If farm mechanization makes sense, sure, but until the Cucumbertron 9001 exists that will make short work of any field, manual labor is needed.
And it's evident that the domestic labor force is ill-equipped to fulfill this demand.
So you are faced with two choices:
- A shrinking, or at least plateauing of your agriculture industry because you can't find enough people who can do the job.
- Letting in tax-paying workers in a legal manner to support your growing industries.
The third option is that some company will set up shop in some other country to exploit this labor force that is unavailable in your country, then sell you cheap-ass cucumbers and further increase your trade deficit, and the US government sees neither personal nor corporate income tax benefits, nor any of the ancillary benefits (increased local economy, increased demand for services from workers, etc etc) of having the work in the country.
There is a third option. The US government is currently paying millions of Americans not to work. When faced with a choice between playing XBox for minimum wage or picking cucumbers for min wage, they make the rational choice - XBox.
So I propose the following: for every agricultural job that goes unfilled, we kick one American off unemployment/welfare and inform them that a job has been found for them.
If the job continues to go unfilled, we kick another American off unemployment/welfare. We repeat this process until either a) all agricultural jobs are filled or b) there are no more unemployed people. If b) occurs, we can then reopen the discussion on immigration to fill agricultural jobs.
I once took a job supervising people for a program like this. I don't believe it is a variable solution. The company I worked for was paid by the government and given other benefits (tax credit, reduced red tape, etc) and it was still barely worth it to employ these people. Out of 20 long term unemployed I had on my team, only two were actually useful workers who I would employ in a second (the company did employ one of them after I left).
The problem is, when you try to force people into work by cutting their welfare that they received for so long without effort is that your carrot is just a worn out version of the one they were getting and the rest of your incentive is all stick. I spent most of my time in that job looking for grown men hiding in bushes, on roofs, and anywhere else they could sneak off to and sending them back to work. Trying to change behaviours overnight is a waste of everyone's time and money and ideas like yours cost more money to implement than they save.
If an adult is hiding in the bushes to avoid work, he does not deserve public benefits of any sort. The program I propose would eliminate such people from the unemployment/welfare/public benefit rolls, saving millions of taxpayer dollars.
Some simple accounting:
Days 1-3: lazy bum is employed by your company and accomplishes nothing.
Day 4: you fire them for laziness.
Day 5: the government compensates you for their wages plus a premium for the wasted supervisor's time, risk, etc.
Day 6-week 99: the government does not pay unemployment benefits to the lazy bum.
Provided 99 weeks of unemployment costs more than 3 days wages + supervisory premiums, I can't see how this could fail to save money.
You forgot the part where someone with limited education and no employment prospects steals a car or holds up a store because they have nothing left to sell and a loan shark threatening them with broken kneecaps. Some unemployment is good for the economy, employee surplus keeps wages lower and ensure there is necessary labour available for short term needs. Most modern, capitalist economies try to maintain at least some level of surplus in the labour market, because history has shown that it is a good idea.
The scheme I worked for was an attempt to rehabilitate the long term unemployed and attempt to train them in a marketable skill. In my view, it was a failure for 95% of people there but it taught me a lot about managing difficult people. Note that I wasn't sent to work there, I worked for an employment company that managed the implementation of the government's idea.
The present education, family, societal and financial system is creating people who have no practical skills, no motivation to work and very little prospects. You have to deal with them as a nation somehow. Doing nothing will lead to social unrest, crime, bankruptcy and a whole swathe of other issues. Giving them money for nothing just creates deadweight dragging down the rest of the economy and basically gives them a life of subsistence poverty. Solving this issue is not easy. Get to work or suffer is a bad solution because suffering isn't limited to the individual, it is inflicted on those closest to them and the rest of us too.
I for one would not be happy to live in a country where people have to live on the streets. 'Lazy Bum' is a pretty brutal indictment of a vast range of people, some of whom may have no other option, may not have the ability to read or the physical ability to pick grapes.
This stuff starts with education. You cannot expect to be a service economy if your K-12 education fails a decent percentage of society. Luckily the tools are becoming available to help, and we need students, teachers and schools to take advantage.
Please pay attention. According to Tsagadai's description, the people he supervised were capable of climbing onto roofs in order to avoid work and were capable of working when ordered to do so.
They merely preferred hiding in the bushes to doing actual work. This was the same situation Georgia had when they tried to get probationers to work the fields - they were capable of working, but unwilling.
This is the group of people to whom I applied the term "lazy bum".
Under my proposal, no one has to live on the streets. The only option which is eliminated is the "be lazy, force workers to pay for your leisure" option.
Georgia is trying something similar with people on probation [1] so far the results aren't good, "most fruits and vegetables require surprisingly skilled handling" [2]
Under my plan, the results would be good. If the process continues as in Georgia's experiment, then we will completely solve the problem of unemployment in Georgia.
Georgia has 11k unfilled agricultural jobs. At the rates described in the article (American workers quit after 1 day), we could reduce the unemployment rolls in Georgia by 11k people/day (330k/month). For comparison, Georgia had only 54k new unemployment claims in May.
This would result in a net decrease of 280k people from the unemployment rolls per month, for Georgia alone.
That's the beauty of my plan - it is guaranteed to solve one of two problems (unfilled agriculture jobs or unemployment). We can't determine beforehand which problem it will solve, but it has to solve at least one.
Idea for Mexico: invest heavily in desalination, create whole states of hothouse farms (hothouse assuming that watering whole deserts would be bad for the ecology and an inefficient use of water), and eat American agriculture's lunch. Subsidize the hell out of the desalination, pumping and waste water recycling, until the hothouse industry can pay for it themselves. Then sell the desalination technology and services to the world.
Your first, second and third sentences are exactly my point.
Yes it's an option, although you and most countries are fairly far from it yet. It takes decisions, purpose and money.
If I can use you as a proxy for Mexico, whatever is not known about this by the larger Mexican economy, and engineering and agriculture communities, can be learned from the smaller groups of knowledgeable people and spread. It's a hard problem, and whatever technologies are developed can lead to exportable products and services (both engineering and agricultural).
Yes, you have big deserts next to the sea, and you probably want to keep them deserts, if for no other reason than human transformation of large ecologies sometimes doesn't work out. So advanced, Mexican developed hothouse technology, enabled by desalinated and pumped water, gives you a place for Mexicans to migrate to in-country, without having to smuggle themselves across the border to die in an American or Mexican desert.
All those Mexican citizens currently working for American agriculture, sending some money home but spending money in America for daily living, could instead be spending that money in Mexico. All that money earned would be feeding the Mexican economy, in addition to the national income earned from exporting agricultural products.
Imagine if the safest food that Americans (and Mexicans) eat came from rigorously clean and high technology Mexican hothouses.
It's obviously an off the top of my head post. Obviously that's part of the equation, and would have to be solved. It's not something that could happen immediately. An economic solution would evolve slowly, but only if it was decided.
Mexico does have a lot of oil, so part of those decisions could involve moving some of that oil from quick money exports to longer term desalination, little by little. It may not always be oil, maybe a good portion of the needed energy could come from tides, winds, chemical differentials between deep sea and shallow sea water. It could be Mexico's Moon project.
> it's evident that the domestic labor force is ill-equipped to fulfill this demand.
...at the current market price for manual farm work, which is low because there are plenty of people from other countries willing to work extremely hard for low pay. But think about the long-term effects here - eventually the current pickers are going to get old and retire. New ones will be needed. So now we need to import more uneducated manual laborers into the country. At the current rates at which 2nd-, 3rd-, and 4th-generation Hispanic immigrants graduate college (http://www.hispanic7.com/us_latinos_enroll_in_college_more.h...), you're literally importing an underclass that is ethnically, culturally, and linguistically different from the majority. That never ends well.
> The third option is that some company will set up shop in some other country to exploit this labor force that is unavailable in your country, then sell you cheap-ass cucumbers and further increase your trade deficit
This can be handled with tariffs, like we do with sugar.
...at the current market price for manual farm work, which is low because there are plenty of people from other countries willing to work extremely hard for low pay.
Prices are low partly because they have no bargaining power due to their lack of legal status. It is the threat of deportation and the resultant economic insecurity that keeps such people in an 'underclass' and prevents them from participating more fully in society, even if they are paying taxes or otherwise invested.
Tariffs have been repeatedly demonstrated to be a failure, as has economic autarky in general.
> ...at the current market price for manual farm work, which is low because there are plenty of people from other countries willing to work extremely hard for low pay.
They are only coming, because they earn even less in their old country. Why do you want to keep those people poor?
> "So now we need to import more uneducated manual laborers into the country."
Welcome to the history of the United States. This isn't just manual laborers, but applies to skilled/educated labor forces too. The intellectual side of America has always been driven by immigration, and this has never been more true than the post-WW2 era. Look at your local university's academics - how many them are first-generation or second-gen immigrants? NASA is practically built out of foreign scientists. And closer to home, what's the representation of immigrants in the tech industry compared to the population at large?
The locals always underperform compared to people willing to scrabble and fight because they've had a tougher background. So unless you have a plan to make locals competitive (beyond simply "raise the wages!"), this seems an inevitable move.
> "This can be handled with tariffs, like we do with sugar."
Ah, so you hope to fight free market capitalism with tariffs... Okay, so let's go with your plan and raise manual labor wages such that people actually want to be farm hands.
Then we go way out of our way to essentially ban foreign imports, or make them so expensive that everyone must use domestic substitutes. We become an enclosed economy so we don't have to face competitive pressures from outside. You're an economy in a bottle, and you better damn pray you have everything you could ever want within your own borders... because as soon as you leave more competitive countries will eat you for lunch.
What part of that sounds like sound economic policy?
> "you're literally importing an underclass that is ethnically, culturally, and linguistically different from the majority. That never ends well."
Isn't this the crux of your argument? You seem to believe this is a bad thing - I fail to see how this can be the case. If this country eventually just starts speaking Spanish as a first-language, what's wrong with that? So what if burritos eventually replace hamburgers as the national staple... in fact this has already happened in some places to no ill effect.
I used to live in Toronto, Canada, where a whopping 50% of the population is immigrant. Pandemonium has not ensued, and instead the country is a stronger, more interesting, and more diverse place for it. Xenophobia has no place in modern economic policy.
Even looking beyond principles of equality, protectionist laws are just plain bad ideas because you're only staving off the inevitable and making things worse. If there is a coder out there right now who's better than me, wants 10% of my pay, and is willing to bust his ass to do so... come hell or high water there's not a force in the world sufficient to stop him from competing with me.
And it's evident that the domestic labor force is ill-equipped to fulfill this demand.
So you are faced with two choices:
- A shrinking, or at least plateauing of your agriculture industry because you can't find enough people who can do the job.
- Letting in tax-paying workers in a legal manner to support your growing industries.
The third option is that some company will set up shop in some other country to exploit this labor force that is unavailable in your country, then sell you cheap-ass cucumbers and further increase your trade deficit, and the US government sees neither personal nor corporate income tax benefits, nor any of the ancillary benefits (increased local economy, increased demand for services from workers, etc etc) of having the work in the country.