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Wait these people that willingly hire illegal workers who are willing to work under minimum wage with little legal protection are worried their workers will be

• seanmcdirmid 10y ago
  I don't think they work for less than minimum wage, nor do they hire them explicitly as illegal workers (instead, they turn a blind eye when their documentation doesn't line up). How many Americans dream of doing farm work? We have some of the best farmland in the world, but our workforce has mainly moved up the tech chain to more skilled and hence more valuable labor. It is a contradiction.
  • deleted 10y ago
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  • ftlio 10y ago
    Yeah I think all of the subsidies are justified by the whole 'non starving populus' externalities even if it isn't an optimal solution.
    • deleted 10y ago
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  • BigChiefSmokem 10y ago
    Please, these people are not stupid. They know exactly what they're doing when they hire undocumented workers.
    • analbeads 10y ago
      So they're smart enough to hire illegals for cheaper labor, but somehow not smart enough to realize that Trump was completely serious when he said at every speech he gave that he planned to deport illegal immigrants? Does that not sound fishy to you?
      • thebooktocome 10y ago
        Uh, no? People vote against their best interests all the time.
        • analbeads 10y ago
          Ah yes, the "uneducated republicans voting against their self interest" meme. What I'm saying is that you are reading propaganda. Enable showdead and scroll down if you want me to elaborate.
          • dang 10y ago
            It's an abuse of HN to use it primarily for political battle. That's not what this site is for. Since that's all you've done, we've banned this account.
      • fallinghawks 10y ago
        Trump said a lot of things and flipflopped on several. And quite often when one votes for a candidate, you don't agree with them 100% on every issue anyway. It's pretty clear from #trumpregrets that a lot of people voted for him based on some stuff and hoped that he wouldn't follow through on other stuff.
    • seanmcdirmid 10y ago
      I think I implied that. They still need cover, however.
  • Inconel 10y ago
    Disclaimer: Hugely unscientific personal anecdote incoming. I worked on a farm in CA as a seasonal worker and I, along with a number of my fellow laborers, were paid below CA minimum wage, and I was actually authorized to work in the US. I don't know how widespread this is but I got the impression it wasn't exactly rare. From comparing experiences with one of my closest friends who is the son of Mexican migrant farm workers in the Central Valley, we have concluded that some farm operators specifically seek out illegal workers, not so much because the hourly wage differential is so great, but because of added savings like insurance and not having to deal with OSHA violations. Farm work an be pretty injury inducing and having a group of workers who are too scared/desperate to report worker safety violations to OSHA can be a big benefit. For the sake of not generalizing too much, I also know someone who runs a small farm and takes things like paying legal wages and overall worker safety and well being extremely seriously. And again, this is all anecdotal.
    • ftlio 10y ago
      Food Inc. discusses the practice of bussing people into the US from central / south America on legal visas. After the visas expire, the sponsors make deals with the INS to slow feed migrants back to them for deportation. Even the people who are against high immigration / illegal immigration aren't going to go after the work visas though. Nobody is going to vote to make food more expensive by forcing what is essentially subsidized labor out of the market. Most of the anti immigration push in the US is about beating the second stage of processes like these - the people that stay and attempt to build political economy for themselves. When I propose ending the work visa program to 'conservatives', I am laughed at. Maybe there's a better solution, but it's at least a more direct solution to their stated woes than I've heard. Not to put liberals on a pedestal either though - the left in this country basically ignores AG labor entirely.
• greglindahl 10y ago
  Note that farm subsidies don't go to crops which are labor intensive. They're for "row crops" that are fully mechanized.
  • jrowley 10y ago
    Exactly! >But only 9% of California's 74,000 farms have actually received subsidy payments and nearly two-thirds of the money since 1996--$1.8 billion--has gone to fewer than 3,500 farms. Most of the crops that fuel the state's $29-billion farm machine--grapes, peaches, plums, nectarines, strawberries, almonds, walnuts and vegetables of every hue--don't get a penny of aid. They aren't eligible. Rather, the bulk of the money goes to support giant fields of cotton, rice, wheat and barley--crops that exist in surplus. Of the top 20 recipients in California, seven are big cotton growers and 11 are big rice growers. On average, they take in $596,000 in crop subsidies a year. http://articles.latimes.com/2002/jun/10/local/me-subsidy10 http://articles.latimes.com/2002/jun/10/local/me-subsidy10
  • bluejekyll 10y ago
    Yes. And the corn subsidy in particular has really thrown off the market, encouraging huge numbers of foods in the US to be made with some sort of corn byproduct. We quite literally are subsidizing the fattening of the US with Coca-Cola getting a cheap sugar.