If cheap labor was unavailable, would American farms shut down? I don’t think so. I think they’d raise wages until Americans were willing to work for them, and pass the price along to consumers. I think the status quo (undocumented laborers working for low wages in terrible conditions with no healthcare, all to subsidize $0.50 oranges at Safeway) is a humanitarian tragedy equivalent to the worst Nike sweatshops.
>the people we're seeing in camps and cages on the borders of the US, the people we keep trying to punish for coming here in ever more brutal fashion, are not trying to make illegal border crossings.
Right. Anduril’s work would not affect these people, so why all these comments calling them literally evil?
If you increase cost it's going to have an effect. Some farms will shut down, some will automate, some will "move" (by way of imports) to other countries where the working conditions are worse.
I'm not saying you're wrong, but how do you know the specific means by which fentanyl is getting into the US?
> The intense fight in the Trump era over this stems from the uncomfortable fact that the people we're seeing in camps and cages on the borders of the US, the people we keep trying to punish for coming here in ever more brutal fashion, are not trying to make illegal border crossings.
I'm also curious about this, how you know the actual motivations behind people's concerns about the border?
Fully agree with your final point though, fixing the problem at the source should at least be seriously attempted, and I don't see any sign of that happening.
1. The process by which drugs are generally smuggled into the US from Mexico has been covered by a multitude of news sources for decades. The vast majority are smuggled through border checkpoints; a small minority are smuggled around border walls using tunnels, speedboats, aircraft, etc. It's hard to believe that you've had no exposure to any of this news in the past yourself if you're concerned about border security at all, but even if you hadn't, you could literally have looked this up by typing "HOW ARE DRUGS SMUGGLED INTO THE US" into the search engine of your choice.
2. The more I thought about "how do you know people's motivations for border concerns" question the more I was at a loss to answer it. I didn't say anything about people's motivations; I pointed out that to the extent there is a real migrant crisis on the US-Mexico border, it is a crisis caused by refugees seeking legal asylum, a problem which is entirely orthogonal to any problems that could be solved by a border all, real or virtual. The belief that the United States is treating those refugees inhumanely is also entirely orthogonal to any beliefs about border security, immigration quotas, etc. The "Trump era fight" that I refer to is the fight over the ethics not only of treating refugees this way, but over the honesty -- or, bluntly, lack thereof -- in the way the Trump administration and its supporters have been framing the debate in a way that conflates a refugee crisis with illegal immigration.
"Unsecured" is being asked to do an awful lot of work in that sentence. Smugglers aren't driving trucks full of contraband over the open desert through areas where Trump's (or Palmer's) "wall," whether real or virtual, would stop them. They're smuggling them through established checkpoints. If you want to reduce the drug trade, better techniques for catching smugglers at the checkpoints will help, and reducing demand -- which is being driven by customers in the United States -- will help even more. "Build the wall!" will not.
I'm sorry about your dairy-farming family in New England, but if we go by statistics rather than anecdotes, there's been a lot of studies on the modern industrial farming economy which conclude that trying to chase out all the undocumented immigrants is attacking the wrong side of the problem. If farmers weren't hiring them, they wouldn't come here to work. Most farmers will tell you that Americans won't work for the low wages that they feel they have to pay farm hands, so they have to hire those undocumented workers. They feel they have to pay the farm hands that low because the prices they can charge are largely set by their huge agribusiness customers. Going after the infamously exploited undocumented workers at the end of this whole chain isn't going to solve the problem.
In any case, there aren't actually many people in power in the US who are calling for "wholesale open border policies," the person you're responding to notwithstanding. The intense fight in the Trump era over this stems from the uncomfortable fact that the people we're seeing in camps and cages on the borders of the US, the people we keep trying to punish for coming here in ever more brutal fashion, are not trying to make illegal border crossings. They are coming here to legally apply for asylum.
If the world is serious about solving "the migrant crisis," then perhaps we should stop trying to desperately fight against people being displaced and driven out of their homelands and start trying to address the issues that are displacing them and driving them out.