Let me get this straight.
One of the Republican tenets is that immigration is Bad. I don’t know why it’s Bad, perhaps all Republicans are Native American, as everybody else immigrated. But I doubt that, so it must be something about “Immigration before a certain year is OK” or “Immigration from a particular country is OK” or something equally as opaque, but in any case, Immigration is Bad.
Also, Republicans are great believers in “States’ Rights”, which essentially (as near as I can tell) boils down to “States should get to do whatever they want, without interference from the Feds”. This goes hand-in-hand with the “smaller government” movement, which essentially reads along the same lines.
A couple of years ago, Arizona passed some really nasty legislation, essentially giving the state troopers the right to pull anybody over for any reason at all, and force them to show proof of citizenship. As a person who is not pasty-skinned and blonde, I plan to carry my passport whenever I’m forced to travel in Arizona. However, Arizona is not exactly known as a hotbed of agriculture.
Enter Alabama.
Alabama has just passed a very similar piece of legislation, allowing state authorities to demand proof of citizenship. This is to prevent the “non-documented immigrants” from using up public funding for things like schools and hospitals and roadwork. Never mind that many of the “immigrants” are actually “migrant”. They flow into the US, doing back-breaking agricultural work, and then flow back to Mexico and Central America for the winter. Never mind that since the troopers will be pulling people over “on suspicion of”, they’ll end up harassing all the *documented* farm workers (and probably several US citizens who don’t happen to look like whatever it is that the troopers expect a “regular” citizen should look like).
The idea behind the legislation (according to the Dedicated Public Servants who drafted it) was to:
1) get rid of the drains on the public services caused by undocumented (and perhaps, although this has never been proven) non-taxpaying workers.
2) put unemployed citizens of Alabama to work, taking all the now-freed agriculture jobs.
What happened next should be obvious.
All the undocumented farm workers left (yay, say the legislators in Montgomery).
All the documented far workers left, too (oops, …).
All the farmers are now without anyone to work the farms (one guy said his sweet potato crew of 25 is now 6, big oops).
The State Unemployment Office started trying to place workers at farms, but most of the unemployed live in the cities, and all the farms are an hour’s drive away. Also, when people sign up for “farm work”, they think they are going to sit around driving a tractor all day. When they show up and realize that they are going to have to dig around in the mud for sweet potato and squash, according to one farmer, 2 guys disappeared in the first 30 minutes, and another one lasted an hour. The latter worker complained that the squash plants were too prickly for him.
The farmers also have to pay the Alabamans higher wages, which means that they will either have to cut back somewhere else (both seed producers and tractor manufacturers complain that orders are way down), or hire fewer workers to do the same amount of work. By the way, this is *harvest* season, so the potatoes are already in the ground, waiting to be dug up or rot.
In the face of losing Alabama’s $5 billion agriculture industry completely, an Alabama legislator went on record demanding that Washington step in to help Alabama out of their crisis.
He did not go so far as to say that perhaps the new law should be thrown out.
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Immigration Bad. Washington Big Government Bad. But then… what, again?
Let me be the first person to say that I like food. Me and food go way back. And I like cheap and plentiful food, just like I liked cheap and plentiful gasoline. I would hate to have to pay 4x or 10x as much for food, because of some line on a map somewhere.
I honor our farm workers like I honor our veterans. They do a job that I don’t want to do, and the job they do helps to make my life possible. Bless them for their sacrifices, and may they make it home every night to their loved ones after a job well done.
We’ve outsourced textiles and call centers and most of the carmaking. I don’t think that outsourcing food production is a good idea, America.
We’ll buy the cheapest food available. So if we start making it expensive to produce food here, then there will be plenty of cheap tomatoes from Chile. And American farms will start going out of business. And that land will happily get turned into McMansions and Jamba Juices, which will be fine right up until Chile cuts us off.
So it’s decision time. For Alabama, for Arizona, and for the rest of the country.
Do we really care that someone is out there, being underpaid to do jobs that Americans simply don’t want to do? Thank them. Welcome them. Don’t make it hard for them to do their crappy jobs. Because the alternative is dire.
And I’m feeling a bit peckish.
You should be a professional writer.
Very well presented Much of what you say is right on the mark.
There is another persepective on this problem, however. Back in the 1960’s when I was working in the logging industry, the work was physically challenging but the wages were enough to support a family. Most of the local citizens who were able worked in the timber industry logging, cutting cedar blocks, planting trees, thinning tree plantations, and working in cedar shake and shingle mills. When larger timber companys found they could cut production costs by hiring cheaper immigrant labor. Contracts that once went to small local businesses and non profit organizations ( such as fire depts., Boy scouts, Lions clubs, school and community project clubs. etc.) now went to groups of immigrant laborers whom the vast majority of which were not legal. As the number of these immigrants grew and were hired by more businesses ,the local citizens and small businesses could not compete with those who hired these illegal immigrants who would work for a lot less than what it takes to support a family here. When I was running the shingle mill and bidding on cedar sales I found that I could no longer buy cedar because the competition was paying less wages than I could because I obeyed the laws and would not hire illegal immigrants. Almost all of the mills that were running legally couldn’t compete and went out of business. People moved out of these rural communities because they couldn’t support their families. Work was hard in the logging industry but if you paid a family wage you had no trouble finding employees. From my experience the reason businesses can not find citizens to work hard is more about the level of pay and benefits than the willingness to do hard or dirty tasks.
I had a much longer response, backed up by cost-of-living statistics, historical solutions to this extremely common problem, and a pithy solution of my own. I decided to pare it down to its core, and came up with this.
I agree that the problem is about being able to provide a living wage to employees. I didn’t mean to directly imply that Americans are by-and-large lazy. I am saying, however, the following:
1) The cost of living in the US is very high, and
2) Food prices must be kept low, and
3) Giant agribusinesses will shut down every single American farmer before they decrease their profit margins.
So. We require cheap food, but we have an expensive workforce. Either a cheaper workforce must be found, or someone has to convince everyone to eat less. A lot less.
I like $1.69 tube socks.
I like $1.69 2×4’s.
And I like $1.69/lb chicken.
I understand that by making those three statements, I’ve put Americans out of work. Because those 3 products simply can’t be produced for that price by American labor. And that’s fine by me. As long as it’s fine by the people who are producing those products.
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except that I’d like the chicken to be raised within the national borders, please.