Comment by ben_w
5 hours ago
You can try, but the unemployment levels in the USA have not generally been low enough to find enough workers in total in recent decades. Worse, even the last few % of unemployment is a deliberate policy choice to prevent a rapid cycle of wage inflation as everyone competes for a limited supply of workers:
The farmers would have to pay enough for "seasonal work spending all day doing manual labour in the sun without any AC" to compete with "year round work spending all day stacking shelves in supermarket where the temperature is at consistently in the range that doesn't put off the customers". And if the farmers got the former shelf stackers, then the supermarkets need to find more people to do the stacking. Food prices go up, both wholesale (because the farmers have to pay workers more) and retail beyond that (because so do the supermarkets).
I keep seeing stories about poorer Americans struggling with food prices even without this kind of cycle; but it doesn't end with just those two examples, it's all the low-pay jobs that are inherently more comfortable than farm labour, and if they find themselves short of labour and raise wages they too have to raise prices to balance their books, and whichever professions they in turn get labour from have the same choices, it ripples across the entire economy. Which may be good or bad for other reasons, but it's a massive impact across the entire economy, not something which is an easy one-liner.
Also, despite all those issues, look at this from the point of view of those workers: They've got seasonal work that pays them somewhat more than they'd earn in their home countries, and until very recently that work would not have come with a risk of being deported to a completely different country than they'd come from.
>not something which is an easy one-liner.
It seems to me like it would initially make inflation spike a lot if applied abruptly but regardless of the timeline would also increase the standing of the lower classes doing menial work substantially. This also has an effect on those other cushier low wage jobs as they then have to compete with the previously unattractive fieldwork. And they bloody well have to compete because food prices would rise and people are sensitive to that.
There's more to it of course and maybe it's in some way good but there's no way the current way of doing things with half or more of farmhands being illegally employed does not provide downward wage pressure for americans. We don't have to be wishy washy about that bit.
>look at this from the point of view of those workers
The government has no mandate to benefit them over it's own citizens beyond the obvious (foreign aid, disaster relief, etc) though.
> The government has no mandate to benefit them over it's own citizens beyond the obvious (foreign aid, disaster relief, etc) though.
Yes, absolutely, I'm just pushing back there against "basically totally control them thru deportation threats should they get to uppity on Freedom Land's supply"; this was, previously, a mutually beneficial relationship despite being… I was about to write "second class citizen", but no, less than citizen even then.
That said, current regime clearly regards foreign aid, disaster relief as not worth supplying, they either don't understand the soft-power benefits to the USA or don't care.