Mexicans Afraid of Being in America Create Farm Worker Shortage – Crops Suffer

Good. These are some of the worst paying jobs in the country.. because they have used migrants to solve their labor problem, removing the need for them to compete for workers.<p>They need to raise their wages, pay what it really costs for labor.<p>And as a bonus, the increased costs will provide an incentive for future automation.

For what it&#x27;s worth, migrant harvest workers have always followed the harvest, in North American moving from north to south in the fall as the frost line moves southward with the season. &quot;Migrant worker&quot; often implies &quot;foreign national&quot;, but not necessarily.<p>It&#x27;s an inconvenient truth of the scaled up agriculture that produces food for us city folk.<p>Many European countries have formal guest-worker programs. A big consequence of the EU is easier guest-worker access and better working conditions.<p>The reason the USA immigration hassle never gets solved by congresscritters is this: it&#x27;s convenient economically to have an underclass of workers with few rights and no recourse for mistreatment. Congresscritters have to say they&#x27;re TRYING to solve the problem or they appear to be amoral. But they can&#x27;t actually solve the problem without antagonizing the 1% who pay their re-election campaign bills. So the issue is a perennial theme of chin music. Both major US parties do this.

Automation can fix this moving forward but ultimately the lost crops are a result of a bad business decision by the farmers to rely on an an undocumented underpaid labor force without thinking there would ever be any repercussions.

In two recent conversations I was told that the coyete[1] rates are $10,000 from El Salvador and $8,000 from Mexico. The Mexican fellow told me he wouldn&#x27;t return to the US not only because the rates were high too but the smugglers now seem more menacing. The fellow used to perform home construction in the Bay Area. Incidentally, a recent report in the area cited labor shortages as the #2 road block in the SF builder industry.<p>The US administration seems to believe that our economic growth was cash constrained, hence the massive corporate tax cut. But for many industries growth is labor constrained.<p>[1] Colloquial phrase for Central American human traffickers.

Reminds of what happened in Alabama. Vice did a documentary on it. It was definitely eye opening. The only thing that scares me for this type of labor is the sheer amount of automation being done in farming.( They have these crazy lettuce cutting machines as well as sorting machines.)<p>&gt;Alabama’s Failed Anti-Immigration Law The state&#x27;s experiment in &quot;self-deportation&quot; reveals what might happen if the US sent 11 million undocumented workers home.<p>[<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.vice.com&#x2F;en_us&#x2F;article&#x2F;8gk7nx&#x2F;what-alabamas-failed-anti-immigration-law-can-teach-us-about-donald-trump" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.vice.com&#x2F;en_us&#x2F;article&#x2F;8gk7nx&#x2F;what-alabamas-fail...</a>]

If you’re wondering what would happen if farm worker wages were raised, this article in The NY Times from 2011 might shed some light:<p><i>”For a typical household, a 40 percent increase in farm labor costs translates into a 3.6 percent increase in retail prices. If farm wages rose 40 percent, and this wage increase were passed on to consumers, average spending on fresh fruits and vegetables would rise about $15 a year, the cost of two movie tickets. However, for a typical seasonal farm worker, a 40 percent wage increase could raise earnings from $10,000 for 1,000 hours of work to $14,000 — lifting the wage above the federal poverty line.”</i><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;roomfordebate&#x2F;2011&#x2F;08&#x2F;17&#x2F;could-farms-survive-without-illegal-labor&#x2F;the-costs-and-benefits-of-a-raise-for-field-workers" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;roomfordebate&#x2F;2011&#x2F;08&#x2F;17&#x2F;could-farms...</a>

Honest question: how do German (for example) farms manage to work, since there are virtually no Mexicans in Germany?

America produces twice than it consumes. Will the farms suffer perhaps, will Americans starve? no. Should the farms adapt, Yes!<p>Hey I am not going to feel bad, that McDonald does not have a Dollar Menu any more. May be the market forces are the right medicine for the &quot;obesity&quot; problems America is facing.

Would there be a shortage if these jobs paid $20&#x2F;hr with more comfortable work conditions?

I personally do not care. Selecting migrants based of their value for the agriculture industry is about the worst thing a nation can do itself. Let&#x27;s hope that constraints breed creativity and industry invests in automation. I think the government should do more to support farmer automation... especially when it&#x27;s been proven to be effective like for dairy.<p>(I come from a family of farmers... going up my family tree there are been nothing but farmers)

Shortage? That&#x27;s not how demand and supply works.<p>Since the job doesn&#x27;t require any specialization (which could take years to master and thus might cause a shortage), it should be easy to fill such positions from the large unemployment pool if employers started paying more to compensate for the missing Mexicans.<p>But it&#x27;s only a shortage of people willing to do the work at shitty prices.

Almost the same thing happened in UK after Brexit. The atmosphere was so poisonous against them, that the EE workers did not return in the normal amount, so that all farms that rely on them for cheap picking are suffering.

If only there were some sort of market mechanism that would incentivize legal US citizens to perform these jobs, in order to spare these suffering crops.

We&#x27;re seeing the same thing in England, with seasonal farm workers not coming over.

Why are they afraid of being in America?

Crops are not capable of suffering. Another publication that spreads the idea that inanimate things can suffer, while the true suffering is experienced by workers.