Many Americans take the stance that "I'm not anti-immigration, I'm anti-illegal-immigration." Nevertheless, the US has very restrictive citizenship & green card programs, and the quotas are a fraction of the demand for them. If we were pro-immigration, we would increase these quotes.
As a globalist: the people living south of our border are just as deserving of a livelihood as we are. This is also the reason that I don't go out of my way to buy local food-- the Chileans need it more than my fellow American farmers. (The American-born farmers had all the opportunities in the world to learn other skills, but they did not excel in high school and have consistently been using protectionism and the "buy local" meme to boost their business.)
I think you've correctly identified what Americans mean when they say "I'm not anti-immigration, I'm anti-illegal-immigration." After all, if they were just against illegal immigration, all they'd need to do is make it legal. What they're really opposed to is unlimited immigration.
The part where I disagree with you is the notion that there's something xenophopic about feeling that current levels (depending on where you get your estimates, this ranges from about 1 to 1.8 million per year) are a reasonable limit. I do find it surprising that a nation that admits well over a million immigrants a year is so frequently accused of "anti-immigrant" policies because the annual cap isn't even higher.
You say you'd increase the quota, but you didn't mention if you'd eliminate it altogether. Suppose you felt that immigration levels should be double what they are now, say about 2.5 million a year. Does that mean someone who would make it 5 million a year can call you anti-immigrant?
I'm a Canadian currently living in the USA, so maybe I'm biased, but I would personally remove a number-based quota.
I would, however, put in a quota based on the amount of education, capital, and whatever else would provide an estimate of the benefit that this immigrant would provide to the country, penalized by the difficulty that the person would have in integrating and establishing himself.
So, for example, someone with a doctorate, a job offer from an employer, significant capital, and fluency in the language should NEVER have an issue getting into the country.
I agree with you, this change would be very beneficial to the US. I've always felt a points-based system (like Canada or Australia) would make more sense. Nobody is happy with the current system - seriously, not a single person thinks the current US immigration system makes sense. The problem is there are so many competing visions for how it should be that reform is nearly impossible.
Keep in mind, if I wrote a post arguing for a cap of 1.2 million a year, some people would upmod me because it's high, others would downmod be because it's too low, others would down mod me because it's too high, others would upmod me because it sets a firm limit. The number of strong opinions on this topic is bewildering (but not at all surprising).
This. I have a Master's from a top U.S. University. Both of my sisters live in the US. I have personal resources well above the average American. But, under the current law this is not enough to move to be close to my sisters. In a point based system, I will get points in several categories.
Seems like you're giving access to the people that need it the least. Seems like you're simply shifting the self-interested (I don't mean this in a derogative sense) motivation of making this country better by not allowing 'job-stealing' immigrants to the equally self-interested one of making this country better by only allowing those who will improve it.
I'm not completely sure how I feel about the issue, to be honest, but I'm an immigrant (my parents brought me when I was an infant), and I probably wouldn't have made it here under either the criteria that exist now nor the ones you are promoting.
What I know is that the dream of immigration to the US is about having a better life for you and your children. Don't the poor and uneducated deserve that dream just as much as anyone else?
"Don't the poor and uneducated deserve that dream just as much as anyone else?"
Of course! The question is, how many poor and uneducated immigrants would you advocate naturalizing every year in the United States? 100K? 500k? 1.2 Mil? 4 mil? No limit? I feel that until people answer that question (and it will vary from person to person), there's no way to have a meaningful conversation about illegal immigration, which is about setting and enforcing limits.
I think quotas are the wrong way to frame the question, at least until we start running out of land. I'd be glad to let 100 million Einsteins and Teslas immigrate if they were available.
How about two separate systems. A quota-system and a points-system. You don't fall into the quota-system if you score high enough in the points-system.
Part of the problem is that it can be difficult to identify the Einsteins early enough to give them the visa when it would still matter. However, I don't think it would be difficult for an established scientist to gain US residency even under the current miserable system. Top athletes, entertainers, business people, scientists, and so forth inhabit a completely different universe.
As for "running out of land"... that's actually a little ambiguous. California could probably triple in population, and we'd still have some rural-ish areas in the extreme north. Japan, because of the density of its cities, actually preserved its rural character in some areas, and this is a country with a population density of 337.1/km2! In other ways, California has already "run out" of land. Ever drive from Orange county down to Tijuana? With the exception of a military base, it's basically sprawl all the way down. I suppose we could increase the coastal population by building high density housing on the coast...
> Don't the poor and uneducated deserve that dream just as much as anyone else?
Yes, but how do you prioritize? How do you control the drag on the social support systems of the country? How do you handle the gargantuan task of integrating these people into society?
There is a separate permanent resident application category with no quota for those individuals. For doctorate holders, it is the EB1-EA. If you have significant capital and invest in the US, you can apply via the EB-5 category.
EB* takes several years to be processed, even EB1-EA. Employers will not wait several years while you twiddle around outside of the country, so how almost everyone does it is to get an H1-B and apply for the EB* soon after while on the H1-B. Or they use it as leverage to get more work out of the immigrant. There is no H1-B speed EB visa and thats what needs changing. And you can only have an H1-B visa once, you can't renew for new ones indefinitely.
Personally I think that idea is anti-American. The very premise of America as an immigrant society is that we don't judge your worth, we let you prove it. It's so important we even put it on the statue of liberty, it doesn't say "give me your wealthy, your well educated, your industrial tycoons".
And honestly I think that is one of America's greatest advantages. Reliance on credentialism ends up too often being just another class-based divide rather than meritocratic in any sense. Look at Andrew Carnegie, as an immigrant he had little to set him apart, but eventually he became one of the wealthiest men in the world. There are many, many more examples just like his. And yet so often we continue to say "yes, but, let's ignore that and pretend that we can filter people by merit". I don't agree that we can filter people by merit.
The fact of the matter is, there is a greater demand for US citizenship than "supply" (amounts to political will, really).
It makes sense to prioritize for the most productive/least diseased/least criminal/etc when possible to discriminate with reasonable certainty. Of course, this is not to imply that immigrants are neither unproductive, nor unhealthy, nor unlawful.
While rags-to-riches stories are great, riches-to-riches probably has a better expected outcome.
It was the refuse of Europe that made this continent what it is not the elites. We would be selecting for qualities that have an unknown relationship to our past results (and perhaps values).
You can achieve this insanely easily, too. Just register every immigrant that comes across and give them a temporary 2 year visa (conditional on the normal things like criminal record, documented connections to terrorist groups, war criminal status, and so forth). Over those two years, compare their tax returns to their use of services. After 2 years, either grant a permanent visa or let their visa expire and deport them. If they're either using services or paying taxes we'll have a way to find them, and if they're not doing either, they're obviously not causing any obvious problems.
Once you've made it past the immigration counter enforcement is virtually impossible. Most cities and counties don't want to be involved in immigration enforcement because its disruptive to the community. And it's left to the visa holder to go willingly. A big problem is people arrive on tourist visas and don't leave by the appointed date. ICE can't really do anything about it unless you try to leave through a border checkpoint. This causes an incentive to stay rather than leave.
Maybe without all the absurd, overcomplicated immigration laws to enforce, ICE will have the resources to implement the followup checks and send local agents to apprehend and deport people.
The US has plenty of rich, educated people. What we need (according to current illegal immigration activity) are less educated lower wage hourly workers.
I don't see a lot of Canadian PhDs smuggling themselves in to the US, compared to Mexican laborers. Because there isn't demand to support the risk. The US seems far more willing to pay for laborers than PhDs.
Actually, you don't see any sort of skilled Canadian smuggling themselves in at all because it's ridiculously easy to get into the USA if you're from Canada. You walk up to the border, say "I have someone who wants to employ me in the USA, and I have a degree. Give me a TN visa." One hour later, your visa application is processed, and you continue across the border to start your new job.
However, even if that wasn't the case, You wouldn't see Canadian PhDs smuggling themselves in because they can get perfectly good jobs outside of the country. They don't need to go anywhere illegally, because they have plenty of options to go elsewhere. If it wasn't for the TN visa, I would be working in Europe, Asia, Canada, or nearly anywhere else, because someone from there would be trying to attract me.
It's not that there's no demand to support the risk. There's plenty of demand. There's also enough demand elsewhere -- if I had trouble getting into the states, some other company would have me, and I would be contributing to the economy there.
I agree. But I would also add political asylum and similar human rights considerations (they do exist, but need to be broader, imho). Perhaps this aspect is less relevant to HN, however it is relevant to the immigration issue.
> I think you've correctly identified what Americans mean when they say "I'm not anti-immigration, I'm anti-illegal-immigration."
I know a lot of Americans who say exactly that, and none of them mean what you (or the parent poster) claim they mean. On the contrary, one of the most common statements I hear from them is "make it easier for people to immigrate legally".
The US population is around 312 million people. 1-2 million people a year 1/3 to 2/3 of 1% annual population growth through immigration.
In contrast, in 1907, the US population was around 87 million and there were about 1.3 million registered immigrants for about 1.4% growth through immigration--anywhere from two to four times the level today.
Good question! Yes, I would remove the quotas. Borders only seek to separate people. The US is a decent country, better than many others as far as stability goes, and I think a lot of people could make a better life here. It would definitely be a burden on our government, but it's worth it.
The rate is not that good of a guide, because the US (as it is now) was so sparsely occupied to begin with. In terms of population density, the US is ranked #180 in the world with 32 people/km2 vs. the world (land) average of 51/km2.
I'm not sure what you mean when you say that the rate "is not that good of a guide." Do you mean that you feel the rate of 1.2-1.8 million a year isn't as high as it sounds because the population density of the US is still relatively low?
Keep in mind, Australia also has a very low population density, but you'd have trouble populating the interior.
New Zealand has a very low population density, and is essentially a large national park. Certainly they could up that population density of 16.4/km^2. Should New Zealand aim to increase its population five to ten fold over the next 50 years to catch up? Is New Zealand an "anti-immigrant" country for not allowing this kind of growth through immigration?
You can say "yes", but then you'd have a tough time identifying a country that isn't "anti-immigrant", and I think the US would come off as one of the more immigrant-friendly nations out there. Not the most so, but pretty high up on the list.
I'm not sure what you mean when you say that the rate "is not that good of a guide." Do you mean that you feel the rate of 1.2-1.8 million a year isn't as high as it sounds because the population density of the US is still relatively low?
Yes. I do think the US is one of the more immigrant-friendly nations, but the numbers admitted can't be divorced from their context.
I think what you are replying to was attempting to address the fact that America has a lot of land that is either parks (Yosemite), uninhabitable (Death Valley, Great Plains) or simply unestablished.
No immigrant is going to move into the middle of nowhere; they are going to move to cities or towns. People vs. total area is a misleading number.
So? It's not like we are never going to build any more cities or that none of the existing towns are going to grow into cities in the future. Nor am I claiming that this is the only statistic that matters.
In any case, this is a curious objection to raise in a thread about a story documenting the inability of rural farmers to hire a productive labor force following a change in the law. Quite a lot of immigrants work in the agricultural sector and live a good way away from major cities.
I'm not saying I'm afraid cities will overflow; I'm just attempting to further expand on the point that the people/land ratio is not as transparent and directly comparable between countries as it is sometimes assumed to be.
That is a pretty hasty generalization about American farmers. I have a friend who is a farmer in upstate New York. He has a master's degree, but chooses to run a small farm because his passion is being close to the land.
> If we were pro-immigration, we would increase these quotes.
The Democrats have a standing policy of increasing the merit-based immigration. However, Republicans have always insisted that the illegal immigration be addressed as well in any such legislation...
gwern, the reality is actually reverse. Obama/democrats wants a comprehensive immigration reform that includes dealing with the existing illegal immigrants in US. He dont want to deal legal immigration and illegal immigration separately. Thats the reason the recent startup visa was dead on arrival.
There is a wide gap between what republicans say to us and what they put on ballot. So far they have not been interested in immigration reform or immigration enforcement. Illegal immigration would drop overnight if they enforced real laws against the companies that hire illegal immigrants. But they focus on the, easily replaceable, migrant workers.
An example, the state of Georgia wrote their own law on legal hires. Now, they are having difficulties retaining fruit pickers for the summer harvest.
Unfortunately most Americans don't realize these quotas exist (or how they impact from different countries differently), and assume that all illegal immigrants simply refused to abide by America's laws. I would bet that illegal immigrants here for legal jobs would gladly follow a legal process if there was one.
Your logic fails when taken to the extreme. Child labor is used to manufacture clothes in some depoliticized districts around the world. Should we sit back and say, "Hey those guys need money and should be able to get a job and work for it just like us!" Or should we change our manufacturing/distribution methods to encourage more american produced goods?
I think child labor is better than the family starving.
For a lot of human history, we've had kids doing work. It's not great, and parents usually agree! One of the first things that families do, when they escape poverty, is to pull their kids out of jobs and put them in schools. And the money that the child earned can help a family feed themselves and be raised out of poverty. It's a negative feedback loop.
Two things. First, I think both of your options are horrible, and specifically selected to be offensive. I'm not aware of any aid organization that makes kids do porn instead of be raped. You can keep that link to yourself.
Second, a kid having to work in a factory is way way better than having to be a slave. Keep in mind, these kids would be working back on the farm with their family, but their family can't afford to feed them, so they send them off. Their families are usually lied to about what their kids are going to do. My western sensibilities find this awful.
So i'm a bit curious at this point. It seems you're advocating, since the kids can't have a perfect life, they might as well be raped?
I can say much the same about your options. Granted, child slavery is worse than child labor. However child labor is still not acceptable. And if a company like, say, Nike was to use that as an excuse for having their shoes made by child labor, I'd find that unacceptable.
...and specifically selected to be offensive.
Of course. That was the point. Your argument is of the form, "We should accept A because if we don't then some people will suffer B, which is much worse." I just substituted a different pair of A and B with a relationship that is just as clear as the relationship between the things that you were describing.
The logical form of the argument is unchanged. Yet your immediate response is that both are unacceptable.
Give your taste buds a break. You would rather buy fruit shipped halfway across the world (i.e., fruit designed for survive storage rather than taste good) rather than visit the local farmer's market? WTF.
I make it a point to not buy fruit from Chile, because I am voting with my taste buds that I want good fruit not cheap fruit.
My favorite fruit is the peach, and I wait for summer and farmer's markets so that I can get some ripe fruit (ever noticed how the supermarket peaches are usually unripe and never really ripen? they seem to go directly from unripe to rotten).
Maybe you live in North Dakota or some such remote place and Chilean fruit is all you get.
Anyway, just an excuse for me to sing the praises of California peaches. :)
is there really much competition? chile is in the southern hemisphere, so the seasons don't match up. i would have thought that when american peaches are in season, chilean peaches will be terrible, and vice versa.
as for transportation - america is a big country. i am not sure "local" californian peaches on the east coast will suffer much less than chilean peaches - in both cases, significant transport is necessary.
So instead of investing in farm mechanization, or paying marginally more for produce, we should have a permanent underclass of foreign-born manual laborers? Can someone explain the logic in this?
If farm mechanization makes sense, sure, but until the Cucumbertron 9001 exists that will make short work of any field, manual labor is needed.
And it's evident that the domestic labor force is ill-equipped to fulfill this demand.
So you are faced with two choices:
- A shrinking, or at least plateauing of your agriculture industry because you can't find enough people who can do the job.
- Letting in tax-paying workers in a legal manner to support your growing industries.
The third option is that some company will set up shop in some other country to exploit this labor force that is unavailable in your country, then sell you cheap-ass cucumbers and further increase your trade deficit, and the US government sees neither personal nor corporate income tax benefits, nor any of the ancillary benefits (increased local economy, increased demand for services from workers, etc etc) of having the work in the country.
There is a third option. The US government is currently paying millions of Americans not to work. When faced with a choice between playing XBox for minimum wage or picking cucumbers for min wage, they make the rational choice - XBox.
So I propose the following: for every agricultural job that goes unfilled, we kick one American off unemployment/welfare and inform them that a job has been found for them.
If the job continues to go unfilled, we kick another American off unemployment/welfare. We repeat this process until either a) all agricultural jobs are filled or b) there are no more unemployed people. If b) occurs, we can then reopen the discussion on immigration to fill agricultural jobs.
I once took a job supervising people for a program like this. I don't believe it is a variable solution. The company I worked for was paid by the government and given other benefits (tax credit, reduced red tape, etc) and it was still barely worth it to employ these people. Out of 20 long term unemployed I had on my team, only two were actually useful workers who I would employ in a second (the company did employ one of them after I left).
The problem is, when you try to force people into work by cutting their welfare that they received for so long without effort is that your carrot is just a worn out version of the one they were getting and the rest of your incentive is all stick. I spent most of my time in that job looking for grown men hiding in bushes, on roofs, and anywhere else they could sneak off to and sending them back to work. Trying to change behaviours overnight is a waste of everyone's time and money and ideas like yours cost more money to implement than they save.
If an adult is hiding in the bushes to avoid work, he does not deserve public benefits of any sort. The program I propose would eliminate such people from the unemployment/welfare/public benefit rolls, saving millions of taxpayer dollars.
Some simple accounting:
Days 1-3: lazy bum is employed by your company and accomplishes nothing.
Day 4: you fire them for laziness.
Day 5: the government compensates you for their wages plus a premium for the wasted supervisor's time, risk, etc.
Day 6-week 99: the government does not pay unemployment benefits to the lazy bum.
Provided 99 weeks of unemployment costs more than 3 days wages + supervisory premiums, I can't see how this could fail to save money.
You forgot the part where someone with limited education and no employment prospects steals a car or holds up a store because they have nothing left to sell and a loan shark threatening them with broken kneecaps. Some unemployment is good for the economy, employee surplus keeps wages lower and ensure there is necessary labour available for short term needs. Most modern, capitalist economies try to maintain at least some level of surplus in the labour market, because history has shown that it is a good idea.
The scheme I worked for was an attempt to rehabilitate the long term unemployed and attempt to train them in a marketable skill. In my view, it was a failure for 95% of people there but it taught me a lot about managing difficult people. Note that I wasn't sent to work there, I worked for an employment company that managed the implementation of the government's idea.
The present education, family, societal and financial system is creating people who have no practical skills, no motivation to work and very little prospects. You have to deal with them as a nation somehow. Doing nothing will lead to social unrest, crime, bankruptcy and a whole swathe of other issues. Giving them money for nothing just creates deadweight dragging down the rest of the economy and basically gives them a life of subsistence poverty. Solving this issue is not easy. Get to work or suffer is a bad solution because suffering isn't limited to the individual, it is inflicted on those closest to them and the rest of us too.
I for one would not be happy to live in a country where people have to live on the streets. 'Lazy Bum' is a pretty brutal indictment of a vast range of people, some of whom may have no other option, may not have the ability to read or the physical ability to pick grapes.
This stuff starts with education. You cannot expect to be a service economy if your K-12 education fails a decent percentage of society. Luckily the tools are becoming available to help, and we need students, teachers and schools to take advantage.
Please pay attention. According to Tsagadai's description, the people he supervised were capable of climbing onto roofs in order to avoid work and were capable of working when ordered to do so.
They merely preferred hiding in the bushes to doing actual work. This was the same situation Georgia had when they tried to get probationers to work the fields - they were capable of working, but unwilling.
This is the group of people to whom I applied the term "lazy bum".
Under my proposal, no one has to live on the streets. The only option which is eliminated is the "be lazy, force workers to pay for your leisure" option.
Georgia is trying something similar with people on probation [1] so far the results aren't good, "most fruits and vegetables require surprisingly skilled handling" [2]
Under my plan, the results would be good. If the process continues as in Georgia's experiment, then we will completely solve the problem of unemployment in Georgia.
Georgia has 11k unfilled agricultural jobs. At the rates described in the article (American workers quit after 1 day), we could reduce the unemployment rolls in Georgia by 11k people/day (330k/month). For comparison, Georgia had only 54k new unemployment claims in May.
This would result in a net decrease of 280k people from the unemployment rolls per month, for Georgia alone.
That's the beauty of my plan - it is guaranteed to solve one of two problems (unfilled agriculture jobs or unemployment). We can't determine beforehand which problem it will solve, but it has to solve at least one.
Idea for Mexico: invest heavily in desalination, create whole states of hothouse farms (hothouse assuming that watering whole deserts would be bad for the ecology and an inefficient use of water), and eat American agriculture's lunch. Subsidize the hell out of the desalination, pumping and waste water recycling, until the hothouse industry can pay for it themselves. Then sell the desalination technology and services to the world.
Your first, second and third sentences are exactly my point.
Yes it's an option, although you and most countries are fairly far from it yet. It takes decisions, purpose and money.
If I can use you as a proxy for Mexico, whatever is not known about this by the larger Mexican economy, and engineering and agriculture communities, can be learned from the smaller groups of knowledgeable people and spread. It's a hard problem, and whatever technologies are developed can lead to exportable products and services (both engineering and agricultural).
Yes, you have big deserts next to the sea, and you probably want to keep them deserts, if for no other reason than human transformation of large ecologies sometimes doesn't work out. So advanced, Mexican developed hothouse technology, enabled by desalinated and pumped water, gives you a place for Mexicans to migrate to in-country, without having to smuggle themselves across the border to die in an American or Mexican desert.
All those Mexican citizens currently working for American agriculture, sending some money home but spending money in America for daily living, could instead be spending that money in Mexico. All that money earned would be feeding the Mexican economy, in addition to the national income earned from exporting agricultural products.
Imagine if the safest food that Americans (and Mexicans) eat came from rigorously clean and high technology Mexican hothouses.
It's obviously an off the top of my head post. Obviously that's part of the equation, and would have to be solved. It's not something that could happen immediately. An economic solution would evolve slowly, but only if it was decided.
Mexico does have a lot of oil, so part of those decisions could involve moving some of that oil from quick money exports to longer term desalination, little by little. It may not always be oil, maybe a good portion of the needed energy could come from tides, winds, chemical differentials between deep sea and shallow sea water. It could be Mexico's Moon project.
> it's evident that the domestic labor force is ill-equipped to fulfill this demand.
...at the current market price for manual farm work, which is low because there are plenty of people from other countries willing to work extremely hard for low pay. But think about the long-term effects here - eventually the current pickers are going to get old and retire. New ones will be needed. So now we need to import more uneducated manual laborers into the country. At the current rates at which 2nd-, 3rd-, and 4th-generation Hispanic immigrants graduate college (http://www.hispanic7.com/us_latinos_enroll_in_college_more.h...), you're literally importing an underclass that is ethnically, culturally, and linguistically different from the majority. That never ends well.
> The third option is that some company will set up shop in some other country to exploit this labor force that is unavailable in your country, then sell you cheap-ass cucumbers and further increase your trade deficit
This can be handled with tariffs, like we do with sugar.
...at the current market price for manual farm work, which is low because there are plenty of people from other countries willing to work extremely hard for low pay.
Prices are low partly because they have no bargaining power due to their lack of legal status. It is the threat of deportation and the resultant economic insecurity that keeps such people in an 'underclass' and prevents them from participating more fully in society, even if they are paying taxes or otherwise invested.
Tariffs have been repeatedly demonstrated to be a failure, as has economic autarky in general.
> ...at the current market price for manual farm work, which is low because there are plenty of people from other countries willing to work extremely hard for low pay.
They are only coming, because they earn even less in their old country. Why do you want to keep those people poor?
> "So now we need to import more uneducated manual laborers into the country."
Welcome to the history of the United States. This isn't just manual laborers, but applies to skilled/educated labor forces too. The intellectual side of America has always been driven by immigration, and this has never been more true than the post-WW2 era. Look at your local university's academics - how many them are first-generation or second-gen immigrants? NASA is practically built out of foreign scientists. And closer to home, what's the representation of immigrants in the tech industry compared to the population at large?
The locals always underperform compared to people willing to scrabble and fight because they've had a tougher background. So unless you have a plan to make locals competitive (beyond simply "raise the wages!"), this seems an inevitable move.
> "This can be handled with tariffs, like we do with sugar."
Ah, so you hope to fight free market capitalism with tariffs... Okay, so let's go with your plan and raise manual labor wages such that people actually want to be farm hands.
Then we go way out of our way to essentially ban foreign imports, or make them so expensive that everyone must use domestic substitutes. We become an enclosed economy so we don't have to face competitive pressures from outside. You're an economy in a bottle, and you better damn pray you have everything you could ever want within your own borders... because as soon as you leave more competitive countries will eat you for lunch.
What part of that sounds like sound economic policy?
> "you're literally importing an underclass that is ethnically, culturally, and linguistically different from the majority. That never ends well."
Isn't this the crux of your argument? You seem to believe this is a bad thing - I fail to see how this can be the case. If this country eventually just starts speaking Spanish as a first-language, what's wrong with that? So what if burritos eventually replace hamburgers as the national staple... in fact this has already happened in some places to no ill effect.
I used to live in Toronto, Canada, where a whopping 50% of the population is immigrant. Pandemonium has not ensued, and instead the country is a stronger, more interesting, and more diverse place for it. Xenophobia has no place in modern economic policy.
Even looking beyond principles of equality, protectionist laws are just plain bad ideas because you're only staving off the inevitable and making things worse. If there is a coder out there right now who's better than me, wants 10% of my pay, and is willing to bust his ass to do so... come hell or high water there's not a force in the world sufficient to stop him from competing with me.
In the article, Jose Ranye was making about $20/hr. He may not be typical (the best picker), but his wage is certainly not underclass.
There are so many safety nets in this country that people have a viable choice of doing nothing instead of going out in the field and working hard. None of the parolees even lasted until noon.
When I was 15, I picked sweet corn for my neighbor. It was terribly hard work, but it was my only option to earn money (for a car). The next summer I was able to drive to get a better job. Its all about options and motivation.
I'd argue that parolees aren't the best people to be comparing against. Farm work is also seasonal, so it's not clear what that $20/hr translates to in annual salary.
I think its a little more than that.Nobody says that there shouldn't be farm mechanization etc. It should definitely happen. We should also do what produces highest net value for everyone in the chain. We should let the illegal immigrants work here and produce value for themselves and for the farm owners without building artificial boundaries. This we can we can help these guys out of poverty and help farm owners make more money too.
You can't ignore the social issues that arise from allowing a huge number of foreigners into a country. Not to say that it shouldn't happen in some form, but it needs to be handled with more care and management than you're implying.
Cultural integration is a big one. If a large number of foreigners from the same country come to an area, it takes longer for every member of that group to assimilate into the culture, since many will tend to stick with others from their same culture. If the whole area is from that foreign culture, it's even more resistant to assimilation.
Nobody thinks a permanent underclass is a good idea. You should provide evidence for why you think that's the likely result rather than just asking the rhetorical equivalent of "when did you stop beating your wife?"
The article uses the fact that tomato mechanization blossomed after Bocero ended as evidence that the same will happen in this case.
There are a number of problems with that.
First, tomato mechanization had been researched for what looks like a couple of decades before Bocero ended. It was a solution in search of a problem, then the problem came. So not all fruits yet have suitable mechanical harvesting mechanisms.
Secondly, in order to use mechanical harvesting (with today's equipment anyway), you have to actually plant differently! Wider, longer rows for example. Or different varieties. So farmers would need some time to prepare.
In the long run certainly it should be mechanized from an economic point of view.
From a technical point of view, someone on HN needs to hack a Kinect onto a robot and make an autonomous harvester that can work with multiple types of plants!
What I can totally not understand about the US is why are they not PRO- the Startup Visa....this seems to be a total no-brainer.
The people here on this visa, would be working for themselves, attempting to create jobs for Americans, and not taking away any jobs from them, so Congress, get your act together and pass this bill NOW!
Many Americans take the stance that "I'm not anti-immigration, I'm anti-illegal-immigration." Nevertheless, the US has very restrictive citizenship & green card programs, and the quotas are a fraction of the demand for them. If we were pro-immigration, we would increase these quotes.
As a globalist: the people living south of our border are just as deserving of a livelihood as we are. This is also the reason that I don't go out of my way to buy local food-- the Chileans need it more than my fellow American farmers. (The American-born farmers had all the opportunities in the world to learn other skills, but they did not excel in high school and have consistently been using protectionism and the "buy local" meme to boost their business.)