Question:
Also, are the hotel and motel rooms in other parts of the country
where there is not a ready source of cheap migrant labor not being
cleaned? Oh and by the way, why is it that California has some of the
highest construction costs in the United States if the construction
jobs are being done by cheap illegal labor?
Answer:
The real issue however is the millions of citizens of other countries
who come to and are in the United States illegally. To propose to
discuss the so-called farm labor shortage independent of the issue of
illegal aliens is, well, disingenuous.
Pro open-borders advocates are fond of stating that illegals will take
jobs that Americans will not. Nonsense. What they mean is that
illegals will take jobs that Americans will not at the price that
employers would like to pay.
Are the farmers trying to say that U.S. citizens will not take farm
jobs that pay, for example, the same rates as U.S. auto workers are
paid?
The farm lobby has succeeded in getting the American taxpayer to
subsidize a continuing source of underpaid labor both in terms of
wages and medical benefits. As long as the price of farm labor is low,
there is little incentive to mechanize or automate farm operations.
When I was a boy, I picked cherries in my Uncle Fred's orchards in
northern Michigan. It was indeed hard work, but all the young people
of that area picked both cherries and strawberries as a summer job.
Part of the harvest workers were migrant laborers at that time also.
In time, the farmers in that area invented or discovered the use of
shakers for harvesting cherries. An orchard that used to be picked by
a force of 100 or more manual pickers was replaced by a group of five
workers with a tractor, a shaker and a tanker truck. So why do the
farmers of California continue to hand-pick the fine Bing cherries
that we enjoy in this area? The answer is because there is a taxpayer
subsidized source of cheap labor available and there is little
incentive to automate.
As to the quality of the Bing cherries, anyone that has tasted
tree-shaken Bing cherries from Grand Traverse of Leelanau Counties in
Michigan or Door County in northern Wisconsin, knows that the quality
of that fruit is every bit the equal of the hand-picked Bings of
California. As for jobs that U.S. citizens are supposedly unwilling to
take, since when are U.S. citizens unwilling to take jobs in
construction? The construction industry jobs have always been at the
heart of blue-collar America. It's an insult to hardworking U.S.
citizens to say that they are unwilling to take construction jobs.
