I think you’re putting the cart before the horse. Why is there a shortage of low skilled workers in a country of 400m? Because you have illegal workers who’ve driven the price of that work below what the market legally supports. If the law was effectively enforced those low skilled jobs would pay enough for Americans
Vegetable and dairy farmers would go out of business, if prices can't be raised due to competition from imports. You'd need tariffs as well, and people would need to put up with significant price increases at the grocery store.
There are not many Americans who want their kids to grow up to be farmhands or migrant workers. If you can speak English, you're better off in retail. For immigrants, there is a valuable benefit that makes it all worth it: being able to live in the US. Without that incentive, it's going to be really tough.
Lots of countries contend with this: Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Britain, etc. People adapt. Perhaps we grow to appreciate our food and throw out less waste.
Even at wages closing in on 3x minimum wage, we cannot get enough farm labor[1] - obviously low skilled American labor still doesn't want the job. What's the solution?
The ability to grow food in the country has pretty high strategic value. If you let your farmers go out of business your country loses domain knowledge in farming.
Strawberry pints from farms which do not utilize unregulated workers come in typically at about $6 to $7 pint. They’re typically smaller scale, so large scale can have them at retail for around $5. If that helps all of us, the farmer the temporary worker and consumers, I don’t see a problem with it. Strawberries and such aren’t staples like wheat and rice (highly mechanized and automated).
How do you know that they're not using undocumented people? That also says nothing of the price increase as the pool of documented farm labor dries up.
As an Australian, this is funny. Your Dept of Agriculture is one of the most socialist "redistributors of wealth" in the world.
Annual subsidies to US farmers is of the order of $25B+ per year. This includes non-tariff barriers such as price supports for sugar, import barriers and quotas such as on lamb and beef, export supports, crop insurance and other benefits.
The DoA has been doing this for 75+ years and the majority of farms are now corporate-owned. The majority of these taxpayer subsidies are directed straight into the hands of corporate shareholders.
Nah, there are plenty of countries that operate fine without cheap imported labor. They just need to...you know...pay fair wages. Which apparently has everyone up in arms I guess?
It's really just about the bottom line. Exploiting people is cheap. Paying or treating people properly is expensive. That's it. Tim Cook or your California farmer don't give a flying fuck about these people.
It's just about the $$$. Immigrants work hard for cheap.
> Nah, there are plenty of countries that operate fine without cheap imported labor.
This is not true. Farming has always relied on exploited labor in some form. Once easily exploited labor disappears with no machinery to replace them, so too does an agricultural industry. Lots of developed European nations are facing this exact problem.
Paying people proper wages will either cause food to get massively more expensive, or will migrate production to crops that are more readily harvested by machines. So grains will still be dirt cheap, but meat and vegetables will be very expensive.
If you want to provide an industry life support, the normal thing to do is to just subsidize it. Importing people desperate enough to work for low wages in poor conditions seems both odd and explotative.
I personally lack a romantic attachment to these industries, but in general people seem fairly happy to support something like the dairy industry.
Beyond that, to imagine that maintaining a medium sized farm or ranch isn't a skilled position is pure ignorance. There is a reason why a bunch of schools in the midwest were called agricultural schools.
There are young people who want to be farmers. Not many of them want to be just a farmhand - they want to own a business. But they'll still need workers.
I'm a white American who grew up harvesting tobacco on the side. It's not a gig Americans are willing to do. It sucks, it's dangerous, it doesn't pay all that well, and it's seasonal. For reference, I quit cutting tobacco in favor of cleaning out sand filters for sewage treatment plants. Which is to say, shoveling literal shit out of a hole in the ground is preferable to being a farmhand.
The American people you see doing this stuff are by-and-large the family of the land owner or teenagers whose backs are still functional (and have school duties during the off-season).
If you have a family, then you're going to need either a primary job, or an RV to move around. The only people making money farming are the land owners, and even then...
We are in agreement. We need some low skills workers, we don’t need all the unregulated low skills workers we have. Instead of 10-15mill, whatever the estimate is, we could probably use 4mill regulated foreign low skills workers to balance economic labor needs with giving and affording our own low skills workers an opportunity to make a living wage. We know it’s possible. We had it in the 70s, 80s, before our low skills workers were undercut in price.
What data supports this frequently touted conservative notion? There could be other factors. Like for e.g. tomatoes can only be sold at $2/lb before they run into competition from imported tomatoes. So the max anyone can afford to pay is really $X/hr. If they could only find someone at $2*X/hour, they would either not farm tomatoes or invest in machinery.
