Re:Alabama immigration: crops rot as workers vanish to avoid...
by dragonwriter on Wednesday February 15, 2017 @02:12AM
(#13650284)
> This is not true. There is absolutely a pay rate, and set of labour conditions in which Americans will do those jobs.
But maybe not one at which the jobs would still exist; increasing price decreases market clearing quantity, ceteris paribus. You can either have poor wages and working conditions in farm labor, more direct government subsidies for agriculture, or less agriculture getting done in the US, because if you increase wages and thereby prices, you aren't going to move as much goods. Various treaties (and domestic politics) interfere with the second option, and there is overwhelming domestic political resistance to the last option, so we get the first even though it's frequently a source of complaints (and rests on the back of illegal immigration, which is itself unpopular).
Not endorsing any aspect of the state of affairs, but that's just the way it is.
> Some things won't be able to be done in the US - that's fine. Move that to other places. Let Mexico and Africa have a cut of the business.
Mexico has sizable food exports, as does pretty much every place with the arable land and political stability to grow export crops. Decreasing US production by increasing labor costs in the US for ag labor may make some additional production elsewhere economical that isn't already, but the main impact would be lower global production of food and higher global prices. Arable land isn't, unlike industrial capital, something that is readily movable to wherever labor and other conditions are most favorable to production.
But maybe not one at which the jobs would still exist; increasing price decreases market clearing quantity, ceteris paribus. You can either have poor wages and working conditions in farm labor, more direct government subsidies for agriculture, or less agriculture getting done in the US, because if you increase wages and thereby prices, you aren't going to move as much goods. Various treaties (and domestic politics) interfere with the second option, and there is overwhelming domestic political resistance to the last option, so we get the first even though it's frequently a source of complaints (and rests on the back of illegal immigration, which is itself unpopular).
Not endorsing any aspect of the state of affairs, but that's just the way it is.
> Some things won't be able to be done in the US - that's fine. Move that to other places. Let Mexico and Africa have a cut of the business.
Mexico has sizable food exports, as does pretty much every place with the arable land and political stability to grow export crops. Decreasing US production by increasing labor costs in the US for ag labor may make some additional production elsewhere economical that isn't already, but the main impact would be lower global production of food and higher global prices. Arable land isn't, unlike industrial capital, something that is readily movable to wherever labor and other conditions are most favorable to production.