6 ms·

So instead of investing in farm mechanization, or paying marginally more for produce, we should have a permanent underclass of foreign-born manual laborers? Ca

by defen 15y ago

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?

potatolicious 15y ago
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.
- sixtofour 15y ago
  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.
  - huherto 15y ago
    Is this really an option? I am Mexican, but don't know much about this type of technology. We have big deserts next to the sea.
    - sixtofour 15y ago
      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.
  - ericd 15y ago
    Desalination takes a huge amount of energy - does your plan take that into account?
    - sixtofour 15y ago
      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.
  - sliverstorm 15y ago
    Is that doable while narcotraficantes are still at large?
    - sixtofour 15y ago
      Good question. But if you let that question stop you, then the terrorists have won.
      - sliverstorm 15y ago
        Narcos are not terrorists. They are narcos. Al Capone was not a terrorist either. Put differently, a terrorist wants you to live in fear thinking he will kill you. A narco will just kill you and be done with it.
  - cesar 15y ago
    "Applying water desalinisation technology to agriculture is generally cost-ineffective" - http://www.fao.org/docrep/meeting/009/j4238e.htm http://www.fao.org/docrep/meeting/009/j4238e.htm
- defen 15y ago
  > 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.htm 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.
  - potatolicious 15y ago
    > "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.
- philwelch 15y ago
  Judging from the nationalities of engineers in this country, we would probably need immigrants to design the Cucumbertron 9001 to begin with.
- yummyfajitas 15y ago
  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.
  - ultrasaurus 15y ago
    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] 1: http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/food/2011-06-25-probation-farm-work-program_n.htm http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/food/2011-06-25-pro... 2: http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/07/illegal-immgrants-might-be-undocumented-but-theyre-not-unskilled/241510/ http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/07/illegal-...
    - yummyfajitas 15y ago
      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. http://www.dol.state.ga.us/pdf/pr/initialuiclaims.pdf http://www.dol.state.ga.us/pdf/pr/initialuiclaims.pdf 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.
  - Tsagadai 15y ago
prayag 15y ago
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.
- ericd 15y ago
  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.
  - prayag 15y ago
    Social issues? Like what? I can think of a number of economic issues, but can't think of many social issues except the superficial ones.
    - ericd 15y ago
      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.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
jobu 15y ago
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.
- defen 15y ago
  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.
  - philwelch 15y ago
    > I'd argue that parolees aren't the best people to be comparing against. Yeah, generally, committing crimes doesn't say much for someone's ability to defer gratification, which is essentially what hard work is.
jdminhbg 15y ago
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?"

by defen 15y ago

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?

potatolicious 15y ago

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.

sixtofour 15y ago
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.
- huherto 15y ago
  Is this really an option? I am Mexican, but don't know much about this type of technology. We have big deserts next to the sea.
  - sixtofour 15y ago
    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.
- ericd 15y ago
  Desalination takes a huge amount of energy - does your plan take that into account?
  - sixtofour 15y ago
    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.
- sliverstorm 15y ago
  Is that doable while narcotraficantes are still at large?
  - sixtofour 15y ago
    Good question. But if you let that question stop you, then the terrorists have won.
    - sliverstorm 15y ago
      Narcos are not terrorists. They are narcos. Al Capone was not a terrorist either. Put differently, a terrorist wants you to live in fear thinking he will kill you. A narco will just kill you and be done with it.
- cesar 15y ago
  "Applying water desalinisation technology to agriculture is generally cost-ineffective" - http://www.fao.org/docrep/meeting/009/j4238e.htm http://www.fao.org/docrep/meeting/009/j4238e.htm
defen 15y ago
> 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.htm 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.
- potatolicious 15y ago
  > "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.
philwelch 15y ago
Judging from the nationalities of engineers in this country, we would probably need immigrants to design the Cucumbertron 9001 to begin with.
yummyfajitas 15y ago
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.
- ultrasaurus 15y ago
  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] 1: http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/food/2011-06-25-probation-farm-work-program_n.htm http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/food/2011-06-25-pro... 2: http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/07/illegal-immgrants-might-be-undocumented-but-theyre-not-unskilled/241510/ http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/07/illegal-...
  - yummyfajitas 15y ago
    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. http://www.dol.state.ga.us/pdf/pr/initialuiclaims.pdf http://www.dol.state.ga.us/pdf/pr/initialuiclaims.pdf 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.
- Tsagadai 15y ago

prayag 15y ago

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.

ericd 15y ago
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.
- prayag 15y ago
  Social issues? Like what? I can think of a number of economic issues, but can't think of many social issues except the superficial ones.
  - ericd 15y ago
    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.

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

jobu 15y ago

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.

defen 15y ago
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.
- philwelch 15y ago
  > I'd argue that parolees aren't the best people to be comparing against. Yeah, generally, committing crimes doesn't say much for someone's ability to defer gratification, which is essentially what hard work is.

jdminhbg 15y ago

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?"