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November 22, 2005
Illegals And Their Enablers
Mark Krikorian at the Corner highlights a puff piece in the Washington Post that details the supposed suffering western state farmers would endure if their pool of cheap illegal labor was removed through immigration reform.
The article is essentially a series of quotes from farmers and their lobbyists on how they can't find enough servile labor to work on their plantations, and demanding that Congress procure a work force for them. The only dissent is a couple of sentences from the United Farm Workers, whining about low wages but supporting the farmers' call for an amnesty and guestworker program -- a typical absurdity from the useless UFW, since mass immigration is the reason for the low wages to begin with. Apparently the "reporter" was unable to find anyone to ask whether it's a viable business model for farmers to rely on 19th century technology and work practices, and then invest money in lobbyists instead of engineers designing new harvest machinery.
Emphasis mine. I'm really fed up with the knee-jerk arguments instantly produced by the enablers of illegal immigration: 1) these are jobs that US citizens won't do; 2) think about how much labor costs would skyrocket. Remember the steel industry? The old school American companies like U.S. Steel also had to be drug kicking and screaming into the 21st century, but because of modern technology steel mills are now vastly more efficient than their smoke-belching predecessors. Defenders of archaic work methods are just defending their comfortable niche; they never look at the big picture. Would produce cost more if there were no illegals to harvest it? Maybe or maybe not--newer, more efficient methods of getting the crop in might well be used; and think of the offsetting savings to be gained by eliminating the drain on our public school and public health systems.
Conservatives are often characterized as resistant to change by those on the Left. That's utterly false. I'm very resistant to mindless change for change's sake, but defending an outdated and inefficient system is equally as bad. Free market capitalism is a powerful and ruthless force--those growers are conerned with their bottom line first. Just like the steel industry, a larger force will be required to change the situation for the better.
UPDATE: Mark Krikorian came back with a very interesting update which noted that illegal labor is limited almost exclusively to the harvest of fresh fruits and vegetables. (As Mark notes, not only do illegals not touch any wheat or corn, no one else does either--those grains are harvested mechanically.) Krikorian give a link to the source of his numbers, which reveals the following:
For a typical household, a 40 percent increase in farm labor costs translates into a two to three percent increase in retail prices (0.175 x 0.33 = 6 percent, farm labor costs rise 40 percent, and 0.4 x 6 = 2.4 percent), so total spending on fruits and vegetables would rise by $8, from $353 a year to $361 a year. However, for a typical seasonal farm worker, earnings could rise to $11,200 a year, up from $8,000. These wage increases may lead to farm productivity improvements, so that consumer prices may decrease rather than increase.
So as Mark points out, raising the wages of the harvesters by 40 percent would result in only an eight dollar a year increase in the grocery bill of an average family. And it could quite possibly be less than that if productivity improvements are made.
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