6 ms·

Also, a fact is that illegal immigrants are willing to work for dirt-cheap which subsidizes our produce price. :) https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/food

Also, a fact is that illegal immigrants are willing to work for dirt-cheap which subsidizes our produce price. :) https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/food/in-an-immigration-crackdown-who-will-pick-our-produce/2017/03/17/cc1c6df4-0a5d-11e7-93dc-00f9bdd74ed1_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.2ff4106d08ed https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/food/in-an-immigrat...

nostromo 8y ago
Cheap produce is awesome. :) But working people not being able to find jobs because they're competing with dirt-cheap no-benefit laborers is not. :(
- magic_beans 8y ago
  These working people who can't find jobs are addicted to opiates or refuse to educate themselves. Dirt cheap illegal laborers slave over jobs a white American would never, ever do.
  - loggedinmyphone 8y ago
    Any system that creates winners also creates losers.
    - unepipe 8y ago
      Not true.
      - loggedinmyphone 8y ago
        Counterexample?
        Pulcinella 8y ago
        Systems of water sanitation, unless you want to count cholera and dysentery as losers.
        exolymph 8y ago
        Arguably those don't create winners, because the concept of "win" necessitates triumphing over others.
        loggedinmyphone 8y ago
        Yeah I don't know anybody personally who feels like a winner because they have clean drinking water. It's universal where I live. In places where it's not, you might feel like a winner when the neighboring village doesn't have it, and sucks to be them.
  - toomuchtodo 8y ago
    They’re just terrible jobs people who aren’t desperate wouldn’t do. If you don’t believe me, go clean a slaughterhouse one night, or pick strawberries in the hot sun for a day. Edit: Automate these jobs.
- Analemma_ 8y ago
  Every time agriculture-heavy states crack down on illegal immigration, crops rot on the vine because nobody else wants those jobs, even in periods of high unemployment. Here's the story from Georgia, there are identical ones from the Southwest as well: https://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2012/05/17/the-law-of-unintended-consequences-georgias-immigration-law-backfires/#5f7e78492aa4 https://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2012/05/17/the-law-of-... https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-06-06/crops-rot-while-trump-led-immigration-backlash-idles-farm-lobby https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-06-06/crops-rot.... Your choice is not between illegal immigrants and working-class citizens getting that work, it's been illegal immigrants getting the work and nobody doing it.
  - chrisfinazzo 8y ago
    YES. Somebody gets it.
  - mozumder 8y ago
    Seriously. Stories abound about millennials (or anybody) not willing to do manual labor, waiting for higher-end jobs. And it makes sense. We pay for everyone to go to 12 years of public school, learning calculus, history, chemistry, literature, etc.., only to work picking strawberries for the rest of their lives? Fuck that. The American labor force isn't designed for these kinds of jobs. I can't imagine any smartphone addicted millennial to do manual labor. In fact, we'd be more honest about our economy if we actually banned these jobs for Americans, and only allowed unskilled immigrants to do them, and deal with it from there.
  - xienze 8y ago
    Bullshit. If the pay is right, you will find plenty of people to pick produce. But in a world where people expect $15/hour for work that is leisurely in comparison (fast food), paying that much for hard labor ain’t gonna cut it.
    - Analemma_ 8y ago
      > Bullshit. I provided sources showing that this is, empirically, what happens, no matter what you would like to believe. > If the pay is right, you will find plenty of people to pick produce. Obviously! But once you do that, the produce costs so much that no one wants to buy it. That is the fundamental issue here.
- chrisfinazzo 8y ago
  If you live in a place where said labor is plentiful (California, Florida, etc), this is a problem in so much as that job which went to someone who will work for less. For certain parts of the country, that is a viable occupation. But that doesn't mean these jobs are in any way desirable. In another instance, I see people who complain about Amazon's cashierless stores taking away jobs that people could do, but they don't seem to have an answer about how this situation could free those people up to do some other, potentially less menial job.
- kaitai 8y ago
  In many states the employment market is so tight that jobs are going unfilled. This is especially true in blue-collar jobs that require interfacing with computers and advanced machinery. In many areas with higher unemployment rate, employers still complain they can't find anyone who can pass a drug test. We do have a mismatch -- lots of employers simply aren't yet paying enough to get employees. And agricultural employers can't get any Americans, white or not white, to work for them, in part because the seasonality of the jobs and lack of health insurance makes the pay immaterial. If you work for 6 weeks you could lose eligibility for some benefits, and what are you going to do for the other 46 weeks in the year? Providing benefits not tied to employment would mitigate this problem. But it still wouldn't solve the problem of all the Americans not even looking for work because they're out on disability. These people, again, are not competing with immigrant labor, because by and large they really can't do any sort of physical labor. There is really no competition for ag jobs. Americans really, really don't want to do them, for some rational economic reasons and some reasons of expectations/feelings about what they deserve.
  - mattrices 8y ago
    Americans do actually want to do ag jobs, they just expect decent working conditions. Many employeers prefer illegal immigrants because they are more easily exploitable in regards to not only wages, but also safety.
  - adventured 8y ago
    > In many states the employment market is so tight that jobs are going unfilled. That has been the case for a mere 12-18 months out of the last decade. You know why liberals used to be against allowing vast inflows of unskilled labor? They fully understood the obvious consequences to the workers their party represented, as it pertained to wages & employment prospects. Make that labor more scarce and wages rise. It's the reason Bernie Sanders used to openly advocate against allowing large amounts of unskilled labor immigration. No other developed nation uses the immigration approach that the US uses. Everyone else favors a merit based system and favors immigrants that can pay for their social benefits. This is why Canada is so annoyed with the US right now on immigrants crossing the border into Canada. [1] A few thousand illegal immigrants cross over each month and Canada is begging the US to make it stop. Out of the entire planet, only the US is held to a different standard, everyone else is allowed to restrict unskilled labor immigration. The US is uniquely backwards in its approach to heavily limiting skilled labor and simultaneously allowing unlimited amounts of unskilled labor. Where's the international condemnation for Canada's approach to restricting hispanic immigration into their nation? Why are they not called racist for it? They're a mere 1.5% hispanic, specifically because they won't allow unskilled labor from Latin America into the country. That's an extremely ugly, hypocritical double standard. If the US behaves exactly as Canada does, it's called racist, xenophobic, etc. I'll note that the sole reason the Republicans are supporting / allowing the low skill immigration approach (and why they've blocked Trump's attempt to shift to a merit system), is that it benefits business margins: they want as much cheap labor as they can get to suppress wages. It's why the Koch brothers are such big proponents of it. The vast, endless supply of unskilled labor that has flooded the US for decades is partially responsible for low wage growth among lower skilled workers in the US over that time. If there's always more low-skilled labor, wages will not rise for low-skilled laborers. It's basic supply and demand. As automation increasingly hammers low-skill laborers, that effect will get dramatically worse. The other critical reason why the US is going to be forced to end its immigration policies: you can't support an increasingly generous welfare state matched against vast inflows of unskilled labor that can't pay for its own benefits programs. This is why other developed nations follow a pay-your-way merit system. If you can't support yourself, Canada generally isn't letting you in. A couple million low-skill immigrants coming into their nation would bankrupt their welfare system and collapse their healthcare system. The US welfare state is now more generous than Canada's, so how is the US expected to continue to afford it? You want universal healthcare? You can never have that unless you change the immigration system to restrict inflows of unskilled labor. The US should flip its policies: continue to allow in some reasonable amount of low-skill labor, and allow in a lot more high-skill labor (which helps pay for the benefits cost of the low-skill labor). As the US moves gradually toward universal healthcare, and continues to increase the generosity of its welfare state, this will become a fiscal necessity, just as it is in all other developed nations and for the exact same reason. [1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-canada-immigration-border/canada-wants-u-s-cooperation-in-turning-back-asylum-seekers-idUSKBN1I12AR https://www.reuters.com/article/us-canada-immigration-border...
losteric 8y ago
Meanwhile Chinese citizens "subsidize" the rest of our economy... The only difference is we can't move all our food factories abroad, so the labor travels here.
- mozumder 8y ago
  We could build a high-speed Maglev rail line over the Bering Straights to Asia and another one to South America... But yah, open the borders. That's the only immediate solution. The 90's had our greatest economic growth, and the borders were basically wide open then.
  - briandear 8y ago
    The borders weren’t basically wide open then.
nitwit005 8y ago
Do you genuinely believe people are going about thinking "I'm so glad for all this illegal immigration so that tomatoes are 20 cents cheaper"?
- SolarNet 8y ago
  No, that's why it's a fact and not an opinion poll that was cited. If people were thinking that, maybe they wouldn't be talking about shooting illegal immigrants [0]. [0] http://www.newsweek.com/ann-coulter-shooting-immigrants-illegal-immigration-926672 http://www.newsweek.com/ann-coulter-shooting-immigrants-ille...

nostromo 8y ago

Cheap produce is awesome. :) But working people not being able to find jobs because they're competing with dirt-cheap no-benefit laborers is not. :(

magic_beans 8y ago
These working people who can't find jobs are addicted to opiates or refuse to educate themselves. Dirt cheap illegal laborers slave over jobs a white American would never, ever do.
- loggedinmyphone 8y ago
  Any system that creates winners also creates losers.
  - unepipe 8y ago
    Not true.
    - loggedinmyphone 8y ago
      Counterexample?
      - Pulcinella 8y ago
        Systems of water sanitation, unless you want to count cholera and dysentery as losers.
        exolymph 8y ago
        Arguably those don't create winners, because the concept of "win" necessitates triumphing over others.
        loggedinmyphone 8y ago
        Yeah I don't know anybody personally who feels like a winner because they have clean drinking water. It's universal where I live. In places where it's not, you might feel like a winner when the neighboring village doesn't have it, and sucks to be them.
- toomuchtodo 8y ago
  They’re just terrible jobs people who aren’t desperate wouldn’t do. If you don’t believe me, go clean a slaughterhouse one night, or pick strawberries in the hot sun for a day. Edit: Automate these jobs.
Analemma_ 8y ago
Every time agriculture-heavy states crack down on illegal immigration, crops rot on the vine because nobody else wants those jobs, even in periods of high unemployment. Here's the story from Georgia, there are identical ones from the Southwest as well: https://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2012/05/17/the-law-of-unintended-consequences-georgias-immigration-law-backfires/#5f7e78492aa4 https://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2012/05/17/the-law-of-... https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-06-06/crops-rot-while-trump-led-immigration-backlash-idles-farm-lobby https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-06-06/crops-rot.... Your choice is not between illegal immigrants and working-class citizens getting that work, it's been illegal immigrants getting the work and nobody doing it.
- chrisfinazzo 8y ago
  YES. Somebody gets it.
- mozumder 8y ago
  Seriously. Stories abound about millennials (or anybody) not willing to do manual labor, waiting for higher-end jobs. And it makes sense. We pay for everyone to go to 12 years of public school, learning calculus, history, chemistry, literature, etc.., only to work picking strawberries for the rest of their lives? Fuck that. The American labor force isn't designed for these kinds of jobs. I can't imagine any smartphone addicted millennial to do manual labor. In fact, we'd be more honest about our economy if we actually banned these jobs for Americans, and only allowed unskilled immigrants to do them, and deal with it from there.
- xienze 8y ago
  Bullshit. If the pay is right, you will find plenty of people to pick produce. But in a world where people expect $15/hour for work that is leisurely in comparison (fast food), paying that much for hard labor ain’t gonna cut it.
  - Analemma_ 8y ago
    > Bullshit. I provided sources showing that this is, empirically, what happens, no matter what you would like to believe. > If the pay is right, you will find plenty of people to pick produce. Obviously! But once you do that, the produce costs so much that no one wants to buy it. That is the fundamental issue here.
chrisfinazzo 8y ago
If you live in a place where said labor is plentiful (California, Florida, etc), this is a problem in so much as that job which went to someone who will work for less. For certain parts of the country, that is a viable occupation. But that doesn't mean these jobs are in any way desirable. In another instance, I see people who complain about Amazon's cashierless stores taking away jobs that people could do, but they don't seem to have an answer about how this situation could free those people up to do some other, potentially less menial job.
kaitai 8y ago
In many states the employment market is so tight that jobs are going unfilled. This is especially true in blue-collar jobs that require interfacing with computers and advanced machinery. In many areas with higher unemployment rate, employers still complain they can't find anyone who can pass a drug test. We do have a mismatch -- lots of employers simply aren't yet paying enough to get employees. And agricultural employers can't get any Americans, white or not white, to work for them, in part because the seasonality of the jobs and lack of health insurance makes the pay immaterial. If you work for 6 weeks you could lose eligibility for some benefits, and what are you going to do for the other 46 weeks in the year? Providing benefits not tied to employment would mitigate this problem. But it still wouldn't solve the problem of all the Americans not even looking for work because they're out on disability. These people, again, are not competing with immigrant labor, because by and large they really can't do any sort of physical labor. There is really no competition for ag jobs. Americans really, really don't want to do them, for some rational economic reasons and some reasons of expectations/feelings about what they deserve.
- mattrices 8y ago
  Americans do actually want to do ag jobs, they just expect decent working conditions. Many employeers prefer illegal immigrants because they are more easily exploitable in regards to not only wages, but also safety.
- adventured 8y ago
  > In many states the employment market is so tight that jobs are going unfilled. That has been the case for a mere 12-18 months out of the last decade. You know why liberals used to be against allowing vast inflows of unskilled labor? They fully understood the obvious consequences to the workers their party represented, as it pertained to wages & employment prospects. Make that labor more scarce and wages rise. It's the reason Bernie Sanders used to openly advocate against allowing large amounts of unskilled labor immigration. No other developed nation uses the immigration approach that the US uses. Everyone else favors a merit based system and favors immigrants that can pay for their social benefits. This is why Canada is so annoyed with the US right now on immigrants crossing the border into Canada. [1] A few thousand illegal immigrants cross over each month and Canada is begging the US to make it stop. Out of the entire planet, only the US is held to a different standard, everyone else is allowed to restrict unskilled labor immigration. The US is uniquely backwards in its approach to heavily limiting skilled labor and simultaneously allowing unlimited amounts of unskilled labor. Where's the international condemnation for Canada's approach to restricting hispanic immigration into their nation? Why are they not called racist for it? They're a mere 1.5% hispanic, specifically because they won't allow unskilled labor from Latin America into the country. That's an extremely ugly, hypocritical double standard. If the US behaves exactly as Canada does, it's called racist, xenophobic, etc. I'll note that the sole reason the Republicans are supporting / allowing the low skill immigration approach (and why they've blocked Trump's attempt to shift to a merit system), is that it benefits business margins: they want as much cheap labor as they can get to suppress wages. It's why the Koch brothers are such big proponents of it. The vast, endless supply of unskilled labor that has flooded the US for decades is partially responsible for low wage growth among lower skilled workers in the US over that time. If there's always more low-skilled labor, wages will not rise for low-skilled laborers. It's basic supply and demand. As automation increasingly hammers low-skill laborers, that effect will get dramatically worse. The other critical reason why the US is going to be forced to end its immigration policies: you can't support an increasingly generous welfare state matched against vast inflows of unskilled labor that can't pay for its own benefits programs. This is why other developed nations follow a pay-your-way merit system. If you can't support yourself, Canada generally isn't letting you in. A couple million low-skill immigrants coming into their nation would bankrupt their welfare system and collapse their healthcare system. The US welfare state is now more generous than Canada's, so how is the US expected to continue to afford it? You want universal healthcare? You can never have that unless you change the immigration system to restrict inflows of unskilled labor. The US should flip its policies: continue to allow in some reasonable amount of low-skill labor, and allow in a lot more high-skill labor (which helps pay for the benefits cost of the low-skill labor). As the US moves gradually toward universal healthcare, and continues to increase the generosity of its welfare state, this will become a fiscal necessity, just as it is in all other developed nations and for the exact same reason. [1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-canada-immigration-border/canada-wants-u-s-cooperation-in-turning-back-asylum-seekers-idUSKBN1I12AR https://www.reuters.com/article/us-canada-immigration-border...

losteric 8y ago

Meanwhile Chinese citizens "subsidize" the rest of our economy... The only difference is we can't move all our food factories abroad, so the labor travels here.

mozumder 8y ago
We could build a high-speed Maglev rail line over the Bering Straights to Asia and another one to South America... But yah, open the borders. That's the only immediate solution. The 90's had our greatest economic growth, and the borders were basically wide open then.
- briandear 8y ago
  The borders weren’t basically wide open then.

nitwit005 8y ago

Do you genuinely believe people are going about thinking "I'm so glad for all this illegal immigration so that tomatoes are 20 cents cheaper"?

SolarNet 8y ago
No, that's why it's a fact and not an opinion poll that was cited. If people were thinking that, maybe they wouldn't be talking about shooting illegal immigrants [0]. [0] http://www.newsweek.com/ann-coulter-shooting-immigrants-illegal-immigration-926672 http://www.newsweek.com/ann-coulter-shooting-immigrants-ille...