“Funny how the same people who argue ^ these points are often the same people arguing for higher minimum wages across the country. Why is it okay for businesses to pay burger flippers more money, but not okay for farmers to do the same with their workers?”
The farmers are paying more and they still cannot attract native born Americans to work there. They are even starting to offer benefits, but still no takers.
I’m certainly not opposed to farmers paying higher wages. Workers should make more then they are making now.
The same thing has been reported by other businesses, like construction co and other trades. They can’t get native born Americans to work for them. They are not complaining about having to pay more but that they can’t get workers regardless.
I didn’t miss that part but instead of going towards a system of some sort of legal status to those workers, we are going in the opposite direction because, for some bizarre reason, they believe Native American workers will replace the illegal immigrants who do those jobs.
Unfortunately, imo, we are going to have to pay the consequences before we will learn the lesson of these misguided policies.
What has happened to the work ethic that makes American Citizens think they are too good for certain jobs, almost regardless of pay or lack of alternatives?
You can answer that question when you yourself – or your children – work on a farm picking strawberries for 12 hours per day. Until then, accept that people who have options (i.e., are legal and have skills/education) are highly reluctant to toil in 95-degree heat for months on end.
BTW, I sort of know of what I speak. I spent two weeks in Spain ions ago picking strawberries because the farm offered me free room and board, and I was a broke college student traveling on the proverbial Europe on $10 per day. It was backbreaking work, and it put me off strawberries FOR YEARS. I eat them today, but guiltily, knowing just how much work they require before they end up in that nice little plastic tub in my supermarket.
^Part of it is that some people aren’t very mobile. For example, out of work West Virginia coal miners don’t want to move to Nappa Valley or even across the state to Charleston. Some of the examples, such as the $10 head of lettuce, are just ridiculous. It’s estimated the CPI-Food’s fresh fruits and vegetables component will increase 0% in 2017.
There’s also the factor that farm work in additional to being arduous with long hours at peak harvest times that it has exceedingly low social status in practice despite many “doth protest too much” public protestations to the contrary by many politicians and pundits who’d probably never deign to get near the fields…much less work in them…
The status, in fact, was so low even the local town residents in my White majority local resident NE college town who were underemployed and on public assistance would look askance at the mere suggestion they do farm work. Why no, THEY were “too good” for that line of work.
I wouldn’t be surprised if such attitudes are worse among coal miners or moreso…college educated corporate professionals…especially those in finance/ibanking type careers.
Incidentally, @hebegebe 's comments about whether we Americans lost our work ethic reminded me a bit about an acquaintance’s recent FB discussion remark about how he’s in favor of a national draft.
Knowing him, he is sincere and will try to fulfill his commitment…but will likely end up like a volunteer soldier in Taiwan who wasn’t required to serve because he was American-born and ended up embarrassing himself on the news/internets when his tendency to rub NCOs and his fellow soldiers in his unit the wrong way to the point he was ragged on and “PTed to death” so often he tried to desert and went on a screaming rant while blocking a public escalator with his elderly father embarrassingly trying to get him to get on with fulfilling his commitment on video because he was worried they were going to “kill him”.
While I have never worked on a farm, I went to a high school in farm country, and so many of my classmates families owned small farms that they worked themselves. Neither they nor their children considered the hard life beneath them.
I estimate that the majority of people in the US have ancestors that arrived in the last 125 years, mostly in steerage. Where did that work ethic for a better life go?
I worked on the farms. I was not poor, I was doing it to earn money for things I wanted. I don’t think any of my ancestors worked on farms, even in England and Ireland, but my brothers and sister and I have a very good work ethic. My brother first started working on farms when he was about 8 or 9 and some friends had one of the farms in an area they were putting up subdivisions. He loved it and to this day works outside.
Hebegebe, are you honestly saying that those NOT interested in farm work don’t have a work ethic? Because I know a lot of extremely hard working people who have never set foot on a farm. Not because they’re too good for the work… but because they don’t have the skills or interest. And I certainly think that a good farmer needs both.
Topic went all over US is one of the only countries where this is even a issue.
There is a.process and it needs to be followed. Deportations need to happen by the millions! I dont believe in sanctuary cities, umdocumented going to school, or getting scholarships.
Did anyone else see the story on the news about the white supremacists marching through the Univ. of Virginia campus last night wielding torches and chanting “End immigration” and “Jews will not replace us”? An appalling display. How do people end up filled with such hatred?
I didn’t see that, and it sounds despicable. Many people feel like ending illegal immigration, and streamlining legal immigration, but I think (and I hope) few want to end legal immigration.
It is as despicable as rallies for immigration, where the protesters fly the flag of the home country instead of the U.S. flag, and hold up signs written in a language other than English. Perhaps they just don’t see the damage to their cause when the words say they want to be American, but their flags are from the country they say they want to exit.
When I was young, we spent every Memorial Day weekend picking strawberries. It’s hard and hot work but it is not beneath anybody.
I just drove through the Central Valley of California and I didn’t see any crops rotting in the fields. From the signs posted all over the Central Valley, it is clear that the farmers main concern is water or rather lack of it, not workers or lack of them.
The last article also notes that the extended family immigration provisions that would be ended by the RAISE act were enacted in 1965 because, “As a co-sponsor of the bill, the New York congressman Emanuel Celler, told colleagues: ‘Since the people of Africa and Asia have very few relatives here, comparatively few could immigrate from those countries.’” Obviously, eventually, it did not work out in the way the original proponents of that provision wanted (which was to keep immigration white), which is likely at least part of the current motivation to end it.
Of course that is not what I am saying. What I am saying is that if a person is unemployed or underemployed, that they should be open to all forms of work. Nothing should be “beneath them”. And the work ethic challenge affects far more than just the unemployed. Here are two recent WaPo articles.
In the first, a company cannot find reliable employees to hire, so the gaps are being filled with robots:
which has absolutely nothing to do with immigration. As it is, this thread is about a nanometer away from crossing the red line and getting closed. Let’s keep to topic and way from a political discussion. 2 posts deleted.
