Georgia’s farm-labor crisis playing out as planned

Thanks to the resulting labor shortage, Georgia farmers have been forced to leave millions of dollars’ worth of blueberries, onions, melons and other crops unharvested and rotting in the fields. It has also put state officials into something of a panic at the damage they’ve done to Georgia’s largest industry.

I guess a state-by-state approach to the immigration issue isn't going to work after all... who could see that coming? Just about everyone but the politicians & tea party nitwits would be my guess. 

Vermont, being an agricultural state, uses a lot of immigrant workers. Legal? Illegal?  :-X  But, Vermont's approach is just as long as it is not done in the streets and scares the horses. Everyone knows these workers are here but they are not being pursued by law enforcement (who have other things more important to do). It these people don't present a problem, than there isn't a problem.



Cat

Let them farm hands work...just make sure they don't get education, health care, a decent wage, or the vote.  It'll be sorta like George before the War of Yankee Aggression!
http://www.inthe00s.com/smile/04/farmerjohn.gif

Georgia’s farm-labor crisis playing out as planned

Thanks to the resulting labor shortage, Georgia farmers have been forced to leave millions of dollars’ worth of blueberries, onions, melons and other crops unharvested and rotting in the fields. It has also put state officials into something of a panic at the damage they’ve done to Georgia’s largest industry.



To use a politically correct term, I suppose those Georgian farmers had a business model which was "unsustainable"

Let them farm hands work...just make sure they don't get education, health care, a decent wage, or the vote.  It'll be sorta like George before the War of Yankee Aggression!
http://www.inthe00s.com/smile/04/farmerjohn.gif


Actually, from what I hear in VT, they are paid rather well for temp workers, and better if they are semi-permanent.  Many come back year after year.  Sure, it would be better the give them more permanent status, but we can't do the on our own. 

I wonder how many of these farms are mega-corporate farms? I have no problem with the workers if they want to make a living do that back breaking work. However the idea that we need a class of "sub citizenry" to sustain our way of life not only has shades of "too big to fail", but also echoes the sentiments of other slave owning cultures. My ancestors were farmers and they didn't need any more help outside of the family.


In Dixie they used to call it "Our peculiar institution."

In Dixie they used to call it "Our peculiar institution."



;)

In Dixie they used to call it "Our peculiar institution."



A slave by any other name...

Let's be realistic...how many US citizens would REALLY do what these farm workers do?  I'm so sick of hearing how "they're taking OUR jobs", but I highly doubt those same people would be lining up to actually TAKE those jobs...

You're right. No one wants those jobs. The question is, do we need them?

Back a couple of generations ago much of America was employed in small family farms, especially up north. However today farming is seemingly becoming such a massive and expensive operation. My dad who grew up on the family farm noted the ever increasing size of farms back in the late 80's. The small, family sustaining farms with a classic tractor or two were quickly being swallowed up by larger and larger operations needing more land, huge 250k (a rough estimate) combines, cheap labor, and other equipment. Add to this producers having to sell their product to big industry for pennies on the dollar of what the final product sells for. Then add other cost into the equation such as transporting a product multiple times across country to different steps in food production. We like to think of ourselves as so much more productive and efficient than our "stupid" ancestors. Yet we're now seeing the weak links in this chain break down this new model, not only with immigration issues but oil cost as well (transport).

For me this is not about immigration. I believe that every decent, hardworking individual should have the same open,free, and easy chance to make a new life that was available to most of our ancestors . Instead the issue is about how a social fabric and way of life has been ripped to shreds, and replaced by one that is seemingly falling apart due to an irresponsible and inefficient grab for cash.    

These are good points, except I wouldn't say the new life was easy for our ancestors.  Lots of them were sharecropping serfs for generation after generation.

Most immigration laws stem from racism. At first it was the Irish. Then it was the Italians & anyone from Eastern Europe. Then you had Asians. Now, it is the Hispanics. The U.S. has always had quotas (which is the problem). More than 100 years or so, my great-great-great grandfather & his family were from Russia. He thought that he had a better chance getting to the U.S. by moving his family to Germany because Germany had a bigger immigration quota than Russia did. (Which he was right.)

If the U.S. did away with the quotas, I'm sure there would be less illegal immigration and no need for the human trafficking that occurs along the border.




Cat 

You're right. No one wants those jobs. The question is, do we need them?


Let's put it another way - the engineer who builds the robots that replace the people who pick our vegetables?  He's gonna be from China or India, and he's gonna be even less welcome in America than the illegal alien who picked the vegetables.  3/6 years on an H-1B visa, a contrived recruitment scheme in which his employer has to pretend that any American with a college degree could build the Alienator(tm) Veggie-Picking Robot, and if - and only if - there exist zero Americans who apply for the job, does he get a green card, and if he gets his Green Card (a few years later due to BCIS' glacially-slow process), he still waits another five years before applying to citizenship.

In our grandparents' time, America opened its doors to anyone with a brain and an idea.  Einstein, Oppenheimer, von Braun, didn't matter whether they were building the Bomb or the Saturn V, someone with brains and skills had a future in America.  Never mind your "Team America: World Police" pony videos, the place was something straight outa a Neil Diamond video, yo.

9ttDUGM-1mU

Today?  Today, America does whatever it can to alienate anyone with a degree (starting right from the fingerprinting at the border and the fondling-your-kids-at-the-airport crap) , and practically demands that after you've spent a few years here, you go back to your home country and take your expertise with you.  Supercomputing, drug discovery, and manufacturing?  Go back to China, ching-chong-man.  Programming and customer support?  Go back to India or Canuckistan, nerdboy.  But fruit-pickers?  Hey, this America.  We don't do engineering.  We don't even support the products we hired people to engineer!  But by Glub, we know how to eat, and if we can save ten cents a carton on orange juice, send us your least-educated!

I love this country.  But that's why I weep for it.  I don't wanna diss the fruit-pickers.  The guy who picks my fruit works harder than I ever did.  And the guys who really add value to this country work harder than I ever will.  Doesn't mean we need more fruit-pickers and fewer of the sort of people who turned this place into a postwar R&D/engineering/industrial hyperpower, but...

But.

But this is a "but" that will affect your lives, and your children's lives, and your children's children's children's lives.

http://abstrusegoose.com/strips/humans_get_your_ass_to_mars.png

"If you send nothing up, worried it might come down...

kTKn1aSOyOs

...then I'm learning Chinese," says Wehrner von Braun.

  - 2-line parody with apologies to Tom Leherer, for being only 50 years ahead of his time.