A survey of rural and urban Americans

Parent Cafe
101

@OHMomof2, yes, I know that. I was just trying to point out that the fishing industry (which includes the processing of fish) in Alaska also has problems getting workers. Plus, If they don’t have enough workers to process the fish, fewer fisherman will be needed.

There is obviously a problem in the US with finding Americans willing to do these very labor intensive and relatively poor paying jobs.

IMO, the climate in this country now is such that no solution will be forthcoming and many small businesses, especially in rural areas, will simply not survive.

102

In my county individuals without access to education used to do the labor intensive, low paying jobs. They tended to be tenant farmers. I’m glad we have evolved beyond that situation. Where I live a few elderly tenant farmers are still alive and they seem to have no retirement funds, no social security. The Churches help out.

103

Totally agree, ebee. If we are going to stop allowing illegal immigrants to do those jobs then they are going to have to pay enough for legal residents to do them, which will likely mean higher prices unless the government subsidizes, or the entire farming model will have to change.

No easy answers here.

104

Eventually it would all work out. We would pay much higher prices and eventually the immigration system would get reformed as folks would not accept such high prices, not perfectly I am sure but better than it is. By turning a blind eye to illegal immigrants it just delays the system getting fixed.

105

It’s funny though- you would think the worst job would be picking up trash and yet I haven’t heard of cities complaining about not finding enough people to be garbagemen. Is it because they are higher paid and with better benefits? Or because they tend to be in cities where there is more of an available workforce?

106

It seems to me how it eventually all works out is monolithic agricultural operations, run by Amazon or Wal-Mart.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/09/16/the-decline-of-the-small-american-family-farm-in-one-chart/?utm_term=.5ef5204404ed

107

All of the above, I think. It’s a job that is year-round, usually has excellent pay and benefits (often unionized) and in large cities there are lots of people to do them. In smaller towns the pay and benefits aren’t as good but still more than minimum wage.

That factory in the WaPo article I linked says it would do fine getting enough people to work there if in Indy, but not out in the rural area where they are now.

108

I agree with this. We either enforce our borders, or we don’t. There’s no in between.

If you want to come here and pick vegetables, by all means go for it, but go through the legal process first (like everyone else has to do). Meanwhile, we streamline the immigration visa system for those looking to work here, and assist those who are already in the country working to get green cards.

We can’t just have a bunch of random, undocumented people in our country though. We need to be keeping track of them.

109

Garbage collection historically paid well because it had to in order to get people to handle garbage.

But now, automated garbage trucks with robot arms to pick up specially designed garbage cans mean that far fewer garbage collectors are needed for residential and commercial garbage collection, and the job is much less nasty than when the garbage collectors had to manually empty the garbage cans into the garbage trucks. (Yes, there is still the manual emptying of garbage cans in public places.)

Probably the nastiest aspect of garbage collection these days may be manual sorting of recyclables and hazardous waste out of the garbage.

110

I think the issue is that once someone has gone through the legal process, they no longer want to pick vegetables. They have better options for work.

111

^ That is not a good enough excuse. You’re basically saying it is okay to come here illegally… :-?

112

" If some people would start getting off their high horse and start looking past thinking all conservatives are “ists” some commonalities could be found. It’s okay to have a different opinion or want a different lifestyle, for both sides."

I agree, but this post itself points out a problem, it posits that conservatives (let’s say rural conservatives) are the victims of being denigrated by ‘liberal elites’, without realizing that in doing that, the poster is demonizing anyone who doesn’t agree with them. Hate to tell you, but a lot of those ‘damn liberals’ when they fight for workers rights, higher minimum wages, opiod drug treatment (instead of Jeff Sessions “Throw them all in jail” method), better workplace rules, and so forth, the people who are those activists are generally not rich, they aren’t elites (well, okay, maybe they are educated), and many of them actually care about the people in rural areas who are struggling, but they are denigrated as ‘big city liberals who only care about lazy welfare recipients’ and the like (and before you tell me that isn’t true, try reading right wing blog sites and listen to right wing talk radio sometime). Maybe, just maybe, those claiming liberal elites and the like are telling them what to do should actually listen to what their representatives are saying and then doing and figuring out if it adds up, or for example, what ACA means or doesn’t mean to them, rather then hearing ‘that is for those lazy people who don’t want to work and get gold plated medical plans, while I have to struggle to pay for mine’. If you want ‘the other side’ to listen, you need to listen yourselves, too (spoken in general to people as a whole), and when you want things done, you cannot go in believing “it is my way or no way, it is the truth”, like with religion, doesn’t work well with others.

113

The border is not the whole story of illegal immigration. Many enter legally, but then overstay their visas to become illegal immigrants. But they tend to get much less attention, since overstaying one’s visa is not a news photo opportunity like someone trying to cross the border illegally. Also, those who overstay their visas are not as highly concentrated on a particularly disliked ethnic or national origin, compared to border crossers.

Even conservative organizations recognize visa overstay to be a big issue in immigration enforcement:

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/may/22/visa-overstays-biggest-problem-illegal-immigration/
http://www.judicialwatch.org/blog/2017/03/focus-border-wall-visa-overstays-create-illegal-immigrant-crisis/

The DHS report is here:

https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/Entry%20and%20Exit%20Overstay%20Report%2C%20Fiscal%20Year%202016.pdf

114

Ucb, you’re not wrong. Visa overstays are another problem.

115

I do not think enforcing our borders excludes ensuring those who overstay their visas are not also prevented from working here, they are still “illegal”.

116

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/jan/31/agribusiness-exploitation-undocumented-labor

117

I’m not saying that at all. I’m saying something is going to happen with farms if illegal immigrants can’t work on them. Certainly not advocating one or the other. If farm work suddenly starts paying $30 an hour or more, and citizens start doing it, great. That will put a lot of money in poor people’s pockets.

118

The problem with building a wall and border enforcement is that it likely won’t fix the issue we are talking about, the vision of this giant wall sounds all great and good, it is marvelous PR and really makes it seem like they are doing something…but it likely won’t solve the problem, in the sense that they will find other ways to get to this country, pure and simple. It is like trying to use masking tape to patch a leak in a high pressure water line, it won’t hold.

In the current situation, the pressure is a combination of pushing (immigrants wanting to come to the us) and the reasons why (jobs that need filling), and it is big enough no wall is going to stop it. A lot of those who envision the wall also think this means not dealing with ‘hordes’ of immigrants from Mexico and South America, that these jobs will go back to “Americans”, but they leave out that immigrants take the jobs because no one else wants them. They want the restrictive immigration policy of today (which is all but broken), envisioning this will mean keep out the invaders, when they talk about 'let them come here legally", many (not all) basically see this as ‘get out and stay out’. I think people have legitimate concerns who live along the border, who deal with all kinds of things, but that can be dealt with by having rational immigration policy so people aren’t sneaking in, and in enforcement to go after people like drug runners and the like (it is the drug runners who are causing a lot of the crime from what I can tell).

However, what this ‘secure the border before talking immigration reform’ is basically a code word for ‘secure the border, then forget about immigration reform because my people don’t want it’, and that is doomed to fail, we could put a wall up covering every border of the US and it wouldn’t work.

People have proposed rational solutions, for those who come to the US to work but are transient (which many are), you could have guest worker visas that would cover that, for those seeking to immigrate it would be a process where they can, maybe a graduated process where they can come in as guest workers and over time work towards citizenship. With H1B tech visas, for example, a common path is people come in under the H1B, and over time they get sponsored for a green card by the employer and eventually become citizens. It is either that, or we significantly change things like minimum wage laws and the like, so that jobs like busboy and prep chef and farm workers and landscapers and the like will be taken by people here, where they pay a living wage, but will Joe and Jane Smith in the burbs who have a landscape service be willing to pay for that? Will they be willing to pay more at their favorite diner, would they be willing to pay more for tomatoes and lettuce and the like?

I am neither hard core "keep em out’ or those who say “open the doors”, I think a country has to do things in its own interest and of its citizens, the kumbayah crowd ignore the consequences of immigration and potential risks, the people on the ‘keep america for americans’ (who often are doing so out of racial bias rather than caring about real issues like jobs IMO) leave out the many jobs immigrants are doing, legal or not, that no one else wants to do and because they don’t want ‘those’ people here, won’t entertain something like a more open guest worker program or better paths to becoming a citizen.

It is funny, I keep hearing from some how ‘those people’ are not like people who came before, they ‘don’t want to be citizens’, they don’t want to learn the language, but it is a funny thing, over the past 20 years or so my area has seen a lot of people coming in from Central America and Mexico, and I have seen something different. I recently got work done (through Home Depot) to do my roof and my gutters and soffits redone, the company that did the roof was owned by a Mexican guy and his crew were Mexican (not day laborers, they work for the company), and they did a great job, as did the people doing the gutters and such, finished the job quickly, it was done well, they cleaned up…compare that to a local company I tried to call, been in business for years, left messages, didn’t return my call, tried other places, when they did talk to me told me they couldn’t come out to give me an estimate for several months, one of the guys finally called me back 3 weeks after i left my messages and got pissed off when I told them I had someone. I tried to get a mason, find out the guy is a nephew to one of my neighbors, left him 3 messages over a 2 week period, never called back…and oh, yeah, with the roofing, 2 of my neighbors used the firm that blew me off and gave me attitude, they have had to get the guy back 3 times to fix things that weren’t done right, including things like shingles not nailed down, the roof was missing the Ice Dam layer required by code, they didn’t put in the roof ridge vent they paid for and so forth…

119

First, not all honest work a day blue collar workers are “country folk” or conservative. Quite a few are urban and liberal/progressive…with an increasing number IME being more radical than their higher SES counterparts judging by what I’ve observed and heard from friends who are blue-collar workers themselves and/or those who actually work with them on the ground on issues of actual concern rather than make fiery polemic speeches.

And rural conservatives also have a serious “superiority complex” vis a vis their urban counterparts…especially non-White counterparts as underscored by decades long rhetoric which claimed them to be the “real Americans”…and was referenced heavily by one rural conservative political candidate in a past presidential election and the increasingly open blatantly racist xenophobic rhetoric from many Tea party members and supporters of the current administration. THEY should seriously get off their high horses.

And when I was attending undergrad in a rural NE Ohio town in the mid-late '90s, there were plenty of rural White town locals who’d condemn urban “welfare queens” while subsisting largely/completely on public assistance and feel entitled to a highly paid skilled factory job despite barely graduating HS with minimal/no skills or worse, being HS dropouts with minimal/no skills.

120

Manual sorting is coming to an end. The interesting part of this video starts around 1:30.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0IMziu1yfS4