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Curious to see what comes home to roost. I mean when, for example, you clear out the agriculture workers of the U.S. without any thought as to how or what you a

Curious to see what comes home to roost. I mean when, for example, you clear out the agriculture workers of the U.S. without any thought as to how or what you are going to do to replace them, well, expect higher grocery prices I guess?

hilsdev 1y ago
The labor cost of food is near the bottom of the price factors.
- bostik 1y ago
  If UK's experience is anything to go by: the fraction of produce left in the fields to rot, unpicked, will go WAY up. Labour cost is one thing, total useful production volume is another.
- margalabargala 1y ago
  Directly yes but there are knock on effects. What you say is true only when labor is not scarce. The consequences of having insufficient labor is a large price factor. If you can only harvest 30% of your crop and the rest rots in the field because there's no one to pick it, that is outsized.
  - hilsdev 1y ago
    If you paid a lot more there would be more people to pick it
    - margalabargala 1y ago
      True! And then the labor cost of food would no longer be near the bottom of the price factors.
- AngryData 1y ago
  Yeah but you still need people to do it and paying a bit better is not going to get an immediate response of many tens of thousands of workers to quit their jobs to do seasonal and migratory work across multiple states living out of vans and campers with no insurance and increased workload and injury rate. Many crops are just going to rot, output will be lower, and prices will still rise. At some point years down the line sure things might improve and settle out and more US people can fill a larger number of those roles, but it will not happen quickly, especially not for token wage increases, and will likely never gain the workforce numbers that migratory farm workers offer who travel not just across the US but also throughout Central and South America. A US citizen is never going to work in Mexico or Brazil during off seasons for US crops because it basically represents a net-zero or negative wage converting it back into US currency to come live back here. Ive done farm and trade work my whole life, physical work is not a problem, but even if you doubled the pay for picking tomatoes and other fruits and lettuces, I would not consider for a second joining that workforce even if I was otherwise homeless. Im not even sure being a row crop farmer that doesn't even need extra labor is worth the effort. Farms are getting the least and smallest margins by far for food production out of anybody in the food logistics supply line and there is no potential windfall for workers and no career path to work up from picking fruits. Would I like people picking fruit to earn more money and have stables lives and not have to migrate across the country living in vans? Of course, 100%. But without a huge overhaul of our economic priorities and policies towards worker rights and wages, which is the exact opposite direction from where we have been heading the last 60+ years, none of that is going to change regardless of what prices people are willing to pay for food. The base of the agricultural market of farms and the workers directly harvesting food is and has been running on thinner margins than pretty much any other industry in existence. A 2% return on a farmer's seed and fuel and fertilizer inputs is considered a great success.
  - hilsdev 1y ago
    We can quadruple the farm worker day rate and it would not significantly impact consumer prices. The floor price of unskilled labor is mostly a function of its market value. Increasing the labor pool via immigration decreases the value of the labor. I too would like to see farm laborers have more comfortable lives
shrubble 1y ago
This argument (which I’ve heard many times before) is easily refuted by looking at YouTube videos for “commercial xxx harvesting” where xxx is the vegetable or fruit in question. For instance the carrot harvester that can harvest tons of carrots each hour: you could pay the driver $126k per year and the carrot price per pound would not even move 2 pennies at retail.
- busterarm 1y ago
  Not everything can be harvested with big machines. Pretty much all tree fruits, asparagus, peppers, etc are harvested by hand. If you want blueberries or strawberries that look nice enough to be sold to consumers whole, those are hand-harvested every time.
  - shrubble 1y ago
    There are some things that are harvested by hand; even in those cases, you can watch a typical process and determine the small labor component. Asparagus for example is harvested in less than 20 seconds per bunch. Even at $50/hour that is a cost of less than 30 cents per bunch; which sells for how much in the store? 1000s of workers harvest over 9 billion pounds of apples every year-again the labor component is smaller than you’d think.
    - busterarm 1y ago
      Oh I agree with you. I'm not saying the labor component is necessarily expensive, I'm just stating the obvious that for many crops they are still human labor intensive. Asparagus harvesting may be fast, but you have to do it every day. You have to keep people employed throughout the entire season. There isn't just a few-week harvesting period. You can't just mechanize everything.
  - allannienhuis 1y ago
    That last statement isn’t true. I know people with a blueberry farm that machine processes (with extra human qa step) blueberries packaged for retail sale.
exabrial 1y ago
It's probably not your intention, but I greatly dislike this argument, as it's similar ones were made to justify previous inhumane practices that were legal before the conclusion of the US Civil war. If manual labor is required for agriculture, let the market absorb the real cost and pay the workers the correct wage instead of exploiting them.
- estimator7292 1y ago
  Ah, but you see the thing is here in the land of the free, we consider this type of thinking to be "Communism" and must be purged without any further thought.
- ben_w 1y ago
  Comparative advantage. Consider this vague hypothetical, because I'm not American and don't care about the specifics: Country A, average wage X; country B, minimum wage for legal residents 2X. People from A can on average get a pay rise by working in B while undercutting legal residents of B. Citizens of B then get the stuff cheaper than they otherwise would have, but also might not be as easy to employ. Are current employment stats accurate? As in do they tell the right picture or is this a case of "lies, damn lies, and statistics"? Lots of people say it's the later, and unfortunately I'm not qualified to explore anyone's arguments.
  - knowitnone2 1y ago
    no company is telling on themselves saying "We hire illegal immigrants to harvest our crops and paying them below minimum wage"
    - ben_w 1y ago
      Course not. Even just the first half, "We hire illegal immigrants", isn't that directly a crime itself?
    - exabrial 1y ago
      This is blatantly untrue unfortunately.
sugarpimpdorsey 1y ago
> I mean when, for example, you clear out the agriculture workers of the U.S. without any thought as to how or what you are going to do to replace them, well, expect higher grocery prices I guess Most ag workers are here on... ag work visas. There are processes in place to facilitate this seasonal work. "No more strawberries/lettuce/etc when you kick out all the illegals!" has been a rallying cry on lefty social media for the last few years and it... hasn't happened? Turns out assuming all the brown farm workers are here illegally is not only extremely racist but fundamentally a misunderstanding of how the system works. It's even more puzzling that people are cheering on the false premise of keeping people here in the shadow of the law as indentured servants so they can save 10 cents on tomatoes at the market.
- senordevnyc 1y ago
  According to the USDA, around 40% are undocumented: https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/chart-gallery/chart-detail?chartId=63466 https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/chart-gallery/chart-d... That seems like enough to have a measurable impact on food prices if they stop showing up? To be clear, not arguing for or against enforcement, just pointing out that the data seems to suggest this as a factor to be taken into consideration.
- SR2Z 1y ago
  It hasn't happened because no President has been stupid enough to deport them en-masse. Even the current guy has admitted that he won't focus on agriculture workers because it would be bad for business. Nobody is hiring illegal workers to save 10¢. They are getting paid significantly less than minimum wage.
  - FirmwareBurner 1y ago
    >They are getting paid significantly less than minimum wage. Which is bad for everyone except business owners who vacuum up all the profits from exploiting below minimum wage labor, and then socialize the cost of taxless under the table work of illegals to the state and by extension to the taxpayer.
  - 1y ago
ben_w 1y ago
My undersanding is that Biden's admin estimated 10-11 million undocumented migrants in the USA, and that these migrants represent a critical percentage of some agricultural roles. It wouldn't simply be higher prices, it would be shortages. I think there's about 50m or so documented migrants, but as many of the targets at Hyundai were documented but apparently wrong somehow, the USA may find its economy and workforce suffering catastrophic reductions in this term of office, even just from people asking "should I leave on my own terms or risk being thrown out?"
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
sillywalk 1y ago
The US Secretary of Agriculture suggested Medicaid recipients and automation. I doubt that'll work. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jul/09/trump-agriculture-medicaid-migrant-farm-workers https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jul/09/trump-agricu...
- crooked-v 1y ago
  Don't forget RFK wanting to round up addicts for 'wellness farms'.
busterarm 1y ago
Not picking any particular dog in this fight, but the western labor market also has become very adversarial. I knew a guy whose family had a tree nursery in Texas and they stopped hiring citizens and eventually white people outside of blood relatives completely. They tried for quite a long time, including raising prices, long training periods and safety equipment purchases, etc. Eventually after several dozen people "accidentally" shear off a tiny piece of their pinky to seek a Workers Compensation claim only weeks into the job trying to claim permanent disability, you either stop putting yourself at risk or you go out of business. They even won most of the cases, largely because they would usually catch these dummies on camera doing it intentionally, but the legal defense itself is still quite expensive and draining...
- kevin_thibedeau 1y ago
  The citizenry has to plan for a future in their home economy. That make labor intensive minimum wage jobs a bad option if you need to hold two jobs to get ahead. Migrants can tough it out for a few annual trips and return with more savings than they could generate at home.
  - busterarm 1y ago
    I'm confused. Is this an attempt at justifying scamming employers for a long-term no-work payday? Like, because the economy is so fucked it's okay to fuck over anyone who has the nerve to have a business that generates employment opportunities? Maybe it's more accurate that labor and the value of labor are a product of culture.
rdm_blackhole 1y ago
So you are saying that you are ok with people smugglers making a buck while encouraging foreign citizens to break the law just so we don't have to find solutions for this sort of problem? It's the same story everywhere in Europe. When people say they want less migrants or illegal people in their country, the-pro immigration parties come out and ask the same sort of questions: who is going to care for the elderly, clean the toilets, take care of the kids, pick up the rubbish and so on? As if, the only purpose of these migrants was to to do all the shit jobs nobody else wants to do. If it wasn't so vile and despicable, it would be laughable. Here is a tip, if you want more people to do bad/hard jobs then the solution is not to encourage illegal immigration so that these people can be exploited, it is to raise the wage of these jobs so that people would actually consider doing them in the first place.
bill_joy_fanboy 1y ago
I told this exact argument to a supporter of deportation policies, and they responded with this: "I don't care about higher grocery prices. I don't care about economic efficiency. I just want them gone." I don't believe you understand their value system. EDIT: In particular, an appeal to economic prosperity will not win an argument with someone who isn't basing their decisions on economics.

hilsdev 1y ago

The labor cost of food is near the bottom of the price factors.

bostik 1y ago
If UK's experience is anything to go by: the fraction of produce left in the fields to rot, unpicked, will go WAY up. Labour cost is one thing, total useful production volume is another.
margalabargala 1y ago
Directly yes but there are knock on effects. What you say is true only when labor is not scarce. The consequences of having insufficient labor is a large price factor. If you can only harvest 30% of your crop and the rest rots in the field because there's no one to pick it, that is outsized.
- hilsdev 1y ago
  If you paid a lot more there would be more people to pick it
  - margalabargala 1y ago
    True! And then the labor cost of food would no longer be near the bottom of the price factors.
AngryData 1y ago
Yeah but you still need people to do it and paying a bit better is not going to get an immediate response of many tens of thousands of workers to quit their jobs to do seasonal and migratory work across multiple states living out of vans and campers with no insurance and increased workload and injury rate. Many crops are just going to rot, output will be lower, and prices will still rise. At some point years down the line sure things might improve and settle out and more US people can fill a larger number of those roles, but it will not happen quickly, especially not for token wage increases, and will likely never gain the workforce numbers that migratory farm workers offer who travel not just across the US but also throughout Central and South America. A US citizen is never going to work in Mexico or Brazil during off seasons for US crops because it basically represents a net-zero or negative wage converting it back into US currency to come live back here. Ive done farm and trade work my whole life, physical work is not a problem, but even if you doubled the pay for picking tomatoes and other fruits and lettuces, I would not consider for a second joining that workforce even if I was otherwise homeless. Im not even sure being a row crop farmer that doesn't even need extra labor is worth the effort. Farms are getting the least and smallest margins by far for food production out of anybody in the food logistics supply line and there is no potential windfall for workers and no career path to work up from picking fruits. Would I like people picking fruit to earn more money and have stables lives and not have to migrate across the country living in vans? Of course, 100%. But without a huge overhaul of our economic priorities and policies towards worker rights and wages, which is the exact opposite direction from where we have been heading the last 60+ years, none of that is going to change regardless of what prices people are willing to pay for food. The base of the agricultural market of farms and the workers directly harvesting food is and has been running on thinner margins than pretty much any other industry in existence. A 2% return on a farmer's seed and fuel and fertilizer inputs is considered a great success.
- hilsdev 1y ago
  We can quadruple the farm worker day rate and it would not significantly impact consumer prices. The floor price of unskilled labor is mostly a function of its market value. Increasing the labor pool via immigration decreases the value of the labor. I too would like to see farm laborers have more comfortable lives

shrubble 1y ago

This argument (which I’ve heard many times before) is easily refuted by looking at YouTube videos for “commercial xxx harvesting” where xxx is the vegetable or fruit in question. For instance the carrot harvester that can harvest tons of carrots each hour: you could pay the driver $126k per year and the carrot price per pound would not even move 2 pennies at retail.

busterarm 1y ago
Not everything can be harvested with big machines. Pretty much all tree fruits, asparagus, peppers, etc are harvested by hand. If you want blueberries or strawberries that look nice enough to be sold to consumers whole, those are hand-harvested every time.
- shrubble 1y ago
  There are some things that are harvested by hand; even in those cases, you can watch a typical process and determine the small labor component. Asparagus for example is harvested in less than 20 seconds per bunch. Even at $50/hour that is a cost of less than 30 cents per bunch; which sells for how much in the store? 1000s of workers harvest over 9 billion pounds of apples every year-again the labor component is smaller than you’d think.
  - busterarm 1y ago
    Oh I agree with you. I'm not saying the labor component is necessarily expensive, I'm just stating the obvious that for many crops they are still human labor intensive. Asparagus harvesting may be fast, but you have to do it every day. You have to keep people employed throughout the entire season. There isn't just a few-week harvesting period. You can't just mechanize everything.
- allannienhuis 1y ago
  That last statement isn’t true. I know people with a blueberry farm that machine processes (with extra human qa step) blueberries packaged for retail sale.

exabrial 1y ago

It's probably not your intention, but I greatly dislike this argument, as it's similar ones were made to justify previous inhumane practices that were legal before the conclusion of the US Civil war. If manual labor is required for agriculture, let the market absorb the real cost and pay the workers the correct wage instead of exploiting them.

estimator7292 1y ago
Ah, but you see the thing is here in the land of the free, we consider this type of thinking to be "Communism" and must be purged without any further thought.
ben_w 1y ago
Comparative advantage. Consider this vague hypothetical, because I'm not American and don't care about the specifics: Country A, average wage X; country B, minimum wage for legal residents 2X. People from A can on average get a pay rise by working in B while undercutting legal residents of B. Citizens of B then get the stuff cheaper than they otherwise would have, but also might not be as easy to employ. Are current employment stats accurate? As in do they tell the right picture or is this a case of "lies, damn lies, and statistics"? Lots of people say it's the later, and unfortunately I'm not qualified to explore anyone's arguments.
- knowitnone2 1y ago
  no company is telling on themselves saying "We hire illegal immigrants to harvest our crops and paying them below minimum wage"
  - ben_w 1y ago
    Course not. Even just the first half, "We hire illegal immigrants", isn't that directly a crime itself?
  - exabrial 1y ago
    This is blatantly untrue unfortunately.

sugarpimpdorsey 1y ago

> I mean when, for example, you clear out the agriculture workers of the U.S. without any thought as to how or what you are going to do to replace them, well, expect higher grocery prices I guess Most ag workers are here on... ag work visas. There are processes in place to facilitate this seasonal work. "No more strawberries/lettuce/etc when you kick out all the illegals!" has been a rallying cry on lefty social media for the last few years and it... hasn't happened? Turns out assuming all the brown farm workers are here illegally is not only extremely racist but fundamentally a misunderstanding of how the system works. It's even more puzzling that people are cheering on the false premise of keeping people here in the shadow of the law as indentured servants so they can save 10 cents on tomatoes at the market.

senordevnyc 1y ago
According to the USDA, around 40% are undocumented: https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/chart-gallery/chart-detail?chartId=63466 https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/chart-gallery/chart-d... That seems like enough to have a measurable impact on food prices if they stop showing up? To be clear, not arguing for or against enforcement, just pointing out that the data seems to suggest this as a factor to be taken into consideration.
SR2Z 1y ago
It hasn't happened because no President has been stupid enough to deport them en-masse. Even the current guy has admitted that he won't focus on agriculture workers because it would be bad for business. Nobody is hiring illegal workers to save 10¢. They are getting paid significantly less than minimum wage.
- FirmwareBurner 1y ago
  >They are getting paid significantly less than minimum wage. Which is bad for everyone except business owners who vacuum up all the profits from exploiting below minimum wage labor, and then socialize the cost of taxless under the table work of illegals to the state and by extension to the taxpayer.
- 1y ago

ben_w 1y ago

My undersanding is that Biden's admin estimated 10-11 million undocumented migrants in the USA, and that these migrants represent a critical percentage of some agricultural roles. It wouldn't simply be higher prices, it would be shortages. I think there's about 50m or so documented migrants, but as many of the targets at Hyundai were documented but apparently wrong somehow, the USA may find its economy and workforce suffering catastrophic reductions in this term of office, even just from people asking "should I leave on my own terms or risk being thrown out?"

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

sillywalk 1y ago

The US Secretary of Agriculture suggested Medicaid recipients and automation. I doubt that'll work. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jul/09/trump-agriculture-medicaid-migrant-farm-workers https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jul/09/trump-agricu...

crooked-v 1y ago
Don't forget RFK wanting to round up addicts for 'wellness farms'.

busterarm 1y ago

Not picking any particular dog in this fight, but the western labor market also has become very adversarial. I knew a guy whose family had a tree nursery in Texas and they stopped hiring citizens and eventually white people outside of blood relatives completely. They tried for quite a long time, including raising prices, long training periods and safety equipment purchases, etc. Eventually after several dozen people "accidentally" shear off a tiny piece of their pinky to seek a Workers Compensation claim only weeks into the job trying to claim permanent disability, you either stop putting yourself at risk or you go out of business. They even won most of the cases, largely because they would usually catch these dummies on camera doing it intentionally, but the legal defense itself is still quite expensive and draining...

kevin_thibedeau 1y ago
The citizenry has to plan for a future in their home economy. That make labor intensive minimum wage jobs a bad option if you need to hold two jobs to get ahead. Migrants can tough it out for a few annual trips and return with more savings than they could generate at home.
- busterarm 1y ago
  I'm confused. Is this an attempt at justifying scamming employers for a long-term no-work payday? Like, because the economy is so fucked it's okay to fuck over anyone who has the nerve to have a business that generates employment opportunities? Maybe it's more accurate that labor and the value of labor are a product of culture.

rdm_blackhole 1y ago

So you are saying that you are ok with people smugglers making a buck while encouraging foreign citizens to break the law just so we don't have to find solutions for this sort of problem? It's the same story everywhere in Europe. When people say they want less migrants or illegal people in their country, the-pro immigration parties come out and ask the same sort of questions: who is going to care for the elderly, clean the toilets, take care of the kids, pick up the rubbish and so on? As if, the only purpose of these migrants was to to do all the shit jobs nobody else wants to do. If it wasn't so vile and despicable, it would be laughable. Here is a tip, if you want more people to do bad/hard jobs then the solution is not to encourage illegal immigration so that these people can be exploited, it is to raise the wage of these jobs so that people would actually consider doing them in the first place.

bill_joy_fanboy 1y ago

I told this exact argument to a supporter of deportation policies, and they responded with this: "I don't care about higher grocery prices. I don't care about economic efficiency. I just want them gone." I don't believe you understand their value system. EDIT: In particular, an appeal to economic prosperity will not win an argument with someone who isn't basing their decisions on economics.