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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   34836 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 9, 2025

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Breaking news: Trump is saying he will not be deporting illegal immigrants who work on Farms and in Hotels.

Gavin Newsom is claiming it for a win for the violent riots that have taken over LA and other major cities.

This is a bit of a let down for Trump Supporters and anyone who wants to take America back from those who were not invited. Especially with Gavin Newsom rubbing it in the public's face. Especially with American Approval of deportation efforts have been increasing.

Trump's rationale appears to be:

  1. Hotels/farms are low hanging fruit, it's easy to pick up illegal immigrants from these locations.

  2. After swooping these groups first, then the only applicants to these positions (at the wages the farms and hotels are willing to pay) are the criminal illegal immigrants.

  3. So focus on criminality first.

Does this mean that, once every last criminal is deported, he will then do sweeps of farms and hotels? Left ambiguous.

One problem is the effect of exploitable labor goes in one way. Over the past 2 decades, Landscaping businesses that employed high school students and ex cons went out of business because they couldn't compete against undocumented workers.

If one farm gets raided, and one farm growing similar things does not get raided for another year, then the first farm needs to hire more expensive people and raise prices while the second farm will still benefit from the lowered wages. The farm that got raided first goes out of business first, the second farm maybe gets to buy up the first farm, then when they are inevitably raided they still stay in business and make more money now.

It's not fair. It's not fair that the government has not enforced its own rules surrounding hiring employees uniformly across industries.

The fair thing would be to deport 100% of everyone deportable all at once. The shock of that will be destructive to every industry that is predominately illegal immigrants.

The next fair thing might be to deport 10% of employees in every business all together, then another 10% later, and so on until the bottom is reached.

Of course, the above two "fair" plans are ridiculous. We do not have the man-power to do it.

Any other fair ideas? Besides Trump's new plan of "Don't try to tackle this right now."

Farms are one of those things where you just can't get Americans to do it. You can pay well-above market rate, they won't do it. You can hire out of the parole office, they'll still quit knowing they stand a good chance of going to jail for it.

Like duh, Trump was never going to crack down on fruitpickers and no one really wanted him to.

I don't actually believe this but it definitely seems possible that the markets clear at prices that would be noticeably bad for the consumer.

down on the farm, labor costs are typically less than 20% or for specialty crops close to 40% of total operating costs, and the price from the farm is about one-third the price on the shelf...

Quadrupling those wages might cost the typical family $300 in a year.

From Oren Cass' "Jobs Americans Would Do" https://americancompass.org/jobs-americans-would-do/

Technically noticeable, but barely! Very interesting if true.

If I had to guess there's probably better ways to make farm work attractive, too, besides that – the article says that the average wage is $28/hour right now. For instance, normalizing shorter workdays (two shifts) or work weeks and paying more might generate a lot more interest and keep costs lower than simply quadrupling wages. But I'm spitballing (and not terribly familiar with what's normal in big ag right now anyway).

Quadrupling those wages might cost the typical family $300 in a year.

These people really want a blue wave next year.

300 over a whole year is small compared to the inflation we've beeen seeing recently. And if it's coupled with increased wages then it's not too bad.

It's coupled with increased wages for the <1% of people who work on farms. The other 99% just pay higher prices.

Except all across the board, in this scenario, the country removes the downward pressure to wages caused by the underclass who can get paid under the table, who cannot ask for help if they are abused, and who are desperate to accept any wage to avoid going back home. That changes the wage equilibrium everywhere.

If farm wages double (not quadruple, like in the example above - I think that the quadrupling was a hyperbole) and farm workers make $40 an hour, price of groceries increases $150/year per family of four. Let's say $50/year for a single person.

Then anyone else in a shitty job can say, "is this really any better than making 40/hr picking corn?" And so now Amazon has to raise wages, or provide better working environments, to at least be better than farm work. And so it goes, rippling through the economy. Wages for the bottom third of the country should rise more than 150/yr.

Except all across the board, in this scenario, the country removes the downward pressure to wages caused by the underclass who can get paid under the table, who cannot ask for help if they are abused, and who are desperate to accept any wage to avoid going back home.

Machinery is also abusable and doesn't require any wage at all, should we increase wages by banning it?

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the underclass who can get paid under the table, who cannot ask for help if they are abused, and who are desperate to accept any wage to avoid going back home

There's a very straightforward way to resolve the humanitarian concern here.

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If other low-wage employers are increasing wages to compete with the new high-wage farm jobs, then the total cost to consumers will be more than the $150/year/family.

We know how this works out, because the main feature of the Biden economy was higher low-end wages paid for out of higher consumer prices. The median voter hated it enough to vote for the crook.

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When Georgia the state had a program to replace migrant farm workers with parolees, the produce rotted in the fields. Parolees almost by definition are more used to crappy, unpleasant conditions than the general public(they had after all just been in prison) and they stand a good chance of being imprisoned if they don't hold down a job- meatpacking plants, low level manufacturing, other big employers in shitty jobs love them for that reason.

Getting first worlders to do heavy agricultural labour is clearly an extremely difficult problem which has not yet been solved. In an ideal world we'd fly people in from the Nigeria, India, etc and fly them back with a fat stack of cash from US wages, but the US won't do that. Non-forced labour from the first world is not a viable replacement for migrant farmworkers.

In an ideal world we'd fly people in from the Nigeria, India, etc and fly them back with a fat stack of cash from US wages, but the US won't do that. Non-forced labour from the first world is not a viable replacement for migrant farmworkers.

Canada has many immigration issues, but the temporary foreign worker program for agriculture is actually a huge success. Absolutely dialled work groups from Jamaica/Guatemala/etc come in for various picking seasons, make a fat stack of cash, and then leave to a different country elsewhere for another harvest season.

There is actual competition between farmers for the best/highest skil work groups because the boys are absolutely dialled at their various fruit/vegetable harvesting skills.

The huge issue with farm work is that it isn't year round, which is a massive issue for western workers.

Guest workers as used in eg. Saudi Arabia and the UAE are non-viable because - 60 years later - everybody knows that they don’t go home. The Turks in Germany were “temporary”, they were promised to never receive citizenship, the German public were told clearly that they would work for 3 years and then go home, every single one. Even renewals were initially banned.

Of course what happened is that businesses that employed “guest workers” didn’t want them to leave at the end of the 3 year period because recruiting new guest workers was expensive and required training them. So the periods were slowly extended, then in-country renewals were allowed, so the Gastarbeiter didn’t have to go home in between stints which was disruptive (and most stopped following the rules after a while anyway).

Then, they were slowly allowed to benefit from the growing postwar welfare system, and to bring over more and more relatives. Lastly, to avoid “social unrest” as a consequence of having a huge non-citizen population that was clearly not going to leave they were granted citizenship.

In 1982 Kohl told Thatcher that he would deport at least half the Turks in Germany. But then it seemed like a lot of effort, his ‘self deportation scheme’ (paying them to leave) led only 100,000 to return, and the military coups of the 1980s doubled the Turkish German population as they brought over wives and children and brothers and cousins (who promptly declared asylum) even though Turkish guest worker recruitment ended in 1973.

In 2000, Kohl’s own son married an (upper middle class, but still) Turkish woman and the Germans slowly started amending nationality law to essentially hand out citizenship to Turkish migrants and their children in an effort to assimilate them.

The point is simple: Western countries are incapable of approaching a guest worker workforce with the necessary maturity. The only way they come and leave is if their home country is at least 60-80% as prosperous as the country they move to (which usually means they are unviable as guest workers unless you’re like Switzerland hiring German doctors).

Since 2000, the Republican majority in congress and very careful lobbying by those on the right of the congressional party has successfully killed another amnesty bill that would hand out citizenship. Eventually the dam will break and a Democratic president will pass another amnesty, though it has been a valiant effort. But it doesn’t actually matter, because as Trump’s capitulation shows, the vast majority of migrant workers will never actually be deported.

If Americans don’t want to do ag work, then the fields can rot. It’s OK. Robotics and multimodal AI are progressing at breakneck speed. In less than a decade robots will pick our strawberries (and all the people we might import still won’t leave). In the meantime we can import them from overseas (and in the event of some kind of truly catastrophic global crisis, ex-PMC Americans will pick them diligently rather than starve, I assure you).

Singapore, Malaysia, Gulf States etc have all managed to keep temporary worker visas under control. It's just difficult under a Western system.

Malaysia has a big undercurrent of anger about migrant workers not going home, it’s just rarely reported on in the West. Malaysia has 35 million people and as many as 2.5 million illegal immigrants according to some estimates, higher proportionally than the US.

I live in Malaysia and there's kind of an automatic disgruntlement from the Malays on any opposing ethnic group since they're largely nonproductive. They are very hardline on not giving citizenships though due to prior experience with the Chinese and Indians. Malaysia also better adapted to giving illegal immigrants something to do and relatively low tolerance of violent crime.

In an ideal world we'd fly people in from the Nigeria, India, etc and fly them back with a fat stack of cash from US wages, but the US won't do that.

Why is that better than the traditional solution of using Mexicans?

Because the Mexicans, even if deported, can simply walk back.

The difference in prevailing lower blue collar wages between the parts of Mexico and Honduras which still have subsistence agriculture and even the poorest parts of the U.S. are vast, even if purchasing power in rural Mississippi and Monterrey or the DF is closer than you might think. And people who are willing to pick strawberries for a living are also willing to walk thousands of miles. There will always be someone willing to pay cash under the table for a slight discount to clean toilets or do temporary construction work or whatever at a daily rate greater than the typical unskilled laborer weekly salary in Guatemala or Chiapas. There will always be someone willing to rent out a spare bedroom for a week’s day laborer pay, in cash. I have heard illegal immigrants speak about this- o, so and so went home to Oaxaca, when he runs out of money he’ll walk back, and this time he’ll learn his lesson and stay. I kept his number in case there’s a big job after he comes back. And even with the difference in costs, those Oaxaca laborers are eating rice and beans and wearing rags at home, and hamburgers with jeans in good repair here.

In contrast Nigerians have little choice but to wait in line to do it legally if they want US wages again.

Because the Mexicans, even if deported, can simply walk back.

Why would they be deported? If there's work, we can hand them a temporary visa and they work. If there isn't, no visa. And if they want to work at things not covered by these visas, they can walk in illegally regardless of whether these visas exist.

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