Stall On Immigration Reform Causes Trouble On U.S. Farms As Growers Seek Workers And Crops Rot

[Purveyor]

By Agence France-Presse
Thursday, March 21, 2013 5:49 EDT

Here’s a mess with no easy fix: American crops going unpicked — it’s backbreaking work Americans won’t touch — and poor migrants in need of work shying from it for fear of being abused.

Creating a program for temporary farm workers from Mexico and other countries to work the land, sow seeds or reap harvests is one of the touchiest aspects of the immigration reform that Congress is working on.

Some 61 percent of growers in California report shortages of laborers, especially in labor intensive crops like grapes and vegetables, said Rayne Pegg of the California Farm Bureau Federation.

So some crops are left to rot.

In the peak of the harvest season, California needs some 400,000 farmhands, and usually 70 percent of them are undocumented immigrants, Pegg said.

MORE...

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/03/21/stall-on-immigration-reform-causes-trouble-on-u-s-farms-as-growers-seek-workers-and-crops-rot/

[Vogon_Glory]

1. Tea-Nomics In Action

Tea-nomics in action. Right-wingers think that if they can stop unskilled laborers from migrating to the US and completely eliminate government assistance to those in need, those crops will be harvested with skill and vigor by those lazy ex-welfare cases formerly residing in big cities.

I don't doubt that a lot of the rural folk who voted Republican are going to harvest the results of the stupidity they sowed last November, when they look around for ag workers and find there aren't enough, even at good wages.

So will the rest of us, when we find some foods disappearing from the shelves and others marked up at higher prices.

[woofless]

2. Pay farm workers a living wage,

and those jobs will be filled. Plenty of white folk will show up and harvest your crops. Try it.

[Romulox]

3. When we make all current undocumented residents citizens, farmers will want STILL want more

and cheaper labor.

[amandabeech]

4. You got that right.

I'm speaking from experience.

[Ikonoklast]

5. Some still miss the "Good Old Days"....

...when a landowner didn't have to pay his help at all.

And Republicans would STILL think that wages need to be lower.

[Romulox]

6. Honestly, I see current labor patterns as a continuation of the Civil War.

And, imo, the South ultimately won--that is to say, following the war, the North became more like the South than vice versa. Instead of a country of high wages, investment in each worker, regulation, and unionization, we have become a nation of low wages, disposable workers (and more always at beck and call!), deregulation, and dog-eat-dog scabs.

The luring away of many middle-class unionized manufacturing jobs from the North to the right-to-work, cheap-labor havens of the Deep South is the ultimate revenge, but the demand that the entire country subsidize the "cheap" stoop labor (that's after we've already granted these same "Southern Planters" crop subsidies, mind you) that keeps the whole thing going is quite damaging, as well.

[Ikonoklast]

8. The stop in the South by manufacturing was momentary, as it fled the country offshore.

For a brief moment in time, they thought that they had pulled a swift one on them Yankees, but it hardly lasted twenty years before they, too, got the shaft.

But for everyone elsewhere in this country, the damage was done

The real problem is that corporations no longer need the Middle Class in this country to keep their profits afloat; they see the rise of wealth and consumer demand in China and India as their profit centers.

It has been predicted that by 2040 that China alone will have a middle class (of sorts) with disposable income whose numbers will exceed the entire population of the United States.

GM already sells more vehicles in Asia than in North America.

We are no longer necessary to them.

[Paul E Ester]

7. Who goes to work to be abused...even migrants won't do it.

and poor migrants in need of work shying from it for fear of being abused.

Sounds like the problems are not with the workers or immigration, but with the slave like conditions of getting paid not by the hour, but by the box. This type of labor encourages families to bring their children to work with them.

These workers are expected to work in fields all day without proper toilets, while paying exorbitant rates to stay in substandard migrant camps at night.

Why live like an animal and work like a slave, when that same worker can find a job working the service industries.