This is the irony of immigration policy since the 80s- back in the more open borders days, people would come, work, and go home. Once the border and visas became more strict, they want to stay, because it’s too difficult to go back and forth. All of the people who complain about immigration changing the country/changing their community should be in favor of huge guest worker/migrant programs. People want to seek out better economic opportunities and more safety but in reality also do actually prefer being home.
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Having recently driven through the central valley, they are a bunch of Trump supporters who want to exercise their god given right to turn every drop of water in the state into something they can sell.
Fuck them. Chase ICE out of the cities, that didn’t vote for Trump, into the farm areas, that did. Let those fuckers watch their crops rot in the fields.
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Food insecurity affects us all.
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Also, note that the same people who want the Federal government to tell California what to do are those who claim to champion “States’ Rights”.
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This!!! I’ve mentioned it before, but so many central valley ag areas had giant signs about how tRump was going to fight for their water rights. I get the point that you can’t grow without water, but it also doesn’t matter if you can grow if there’s no one to pick it to bring it to market.
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This, and it appeals to his brown people fearing base. The fact that “commie-fornia” is hurt economically is awesome to them because we’re the home of all the “lubrul commies” and “homo-Fa…” (you get the picture). Never you mind the logic that when one part of the body is hurt, the body itself is hurt…
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They were such the typical Trump supporters - they zeroed in on the bits that they wanted to hear, while insisting that the bits they didn’t were things he really didn’t mean. It’s especially funny because the bit they wanted to hear was Trump at his most meaningless bloviating - “there is no drought”! - while the bits they didn’t want to hear were his core messages.
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Keep an eye on them; I expect that they’ll soon be pushing for this as a replacement, if they aren’t there already:
http://www.takepart.com/article/2014/04/14/prison-ag-labor
https://twitter.com/nwmalinowski/status/958136290276454403
They may even end up returning the same workforce to the farms:
The number of people in ICE detention is rapidly escalating, as they’re arresting much faster than they’re deporting.
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Didn’t you hear? there’s a trade war going on to protect american farmers, TARIFFS FOR ALL
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I thought it was a beverage!
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Exactly right. And it amuses me that whenever Trump says something stupid, his people have to explain what he really meant. Because he’s unable to express what he really means by himself, you see.
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Although when the White House “clarifies” what he said, it usually seems to be done in a dismissive, condescending, “Well, when he said X, he clearly didn’t mean X. How outrageous of you biased mainstream news media to interpret it that way! He obviously meant Y!” It’s an evolution of a campaign admonishment not to take him literally (when it usually turned out, he definitely meant it literally), but making it a defect of everyone hearing him, not the speaker’s.
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There’s something that’s bothering me about this… respect is free, right? If the work is valuable, why are we not paying agricultural workers more? I mean, it’s one thing to scoff at americans for not rushing to fill what is by all accounts back-breaking labor, but in any other situation, we would certainly recognize the basic economic proposition going on here: undocumented labor is cheaper because they are down by law, because their employers have an extra measure of leverage.
Let’s say tomorrow the US decides to grant a nationwide immigration amnesty and grants citizenship to the millions of undocumented workers who were our countries labor force. How many of them do you think are going to stay in the fields getting paid a pittance when they suddenly have the ability to move wherever they want and apply for any job in the US without any complications? So, some of them leave those jobs, and we either have another “labor shortage”, or the wages will have to go up to attract those workers back.
Then maybe the pay needs to be raised more than twice? There is literally no other job (perhaps besides teaching and child care) where we would accept labor exploitation on this scale. Yes, it could raise food prices. However, the economic subsidies for agriculture are far out of balance, favoring commodity crops like corn instead of more sustainable and healthy foods, you could go a long ways toward keeping the cost of food managable by re-balancing those subsdies. Labor contributes a small percentage of the cost of produce, the only thing keeping it low is this historical reliance on marginalized classes–like slaves, sharecroppers, children, and undocumented immigrants.
Somehow, you can decry NAFTA and the TPP as a bonafide progressive on behalf of benighted manufacturing workers, yet the concept is turned absolutely on its head when we’re talking about agricultural workers. Funny, right?
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There is a logically consistent (if economically challenging) argument to be made for hiring Americans to do this work at significantly higher wages instead of depending on migrant workers from Mexico.
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There is a logically consistent (if ethically dodgy) argument to be made for hiring migrant workers from Mexico at wages that are low by American standards in order to keep produce more affordable.
The thing that all too many Americans refuse to acknowledge is that we can’t have it both ways. You want cheap produce? Get used to bringing in seasonal farm workers. You want to reserve those jobs for American citizens? Better find some way of making that work more appealing, because they sure aren’t interested in doing it now.
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