not paying his way in American society. His taxes don't cover the costs of the kids in school, the free lunches, etc. Now, all work is dignified, but really we don't need to import 30 year old burger flippers so we can subsidize their households.
If we doubled the price of agricultural products, wages could be raised to the point Americans would do the picking. But are consumers going to tolerate that?
Labor costs: Table 806 of the 2008 Statistical Abstract puts total farm output for 2005 at $253e9, and employee compensation at $24.3e9. Farming isn't my area of expertise, but it appears to me that labor costs amount to a rather small percentage of farming income, and that even large (2x, 3x, 4x) increases in agricultural wages wouldn't quite double food prices.
As to what degree of food-price increases consumers would find intolerable, I plead insufficient data.
If we slashed our ag subsidies, we could look at importing more of our food from Mexico instead of uprooting their laborers.
Eliminating farm subsidies may indeed "upsize" the American market for third-world food exports - with obvious benefits for overseas farmers - but at the price of outsourcing our own food production. As with energy, there's something to be said for national self-sufficiency WRT food production - see the WWI "Starvation Blockade", or present-day Gaza. OTOH, given my druthers, I'd junk the current asinine system of farm subsidies for tariffs on food imports.
Reason recently ran a rather interesting article on guest workers:
www.reason.com/news/show/123474.html
Most notable to me were the rather draconian measures utilized by other countries to prevent their guest workers from integrating. One wonders if American advocates of guest-worker programs have such policies in mind for ensuring that such workers do indeed remain "guests".
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