Victory Farm Volunteers registering in Lane County. Oregon. Lovina Wilson, farm labor assistant, routes the first three children, and that is what they are, to register during the Mobilization Day program at the Frances Willard School in Eugene. The enrollees in the photo are, left to right, facing table front row: Glenn Cash,13; Howard Cash, 11; and Don Mickelwait, 13. This photo was taken in 1946, right after World War Two, demonstrating that wartime manpower shortages were ongoing. This would be, quite frankly, more than a bit much today, as these individuals are way to young to seriously work on a farm, unless they are working on their family farm, and they were frankly way too young then. Note the boys are wearing white t-shirts, with nothing emblazoned on them, and that girls are in the crowd as well.
There are a lot of varieties of this argument I keep seeing:
If you’re out here talking sht about immigrants but still going to the grocery store to feed yourself, that’s clown sht of the highest order.
Stop being lazy & get your hands in the dirt or shut the fck up.
From, of course, Twitter.
This is baloney.
To distill the argument, it is that the US must dare not get control of its border with Mexico, or at least not a fair degree of control, as the US is dependent upon those illegally crossiong for food production.
That argument is first and foremost baloney, as it somehow makes the assumption that the huge number of immigrants arriving from Central and South America are in fact arriving in order to work on farms. That isn't happening. They want to work, no doubt, but the migrant farm system is well established, and they aren't seeking to get jobs in cabbage fields this summer and then go back home.
In reality, most are economic migrants or migrants from Central and South American failed states. The US is racing towards becoming a failed state itself right now. Our government isn't working, and we're about to elect an imagined Caudillo who will have to turn on migrants like a health inspector turns on expired milk.
But economically, the farm sector isn't employing them.
Lots of other things are, such as the construction industry, local small businesses, and back door employment, which explains who we got in this mess. Democrats imagined, wrongly, that all future migrants are Democratic voters.* Republicans imagined them all as somebody who was going to mow their lawn for cheap. Turns out that they are none of those things.**
In reality, they take entry level manual labor jobs which, frankly, would go to Americans who need them, but for the price depression impact this has.
Which gets to the next thing.
The "agriculture depends on migrants" argument is, really, that American agriculture is habituated to cheap farm labor because the Federal Government, with apocalyptic visions of the future after World War Two, created a cheap food policy.
Frightened that Depression Era conditions would return after World War Two, and then frightened that conditions were going to go into the waste bin due to the Cold War, from 1945 on the government has done everything it can to keep foods as cheap as possible. Americans bitch about food prices, but they spend about 9% of their budget on food, and it generally keeps going down. The U.S. Government has tracked food prices since 1929, and it's the lowest ever, generally. From 1929 to 1952 Americans spending on food consumed generally above 20% of a family's income. In 1932, it was 22%. In 2008, in contrast, it was 5.6%.
That's great, for family budgets, and it has ancillary impacts on a lot of industries. Cheap food means that people can go to good restaurants (where you are actually a lot more likely to run into an illegal alien than in a cabbage patch) and have a really good dinner for pretty cheap, and then sit there over dinner and bitch about food prices. This hasn't always been the case. When Americans "ate out" well into the 1970s, they probably meant that they went to a diner for lunch. Growing up, trips to restaurants for dinner were so rare that they only occured, normally, when it was some sort of special occasion, like a birthday or anniversary. To take a date to a restaurant was a big deal, even when I was a college student. You were trying to really impress a girl if you took her out for a meal, and later you assessed the damage to your finances that had ensued.
Even fast food joints to some extent expressed this. We would often hit the burger joints on the weekends, but not daily. By the time my son was in high school, however, high schoolers hit the nearby fast food joints every day. Indeed, when I was in high school I ate in the cafeteria, the first time I'd eaten routinely at school. I didn't particularly like it, but that's what there was. When our high school cafeteria was condemned during my first year of high school, and prior to their building a new one, I briefly ate downtown, but it was too expensive, and I took up just brining a bad sandwich I'd made myself at home and sitting in the football stadium to eat it.
Glory Days indeed.
Now, fast food fare is absurdly cheap. Quite a few people I know hit Dirty Ron's Steakhouse every morning for a couple of Egg McMuffins and a cup of Joe on the way in to work, and frankly, they're not bad (and no, that nickname aside, that establishment is not dirty at all). And I've met working adults, including professionals, who go to Subway, or whatever, every day for lunch. "Value Meals" and the like are incredibly cheap. All of this because of a "cheap food" policy. Part of that policy is related to legal farm migrants, but they are not flooding across the Rio Grande or the desert and claiming asylum.
Nor, frankly, is an ongoing "cheap food" policy a good thing.
The cheap food policy has helped make Americans increasingly fat while driving smaller agricultural entities out of business. It's contributed to the concentration of everything, and not in a good way. It's made food prices unrealistically low, while divorcing Americans from the reality of the actual cost of things. It should end.
Part of that would be, quite frankly, to end the modern version of the Bracero program that has depressed the value of farm labor. When it came in, in 1943, it made a little bit of sense, maybe, perhaps. But eighty years later, it doesn't. Americans will work any job, contrary to what is claimed about them, but at wages that are realistic. Immigrant farm labor wages won't attract them, as the wages are too low.
In an era in which thousands of Americans are out on the streets without jobs, and in which there are rural areas that are basically depopulated save for the injured and left behind in smaller towns, lying between the consolidated farms, and in which we have urban areas and reservations that are hardcore reservoirs of poverty, if people were paid real wages, there's a ready-made source of labor. Sure, they aren't the best jobs in the world in some ways, but they are jobs. And they're also jobs for middle class younger people, who have a demonstrated interest in topics of the soil.
The numbers involved are not small. The US takes in 3,000,000 migrant farmworkers per year. Ending a program such as this would result in a big impact to farm production, and it'd jump food prices for sure as the positions were, and they ultimately would be, filled with American residents. It'd frankly also spur mechanization, which I'm not particularly keen on, as right now there are very expensive agricultural implements that are not employed as migrant farm labor is cheaper.
But ultimately, the principal of subsidiarity should come into play here for lots of reasons.
None of the reasons involve the thousands crossing the US Southern border, who are people facing an existential crisis that must be addressed. They aren't the migrant farmworkers however. That's a completely different topic.
Footnotes:
*Democrats have long assumed that Hispanic immigrants are natural Democratic voters, without learning the lessons of demographics or history.
Immigrants tend to be Democratic voters early in their demographic's migration history. Irish immigrants were. Italian immigrants were. This frankly had a lot to do with patronage. But as they became established, this became much less the case. To declare yourself "Irish" today doesn't mean that somebody should automatically assume you are a Democrat.
And that's true even if you have 100% Hibernian heritage, or to take the Italian example, if you can trace your lineage back to Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus' third cousin, once removed. Truth be known, in a species in which Joe Cro Magnon pretty quickly asked Lucy Neanderthal out on a date, those straight lines of lineage don't last very long. To declare yourself "Irish" today, in the US, might merely mean that you think the Irish drink green Budweiser with corned beef sandwiches on St. Patrick's Day.
Moreover, Hispanics in the US have and retain (although they are rapidly losing it) a very distinct culture which is existentially Catholic and conservative. This is so much the case that the radicals of the Mexican Revolution, in the form of the Constitutionalist, sought to stamp it out, much like their semi fellow travelers the Bolsheviks went after Orthodoxy in Russia after 1917. And they had a similar success rate, which means lots of Mexican Hispanics, which is what most Hispanics in the US are often only semi observant, but culturally Catholic still. Given that, the darling issues of the Democratic Greenwich Village set, which forms the central corps of Democratic thought, are deeply at odds with what most Hispanics believe. And this only becomes more the case when Hispanics from outside of Northern Mexican ancestry are considered. So, not too surprisingly, they're turning Republican.
They are also due to the border crisis itself. Hispanics along the border whose ancestors settled there two hundred years ago, or in the wake of the Mexican Revolution, or even in earlier recent migrant waves, are not really of the same culture, no matter how dimwitted Americans are about it, as those now crossing and the flood is wrecking their communities. Americans may see Hondurans and Guatemalans, as well as Venezuelans, as being the same as people from Chihuahua, but people from Chihuahua who live in Eagle Pass do not.
**And they are people, which oddly seems forgotten, except as an argument over the crisis. Democrats thinking they were mindless sheep who could be herded into the voting booths and Republicans thinking they were something akin to slaves is inexcusible.
