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I'm not sure about this. For one, while you made good point about cost/substitution, there is a ceiling on how much you can pay farm manual labour.
Especially because of how seasonal the work is. No first world citizen wants a job for 6 months and then ??? for the other 6.
Yeah totally agree, just doesn't fit great with the economics of farm labour.
But maybe it would, we'll never know because it's easier to just exploit Mexicans
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There's a lot of seasonal work in the First World, construction perhaps being the most common.
Yeah I stand corrected on this, although I think farm labour has far too many negatives and will never pay enough to make Americans think it's worth it (demonstrated by the current situation) but with enough market distortions/minimum wage I'm sure you could get there.
Whether society is better at the end, hard to know, and we never will, because everyone in power, despite saying otherwise, loves exploiting Mexicans instead
The work not being done until the wages raise to a level where workers are willing to do it is not a market distortion, it is the market working as intended.
Illegal immigrant workers are the market distortion; international borders (not market forces) that have very stark difference in cost of living on one side compared to the other create the incentives for people to go work for way below local market rates. Not that I'm arguing for open borders, but that is one situation where governments create bad incentives (by not having an open market with a poorer neighbors) for reasons that can be desirable for other reason than economic, and where it should also work to compensate for it (by policing illegal immigration properly to counter the incentives they've created).
No they aren't, at least not any more than importing any other economic input is a market distortion. Telling an employer that he can't use labor from Mexico isn't fundamentally different than telling him he can't use iron ore from Australia, or electronic components from South Korea. You can make public policy arguments for why certain market distortions are necessary, but they're only distortions if you presuppose some kind of Peronist ideal where the only economic activity that matters is that which takes place inside your own borders. As @AlexanderTurok says, MAGA Maoism.
why are you ignoring the "illegal" part of the argument?
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Yeah fair I misspoke
I think what I mean is I predict trying to replace illegal immigrant farm workers with American farm workers would reduce American agriculture competitiveness worldwide and make Americans very mad about the price of their food.
Hence why politicians love to talk a big game but never do anything to actually fix it (punish businesses who hire illegals)
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That’s not true, if you’ve lived in or near a beach town or ski town there’s plenty of serving staff who only work in a restaurant a portion of the year, every year.
They just work like crazy to make enough money to support themselves on a part time job or unemployed for the remainder for the year.
It’s like a tour of duty. There’s lots of industries that are hyper seasonal and / or are intensive for short amounts of time.
Oil workers are like that, for example. Fisherman, cowboys, that’s just off the top of my head.
Some people really love the freedom of working extremely hard for part of the year and consequently fucking off for the rest of the year.
We've got plenty of this sort of seasonal work up here in Alaska — and not just the oil workers and the crab boats, but also a lot of tourist-adjacent jobs, ranging from seasonal airport baggage handlers to RV park attendants.
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That's a great point actually
I'm concerned that all these jobs are significantly more productive than farm labour, and thus command higher wages.
I guess we can price floor farm work wages but I have a feeling Americans will freak the fuck out when strawberries get more expensive.
I live near a popular tourist area, and we get flooded with Eastern European's on guest worker visas every summer. The jobs are in hospitality, which isn't that much more productive than farm work, if it is at all.
Yeah fair enough
I've been vibe analyzing this so happy for feedback lol
Shame we'll never know because Trump backed off
We can't really say that based on this. Total number of hotel and farmworkers in the US is around 4 million. Even if they're all illegals, there's 20+ million illegals in the US, and some estimates put the number much higher. "Target that group last" is very different from just giving up altogether.
I'm really not a gambler by nature but I'd be willing to put money down IRL that there is never any coordinated significant deportation of farm workers in the USA during Trump's term
Maybe a farm worker or 1000 will get inadvertently sniped as ICE roams around, but there's no shot they deliberately up the pressure on farmers. My basis for this reasoning is the fact red states don't bother to use e-verify or crack down on the American farm owners who freely choose to hire illegal immigrants, despite claiming they hate immigration and there being some relatively straightforward solutions they refuse to use.
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