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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:
Hotels/farms are low hanging fruit, it's easy to pick up illegal immigrants from these locations.
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.
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’m not convinced you couldn’t get American workers to do it. Much like construction and hotels and housekeeping and so on — Americans used to do all of it. And keep in mind that you have ex-cons and teenagers trying to build a good work history.
Mildly coercive labor practices+pay well above the going rate for unskilled labor has historically failed at staffing American farms with native workers. You could fly in a different set of third worlders, hold their pay in arrears until they get on the plane to go home- but you can't replace the need for migrants from shithole countries.
As @Iconochasm says, if you’re a 19 year old white English-speaking American college student without a summer job, making $30 an hour picking fruits with other white, English-speaking American college students on summer break (who you can chat, joke, flirt with) is a completely different proposition to making $12 (or indeed $30) an hour as the odd one out in a group of only-Spanish-speaking 40 year old Oaxacans with whom you cannot really communicate or talk.
There is a farm near me that a lot of kids wanted to work at because they hired 14 year olds. Few lasted. You don't get paid by the hour, you get paid by the bushel, and it's well under a dollar per bushel. You aren't chatting with your friends because no talking is allowed. Sunup to sundown every day, and you can forget about taking a vacation. And this was a family farm with a grocery store and a pumpkin patch with hayrides, not some agribusiness with thousands of acres.
"Not paid enough" and "doesn't have good working conditions" are in the same category and both can be improved. They could allow talking (especially if they pay by the bushel so talking wasting time won't hurt them), they just didn't.
Also, people think of family businesses too favorably. Family businesses are often inefficient, and their owners vary much more in pettiness than big businesses.
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