This sounds quite sinister but it was a common summer job in Iowa for teenagers. You could make enough in a summer to buy a used car. Because of immigration these jobs are not really available for citizens anymore. I haven't heard of any teenagers taking this work in some time. You had to work long hours in the sun and heat but it was "an honest day's work."
Interesting it was in 1965, around the time of the Cultural Revolution in China which forced masses of non-working class people to leave the cities and work on farms.<p>(I'm not certain of the exact timing of the farm labor program in China.)
Growing up in Norway, picking strawberries was always a typical summer job for teens. You'd get bussed to the field, be crouched down all day under scorching heat, and...well, it sucked. Just sucked. And the pay was piss poor.<p>Pretty much any summer job would pay more, and in the end less and less teens decided to pick strawberries. Farmers complained, and then started flying inn south-east Asian rice farmers to pick berries instead. Relative to their pay back home, picking berries in Norway was a pretty sweet deal. Many still go there annually to pick during berry season.<p>They live cramped in a cottage, and work all day. If it's a good season, they make good money. If it's a bad season, they break even. Unfortunately there are some pretty scummy farmers that will exploit the situation. Here's a short docu following Thai pickers in Sweden: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vW1QWG3xSNg" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vW1QWG3xSNg</a>
Setting aside the moral component, and focusing on the economic; the Trump deportation plan is red carpet invitation for consolidation. Agriculture today is a declining mix of many medium and small growers, with a few mega growers that have increasingly concentrated their market share of output. Deportation will greatly accelerate this trend, consolidating most agriculture under a few mega growers. Small and medium sized farm operations can’t afford the capital for complex automation to replace manual labor - but mega corps can.
is "Migrant" a euphemism here for "illegal migrant"?<p>If your business needs illegal labour, then it's not a viable business, and it should die. If your pay is so low that no one wants to do your work, why should you be able to break the law with impunity because your business can't compete? Innovate, or die.
If you're center-left like me, here's something you might not have realized yet. The conventional wisdom is that racial cleansing is the goal and that the economic cost of mass deportations is the price. It's actually the other way around.<p>The economic cost is the <i>goal</i>. The racial cleansing is just how that cost is initially justified to the base.<p>Once the economy really starts heading south, blame Democrats and other phantom enemies. It's much harder to jail the opposition and overturn democracy when things are going well. The blueprints are Venezuela and Argentina.