Come on over!

After last night, whether it's Clinton or Mccain, it will be the same stuff, different administration come 1/21/09.

But strange that so many Conservatives/Republicans have such vitriol for illegal aliens from Mexico but give a free pass (and even wax poetic about the strength of American capitalsim) to ruthless exploiters who are "100% American" and are basically interested in the cheapest possible labor that they can exploit and cheat. Despite recent laws looking at employers in places like Arizona, the GOP and much of the conservative chattering class (with a few exception) goes easy on the "demand side" of the problem.

After last night, whether it's Clinton or Mccain, it will be the same stuff, different administration come 1/21/09.

And the best hope of getting a handle on the problem is with Clinton.

Funny thing. Clinton walloped Obama among Hispanics 2 to 1. If Obama were to pull out the Dem nomination, and McCain is on the GOP ticket, the GOP might actually win the majority of Hispanics (longshot, but still). Of course, he'd still get creamed in every other demographic, but it would be hilarious when you consider that they finally got their outreach to work in the one year they get creamed.

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?

Not all ag products would be affected. Most are harvested mechanically, and we import quite a bit. If we slashed our ag subsidies, we could look at importing more of our food from Mexico instead of uprooting their laborers.

Remember the peach farmer Rod quoted a while back saying that instead of $.89 peaches, we'd have $4 peaches? Even if labor made up 100% of the cost of food production (it doesn't) that would mean that the farmer would be talking about raising wages by almost 450%! How utterly ridiculous. Yes, some food would cost more. I have yet to hear anyone who thinks we can solve our "chronic worker shortages" by paying Americans a decent wage to do the work then turn around and say that they wouldn't be willing to absorb any price increase. Sorry, people can do math and the math just isn't as scary as the pro-slave workers folks like to claim. Really, these are the same people who opposed wilberforce and the abolitionists because the economy couldn't afford to get rid of their free labor.

People should be mortified and ashamed to even contemplate using the "things will cost more" meme to argue for the use of slave workers - whether those workers were blacks in the 1800s or latino workers making slave wages today. It's just revolting that here in America such an argument in favor of exploitation for the benefit of cheap prices can be made.

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.

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.

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".