The comments to one of my posts pointed to this claim by Sen. McCain:
[Speaking to the AFL-CIO's Building and Construction Trades Department, McCain took] questions, including a pointed one on his immigration plan.
McCain responded by saying immigrants were taking jobs nobody else wanted. He offered anybody in the crowd $50 an hour to pick lettuce in Arizona.
Shouts of protest rose from the crowd, with some accepting McCain's job offer.
"I'll take it!" one man shouted.
McCain insisted none of them would do such menial labor for a complete season. "You can't do it, my friends."
How can this assertion of his possibly be right? Fifty dollars an hour is $100,000 per year. I suspect the lettuce-picking season is shorter than a year, but it's still $50,000 per six months, assuming a 40 hour/week pace. It's possible that no-one in that particular crowd would think this is a good deal; among other things, they already had jobs that likely pay pretty well, and perhaps most of them were older and not terribly fit (McCain saw the crowd and I didn't). But surely there must be some substantial number of current American citizens who would be quite willing to engage even in highly strenuous physical labor for an annualized wage of $100,000 per year, no? Even if 99% of all Americans would be unwilling or unable to do the job, the remaining 1% should be plenty to fill those hypothetical jobs.
Now perhaps Sen. McCain should have just chosen a lower number; maybe his claim would have been plausible at that number, though I'm not sure. But it seems odd that he would choose a number that is so clearly out of place for his argument — that he would seemingly deliberately engage in such pretty patent overstatement.
Related Posts (on one page):
- Sen. McCain on Jobs No American Citizens Want, Even at $50/Hour:
- More on "Jobs Americans Won't Do":
- Response to "Jobs Americans Won't Do":
- Jobs Americans Won't Do:
Heck, $50,000 and 6 months vacation is $10,000 and 5 1/2 months more than I make now.
They physically wimped out. It's tough.
Look if you are a US citizen in the states who is fit and sane enough to take a job picking lettuce you won't starve. You can get food stamps and other government aid. More importantly if you are fit enough to pick lettuce and willing to relocate to arizona for a job that only lasts half a year and disciplined enough to keep at the job almost certainly you can get some other job in the US. Sure, some people really are unemployed and can't get jobs but they are probably unwilling to move across the country at the drop of a hat and take intermitent (though well paying) work picking lettuce. Thus it stands to reason that no one who could actually do the job (physically and psychologically) simply won't take it because they have better options.
Also I suspect that picking lettuce doesn't offer constant employment even for the time you suggest. Either it occurs over something like one month or less or it involves intermitent labour (can't get hired for the whole time).
Thus to take such a job someone in the US would have to be totally unable to get another job since the lettuce picking wouldn't be enough to sustain them for the year but wouldn't be compatible with any other job they are likely to get.
Now, sure, some people aren't goign to be cut out for physical, menial labor. I'd even imagine, as Harry basically says, that people who grew up in suburbia with white collar parents are going to be less cut out for such jobs. But this doesn't mean that there aren't plenty of people who wouldn't be willing to give it a shot, much less actually be capable of doing the job.
Frankly, I'm confused as to how anyone in their right mind could possibly think that there would be trouble getting Americans to pick lettuce for $50/hr. There are Americans who work in dangerous, uncomfortable steel mills for less than that; there are Americans who work in fast food for $6/hr, for goodness' sake.
In fact a moment's thought reveals that nearly anyone, even a fat 45-year-old newspaper reporter with lily-white hands, could, if he began picking lettuce and kept at it succeed in doing so as well as the most sun-baked, whipcord-tough farm laborer (which of course he'd be turning into). This is, by definition, not rocket science, and a job that requires less in the way of natural God-given talent it would be hard to imagine.
Does ol' Senator McClueless realize the logical implication of what he's asserting here? Namely, that there's something in Hispanic DNA that gives them an inherent and insurmountable genetic superiority in the lettuce-picking field. No white folks can do their jobs, Senator McSilly says, 'cause they're just born lettuce-pickers. Good grief.
*waves hand*
I have, in fact, picked lettuce. And yes, it sucked. I was paid, at the time, I think $22/day. That was basically dawn to dusk, but we had breaks, and my boss was not unreasonable. Later, I graduated into tobacco, which was higher risk, but made more. There were two phases - harvest and curing. Harvest was somewhat different from lettuce or tomatoes, except in the mechanics, but OK. Curing was different. That involves hanging harvested plants in tobacco barns - large structures that are essentially nothing but drying racks, vertically aligned, with a series of beams one both climbs and places plant matter on. Climbing those things is scary. The first day I did it, I nearly fell when nicotine poisoning from the plants made me sick. A coworker caught me and tied me off to a bridge, until they could get more folks up to lower me down. I started smoking that summer in order to build up a tolerance (I finally quit smoking a few years ago). None of the local farmers payed minimum wage to workers like me, but I didn't pay taxes on that income, either. In some ways, at the time, I thought that was fair: They were cheating, so why shouldn't I? But then I went to school.
I share my trashy, farmer background only to note that McCain is talking, bluntly, rank crap.
I've been lucky: I run a company now, am established in NYC, and not only am I stable, but I'm going to go to law school, and the company I own stands a decent chance of still being here when I get out. I hope to run the company again after I'm done. We'll see.
To say that people wouldn't take jobs at $50/hr demeans not only those who want to come to our country, but it demeans people like me, who did, frankly, shit work to get leverage. I'm omitting my experiences in food service, hotel service and the temp worker gig for brevity.
Um, John, am I not an American?
As an alternative to accepting my narrative, I invite Senator McCain to advertise whatever jobs he's talking about at $50/hr, and see what happens. I think that would be a nice reality show, in fact.
It presupposes that everyone has a choice about what work they can do. Not everyone has the ability to move through the education system, get a degree and more, and get the job they want.
There is, I would suggest, a sizeable number (At least in the millions) of people who do not have it in them to get a workable degree and get a "good" job. Are we to deny them work.
A lot of the work done by illegal aliens is work that could be done by these people. Jobs you or I may not like but jobs that paid a living wage. Most of the jobs done by illegals are not farm jobs but jobs in metropolitan areas. The service industries and building trades come to mind. Costs may go up if legals were hired but the costs would be applied to those who benefit from the work.
Two additional points:
1. The marchers are asking for citizenship. Not a Green Card (after which you have wait to five years before appplying to be a citizen) but citizenship. The Senate bill is considering this.
2. I cannot understand why either political party is supporting the argument to legalize illegal aliens. Do they really think the illegals are going to be voting for black and white faces when they get the vote.
Please do not put words in Mr. McCains mouth.
My memory is a bit hazy but I don't recall making anywhere near $50 per hour and I don't make anywhere near that now for significantly easier work.
Please, send me an application...not only am I willing, I know for a fact that I'm capable of the type of work he's talking about. I did it for years.
I think they could find someone to pick lettuce...
Just wondering.
(Of course--and I'm sure this point has been made on earlier threads--the real reason that some employers want immigrants, legal or illegal, is that they regard them as better, or at least more docile, workers than Americans they can get for a similar price. Americans are more likely to assert their rights, argue, etc.)
Lettuce picking is similar to playing football. Could I have learned to do it when I was 14? Yes. Are there people older than me who are still doing it professionally? Yes. Could I learn it now, in my thirties? Not a chance. I don't have the bone structure or endurance, and my learning curve would be much tougher than a 14 year old's learning curve. I'd probably be injured badly enough to miss the rest of the season before I developed the strength and stamina necessary.
It is a myth than manual labor is "unskilled". It is just a different kind of skill which is easy to learn when you are young, much harder to learn later.
http://migration.ucdavis.edu/rmn/more.php?id=1092_0_5_0
It seems the point of the comment was the subtext: "Downtrodden brown immigrants will do jobs that blacks are too lazy to do and whites are too good to do." It plays into the rationalizing racism of a populace ('Hey, we're not doing anything wrong, Americans wouldn't take the jobs anyway...'). I thought McCain was above that.
So yes, raise the wage high enough, and even Professor Volokh might give up his sinecure for healthy days in California's sunny lettuce fields. But surely that's a world only an economist, with her convenient ability to assume away reality, could love.
In the 1930s Eric Blair/George Orwell pointed out that the one of the first orders of business in establishing a just world was to equalize incomes across national boundaries. Capitalism and open borders seem to be doing a much better job of this than socialism ever did. Interestingly, the left is screaming with just as much anguish as the right about cross-national income equalization.
Is anyone going to pay $50 for labor to harvest lettuce? Of course not. (You'd start to see American citizens and resident aliens taking the work soon after the wages started creeping up, or worst-case scenario, mechanized harvesting will become the preferred and much more economically viable alternative long before the wages reach $50/hr.) The only value of the $50/hr. lettuce picker scenario is as a reductio ad absurdum, but one which proves the defects of the JAWD meme.
And as far as the whole "living wage" thing goes, it seems to me that the industries where people are demanding "living wages" (janitorial, agricultural, and other unskilled labor) are the same sectors that are coming to be increasingly dominated by illegal, therefore unprotected and compliant labor. If the living wage people were intellectually serious (i.e. actually studied some economics and business instead of "social justice" theory and Chomsky's scribblings) they'd be wanting an end to illegal immigration too. That way, unskilled workers would have much more bargaining power, and the corporations would actually have a true economic incentive to increase wages, and would be much more liklely to oblige.
She would have jumped at the chance to pick lettuce for $50 an hour.
$50 an hour is somewhat more than I am paid. Back when I was working at a non-profit law firm and paid still less than I am now, I would have been willing to pick lettuce for $50 an hour for a couple weeks a year on my use-or-lose vacation. (It's not as if I could have afforded to go anywhere on my vacation anyway. Before my vacation became use-or-lose, I cashed it out rather than using it).
The cost of taxpayer-funded social services for illegal immigrants and their kids exceeds the economic benefit of the cheap labor they provide to business and the wealthy.
In Arlington, Virginia's Ballston neighborhood, in an apartment complex where we nearly rented, the recipients of subsidized housing appear to be primarily illegal aliens and their families. And the users of food stamps in the immigrant-oriented stores where my wife shops in Northern Virginia are disproportionately monolingual Spanish speakers, and thus probably illegal immigrants.
(My wife can chat with these food stamp users only in Spanish, not English, since they don't speak English well. I imagine they receive the food stamps because they have given birth in the U.S. after illegally immigrating, and thus have U.S. citizen children (all children born in the U.S. are deemed citizens under currentl legal interpretations). The immigrants we know who speak both Spanish and English well are all here legally).
And the teenagers scraping the grease out of 400degree chicken friers at KFC; they'd take that $50/hr.
And lastly, how politically obtuse to stand in front of a bunch of blue collar union types, and tell them they "can't" do something.
What McCain proved was that people will do almost anything if the money is right. There are no "Jobs that Americans wont do" there are "Jobs that don't pay enough to offset their suck factor."
Why does it pay so much to be a garbage man? Or sewer cleaner? Hazardous or difficult jobs cost more because people don't want to do them. It takes more money for them to risk bad smells or dangerous environments. I worked as a hazmat guy for a year while I was looking for a engineering job. Hazmat pays well for you to sit in a bunny suit and scrub things with bleach, but the turnover is high.
Mexicans and other illegals work these hard jobs cheaply because for them the alternative is to go home and not get paid. They depress the wages so that Americans, who have other options, choose not to do that job at that pay level. That is the crux of the problem. If you want Americans to do that job, you have to pay them enough. People don't want to pay that much, so they hire illegals.
If McCain was serious about fixing the problem, he would stop illegal immigration. Then those same back breaking crappy jobs would pay more to the LEGAL employees due to simple economics.
The real point being that Americans won't do it for what is really paid, which is probably a small fraction of that.
By the way fifty an hour is not realistic even for the fastest worker assuming they were paid without the bosses skim off the top. Although fifty a day seems unfortuantely low. Most of the workers will do 12-15 an hour and picking crew does a six hour day because you can't pick most crops in the afternoon heat.
1) Americans won't do these jobs for the incredibly low wages illegals accept.
2) Legal immigration is as bad as illegal immigration. Look at the welfare rates and education levels of legal immigrants. They are not all H1b visas being passed out.
3) What do we do with the influx of new illegal immigrants the day afte we legalize current illegals?
4) What does this say to legal immigrants that have followed the law?
5) Who is going to screen ID's and evidence of the current illegals getting amnesty to prove they merit it? They get forged documents now. How are we going to prove they aren't fraudulent?
6) Why no outcry about Canada's current wave of deportation of illegal aliens? (moostly of European extraction)?
You are joking, right? Did you actually read the thread, or are you just presuming your vast intellectual superiority off-hand?
I'd assume the real limiter would be -- at such pay, it'd be worthwhile to invent an automated picker, as they use for grain and cotton. Wonder why no one's come up with a simple tool that would enable a person to sever the stem while standing up (or have they?). A narrow bladed shover, with the last foot or so of blade angled steeply, and an area on the back to receive a kick. A guy in front to wield that, one behind to pick up the result, and they alternate to give the latter's back a rest. Or give the second guy a scoop.
Cala, where do you get your 75 cents per head figure? And even 75 cents per head would be enough to radically shrink the lettuce market anyway.
The outburst against McCain, at that meeting, and on this thread, is nothing more than a resurgence of that long-standing American curse, the "Know-Nothing" party.
This provides a context that the hypo doesn't need. Obviously no one will pay $50 for a lettuce picker, because of how much people pay to buy lettuce retail. That's not the point. The point is that McCain said that Americans wouldnt pick lettuce for $50/hour even if they were offered, which is patently ridiculous - many Americans do much harder jobs for much less.
But those bashing McCain are using his misfired argument to discount all of their opposition. A time-honored tactic used by all sides in political debates, but one not aimed toward getting to the truth of the matter. What's the counter to my argument and Lawyer3's argument, other than "it doesn't add much to the price anyway?"
Time to look at what longshoremen do, folks. That work is back breaking. That work is dangerous, dirty, and difficult. And they make $50 an hour--why? Because unions were able to win them that pay, and because the people willing to do it are somewhat rare but not nonexistent.
McCain was right about lettuce. Most Americans couldn't do it, even if they would.
But you cannot extrapolate stoop labor to the general question of illegal labor, as McCain is trying to do.
The effects of illegal labor are all bad, except for the illegals themselves, who come from hellholes where if you were lucky enough to pick lettuce, you'd probably be paid in lettuce.
If there are 12M illegals, let's say 8M are employed at something. That's about 5% of the entire work force, but the effects of cheap illegal immigrant labor are disproportionately in the lower paid, lower skill sector. Let's say the bottom quartile.
Migrant workers don't work 2K hours/year, but to keep the numbers simple, let's assume they do.
For every Guatemalan peasant making $50/day (without benefits), four native workers who are in equivalent jobs are also dragged down to $50/day. (Whatever the actual figures are; at the bottom, it's well under $50/day.)
If the going rate for native labor, without immigrant competition, would be $70/day, it doesn't take very sophisticated math to see that immigrants take more out of our economy than they put in -- even not counting any subsidies like food stamps. (If the numbers are $50 and $70, then immigrant labor goes negative when illegal labor reaches about one-sixth of the labor pool in the affected sector. You can do a spreadsheet for any suite of possibles you like.)
Of course, if the jobs being affected are fungible, then if you remove illegal cheap labor and the going wage rate rises, then the jobs will move overseas. Depending on the job mix, the overall economy might be damaged. On the other hands, those jobs are probably going overseas anyway, if they haven't already. The going wage for work in an American television assembly factory is $0/hr.
Lettuce is sorta fungible. You can import lettuce from Mexico (at a certain extra, unstated cost in disease), but jobs as nannies or installing drywall are not going overseas.
The US economy would not collapse without illegal immigrant labor. It would not even notice their absence. For one thing, if the immigrants were all gone, we would quickly find out which, if any, jobs that really need doing could not be recruited from native labor -- the market would set the wage rate -- and we would then adjust our legal immigration policy to allow in the necessary labor.
This ain't rocket science, or shouldn't be.
Was lettuce unaffordable back in the days when native labor picked it? Have we seen a precipitate drop in the price of lettuce in the past 10 years? Is the benefit of employing immigrant labor being passed on to the consumer, or is it being pocketed by intermediaries?
So I call BS on Senator McCain, too.
McCain's 1st argument: There are jobs that no American would do.
McCain's 2nd argument: Even for $50/hr, no American would pick lettuce.
Response of many people: We are Americans, and we would pick lettuce for $50/hr.
Conclusion: McCain's 2nd argument is clearly wrong. There are Americans who would pick lettuce for $50/hr. (In reality, there are probably Americans who do it for whatever the real wage actually is.) McCain's 1st argument is not disproved - perhaps no American would take the job of "eating nuclear waste" or "sleeping on a bed of ultra-poisonous scorpions" - but the implication seems to be that there is no realistic job that an American wouldn't do for the right amount of money.
In any case, the whole $300 salad argument is a red herring. Sure, it's unlikely that people would be unwilling to pay $300 for salads - but that has nothing to do with whether people would pick lettuce for $50/hr. The two claims are wholly unrelated; just because no one would ever pay people $50/hr to pick lettuce doesn't mean that people wouldn't pick lettuce for $50/hr if they had the opportunity.
I'll leave others to point out the inherent (and ridiculous) ethnocentrism of the "there are jobs no American would do" argument. I would imagine (although I have no evidence) there are a lot of jobless American people who live in shelters and eat once a day that would be very happy indeed to pick lettuce at all, much less for $50/hr. Seriously.
left in all of this. First, they complain that
there are not enough Latino doctors, engineers,
college professors and professionals in general.
But then the left (as well as open-borders nuts like
McCain) says we need to import vast numbers of
Latinos to do menial labor. So given a continuing
influx of poorly-educated Latinos, how can they ever
be represented at parity in the professions?
This is precisely correct. In another thread, the repeated invocation of the stereotypical farm laborer irked me enough to check on the figures. The best numbers I could find were from CIS. Only 258,000 jobs of a total 5.8 million were in farming--that's around 5%.
The other 95% are employed in jobs that Americans perform every day--construction, food service, building maintenance and cleaning, etc.
Scroll to table 10 here to look at the table for yourself. Do these sound like jobs that "American won't do"?
I'm a ninth generation Scots-Irish immigrant. My family has been farming and mining in the New World since before the Revolutionary War. That involved backbreaking labor, picking cotton and so forth, to make below poverty level wages in the Deep South.
There's no question whether Americans would break their backs picking crops for even a low wage. Some have done so for hundreds of years.
There are very good reasons to support comprehensive immigration reform, but the canard that "Americans won't do these jobs" is just silly. And the argument that "Americans won't do these jobs at a particular price point" ignores the hidden costs of getting cheaper produce from illegal labor.
(Disclaimer: when I was young, Dad did us all the blessed service of moving into town to take a factory job to get more regular work. So I was personally spared the labor of cotton picking. But my siblings, parents, uncles and aunts all did this as a simple fact of life. And that wasn't to earn a wage four times the poverty level, either. Grisham's "A Painted House" is a pretty good read to get an insight into what this kind of life was like.)
Unfortunately, the same "know-nothings" currently sounding the alarm about illegal immigrants tend to be the same people who ignore economics and history (re: Smoot-Hawley) and want economic protectionism.
So the price of American purity will be expensive lettuce. Which means Americans won't eat as much lettuce. Which means that American farms and the lettuce jobs paying $50 per hour won't exist. And Americans will have fewer (and less healthy) culinary choices.
This slogan is a wad of chewing gum stuck to most U.S. politicians' shoes now.
Yup anybody who disagress with your open borders anarchocapitalism is an unenlightened bigot. Anybody who wants to crack down on illegal immigration is a modern know-nothing? Anybody who believes America is more than a jobs market is a troglodyte? Well, let me tell you, Gordo, this message of yours is going to go over about as well as McCain's statement.
If this was really about maximizing economic output and our economic competitiveness, we wouldn't be importing poverty, we'd be importing brains. But this isn't about the well-being of the country--economic or social--this is about perceived Democratic political advantage and Republicans catering to business interests.
The current temporary worker program is sufficient to meet these jobs. What don't you understand about the fact that 95% of illegals aren't doing this sort of work?
Oh, how much will it go up, Gordo? First of all, when dust settles, would you agree that going rate for lettuce picking will not actually go all the way up to $50/hr? Please. Then even if we assume generous $20/hr, how much will it amount to per lettuce head, less than a quarter? You would not even notice price increase by the time lettuce reaches store - there are so many other factors causing price volatility.
What the price of lettuce would be if people made $50/hr picking it is completely unrelated to McCain's comment... Really, truly, honestly - it doesn't.
It actually does if one extrapolates from Senator McCain’s argument that if you paid $50/hr for picking lettuce rather than the much lower wages paid to illegal aliens to do the same work that “no American would do that job” because it would make the cost of lettuce so high that the job would vanish and be replaced by either mechanization or imported lettuce.
Sorry to burst your bubble.
Well then, let's look at the price impact upon some of the other jobs illegal aliens are doing:
Food Service: The price of your fast food just went up. You go out to eat less. You spend more of your leisure time slaving away in the kitchen. And there go all of those better paying restaurant jobs held by native (with a small "n") Americans.
House Cleaning and Gardening: You can no longer afford it. So you have to do it yourself. Say "bye bye" to some of your leisure time, or live with a filthy house. And there go all of those better paying domestic services jobs held by native Americans.
Get the picture?
I happen to agree that our borders should be better sealed to prevent future illegal immigrants (and even more unsavory characters) from infiltrating our borders.
Where I quibble with the "know-nothings" is on the issue of amnesty-legal immigration-guest workers. I think McCain's Senate Bill had the right idea on the amnesty issue for longer term illegals. I think we should increase our quotas for legal immigration. And I think reinstituting a guest worker program will allow us to continue to enjoy the fruits of cheap labor, while allowing those who want to provide that labor but eventually return to their native lands to do so.
I find the House Bill's emphasis on throwing illegal immigrants into jail while letting their employers off to be rank demagogic stupidity of the first order. Any bill that stiffens our borders must also stiffen penalties against employers who willingly or negligently hire illegal immigrants to be effective.
1. There are too many of them.
The absolute numbers of foreign-born in the U.S. are higher now than they have ever been.
We the People
19.8 million in 1990 vs. 10.4 million in 1900 and the previous high of 14.3 million in 1930. However, the 7.9% of current foreign born are a little more than half the percentage during the early part of the 20th century, a high of 14.8% in 1930. Does anyone other than a nativist, bigot, anti-papist, or anti-semite argue that the waves of immigration to this country 100 years ago have been a net negative?
2. The ones here now don't assimilate.
This is primarily aimed at Mexican-Americans, although with the ease of global communication and transportation it is an allegation that can be levelled at all recent immigrant groups. However, it isn't true.
Migration information
79% of first-generation Mexican-American children speak English well. By the third generation 72% of Hispanic immigrants are monolingual. And it's not Spanish they are speaking.
3. Recent immigrants have different skin color.
Very few openly admit this. But one has to wonder.
4. It's no longer a culture where I feel comfortable.
This is an understandable issue, especially in places like California. But native Americans have felt this way for over 200 years as waves of immigration have come to this country. And all those immigrants have assimilated and added great cultural wealth. Only the most hardened DAR member would deny this.
American standards are none too high, in the view of the government, which is busily imposing extensive hygienic regulations that will raise the price of food far more than paying native labor to pick it would.
Actually American immigration policy limits the importation of "brains". H1-B visas are capped at 65,000 per year. No such limits for the impoverished or uneducated.
It's true that longshoremen make $50/hr (and more), but no active longshoreman has ever worked hard. Containers, which came in during the '60s (this month is the 50th anniversary of the voyage of the first containership), turned longshore work into a wussy job. It's just truck driving now, and not even challenging truck driving.
I assume by "native American" here you mean only "Americans of European descent confronting later waves of European immigration". From the perspective of indigenous Native Americans, these "waves of immigration" over the past 300 years were not "immigration" at all, they were invasions. The indigenes would have repelled them if they could, despite all the "wealth" that the Europeans brought (and from the indigenous perspective, was all the disease and death the Europeans brought with them justified because the Europeans also brought great cultural and material wealth?).
Moreover, the "immigrants" did not assimilate into the indigenous culture, the immigrants forced the indigenes to assimilate into their culture, when they did not exterminate them outright.
A horde of invaders who forced the natives to assimilate into the invader culture, hmmmm, not a very pleasing analogy for today. But even if we accept your analogy in the way it was intended, it fails the "so what?" test. If the current residents of America wish to exclude further immigration for "misguided" cultural reasons - or indeed for any reason - they certainly have an inarguable right to do so.
I have to admit that it reveals a very common ignorance about the nature of itinerant agricultural work.
The reality is this:
1. It is taxing manual labor, involving a lot of stooping (and depending on the season, exposure to blazing heat), and very poor sanitary conditions.
2. It is quite poorly compensated. Those who've followed previous comments will know, however, that the going rate for cotton pickers in Texas is $6.75/hour.
3. Therefore, these are tough jobs, and they're pretty tough to fill with Americans -- particularly those with families, since the nature of migratory farm work is that it is, well, migratory, and that doesn't fit in too well with school schedules.
4. Lettuce picking (to be precise, "lettuce cutting" -- I've seen more than one criminal case involving "Assault with a Deadly Weapon, to wit: Lettuce Knife") is a pretty short season. But again, the nature of migratory farmwork is that when lettuce cutting season ends, some other season is beginning. I haven't lived in the irrigated valleys of California for some time, but if I remember correctly the normal rotation goes something like this: cutting asparagus in the early spring in central and northern California, cutting lettuce in the Imperial Valley in late spring/early summer, then moving north to cut lettuce in areas with shorter growing seasons, then perhaps picking strawberries or some such thing in the central coastal valleys, then maybe picking cotton or even fruit, then ...
5. Taking a few months off, which used to mean going back to Mexico and returning (generally) illegally. Tighter border controls have made this harder/more expensive to do. By the way, this also means: "collecting unemployment" -- at least during the period of time you remain in the United States.
So, to be blunt, the job is: tough, physically demanding, low-paying, but offering huge blocks of time off. The fact that the "job" exists for only a few weeks in any given place makes it difficult to fill. But "filled" it is. When immigrant (legal - H visa, etc. -- or illegal) labor isn't around, it gets done by others. In Idaho, school kids used to get time off in potato harvesting season. I don't know if they still do. When you can't employ the same person to travel from place-to-place as the seasons dictate, you wind up using local labor (school kids in Idaho) to do the job, and most young people can handle it quite easily because -- after all -- the season is so short.
Meanwhile Jeek, after giving us a jeremiad on Native (with a capital N) Americans, tells us that we don't have to follow the immigrant assmilating path that has made the U.S. the greatest nation of modern timss - that instead we can turn xenophobic and isolationist if we damn well please. He is, of course, correct - we can certainly do this.
The proper political term for proponents of this idea was first coined in the 1850's.
"Know-nothings."
If any opposition to 100% open borders and unlimited immigration is xenophobic, Know Nothing, and illegitimate, so be it. If it is xenophobic, Know Nothing, and illegitimate to assert that America, like every other nation, has the right and the duty to control its borders and to determine the number and type of immigrants who enter, then so be it. (Indeed, compared to the United States, almost every other nation than America is "xenophobic and isolationist". Shame on them for not understanding that the road to prosperity is through the importation of massive numbers of poorly-paid helots.)
Since I Know Nothing, perhaps you can educate me. Precisely what level of immigration is required to ensure that we remain the "greatest nation of modern times"? There are hundreds of millions of potential immigrants in Latin America alone, and billions more in Asia and Africa. Where do you draw the line, and why? How do you tell when we have not enough, too many, just right?
As for the illegality of those immigrants, I have no problem with tightening our borders, including continuous fencing, and I have no problem with strong and persistent enforcement of laws against employers who hire illegal aliens either knowingly or negligently. Where I differ with the current anti-immigration hysteria is that I don't think it is wise, necessary, or economically sound to try to find 11 million individuals and throw them all into jail, and I don't think it is wise to shut off or greatly curtail legal immigration. I think the President is right on the mark with his guest worker program as well.
As for my allegations of racism or xenophobia, they are amply demonstrated by past history. The anti-immigrant backlash of the 19th century can be fairly and accurately described as overwhelmingly anti-catholic and anti-semitic. Today's backlash has more than a whiff of racism against the non-European immigrants coming, along with a new religious bigotry against Muslims.
So in answer to your final question, my know-nothing friend, we should have a generous (but not unlimited) allowance for legal immigrants into this nation of ours, the precise number to be left to reasonable policy analysis. We should reject the multi-culturalists and promote the assimilation policies for immigrants that have served our nation so well in the past. We should crack down on additional illegal immigration with a two-pronged attack on physical border security and on employers who hire illegal aliens. And for the unique situation of Mexican workers, we should have a guest worker program.
And why is that (your numbers are wrong, but I'll get to that shortly)? Because we restricted legal (and illegal) immigration quite severely for about 40 years, from the 1920s to the 1960s. Today we are approaching the levels of foreign born that we did at the first of the last century, indeed we may have even surpassed this as we are unsure of the precise numbers currently in the US. The highest percent of foreign born in the 20th century occurred around 1910, with 14.7%. Currently we have around 12.1%, if the numbers are not grossly underestimating this. If we aren't already in excess to the early 20th century peak, we will be soon.
Now even if we accept that immigration was good for the country 100 years ago, why would it be good for it today? There was no welfare, no social security, and the immigration was from diverse countries (linguistically and culturally). The situation today is not at all analogous for what should be obvious reasons. Today, we are importing poverty, placing incredible strain on public education and government revenue, and the cultural and linguistic character of our immigrants is increasingly monolithic. Why does this matter? Because the larger an immigrant group is the less likely they are to assimilate, as it becomes easier and easier to retain one's language and cultural identity.
Moreover, the immigration of the past was cyclical as well as diverse. Mexican immigration, because of its proximity and quality of life, is bound to be a source of millions of impoverished immigrants for many decades if we allow it.
I think we can agree that the numbers of immigrants we should accept is pragmatically limited by how quickly we can assimilate and absorb new peoples into the American culture. And it's my firm opinion that we have already exceeded these levels.
I am pro-immigration, but I'm for the kind of immigration that will strengthen rather than weaken this country. I am for immigration that is in our national interest. Why would we choose the poor when we could choose the wealthy? Why would we choose the uneducated when we could choose the educated? Why choose those likely to be a welfare burden when we can choose those who are likely not to be? Why choose those without English skills when we can choose those with English proficiency? Why choose the high school dropouts when we can choose the best and the brightest? Why choose those who are more likely to commit violent crime when we can choose those who are less likely? Why choose immigrants who will contribute the least to GDP instead of those who can contribute the most? Why weaken America when we can strengthen it?
I am currently doing a semester abroad program in Japan. One of my classes is US Immigration Law. The reasoning I made was a matter of logic, not prejudice, and naturally jumps to mind while here.
You are correct that Japanese culture has been ethnically exclusionary. I was not proposing that we adopt their immigration policies but simply pointing out, as this posting asked us to, that this particular argument in the immigration debate is an economic fallacy.