Posted on 04/30/2015 1:07:25 PM PDT by Kaslin
Immigration restrictionists often claim that there are no "jobs Americans won't do," if only US borders would be secured against economic migrants who are willing to work hard for low pay and few benefits. If the fruit-and-vegetable industry couldn't rely on seasonal farmhands from Mexico and Central America, for example, growers would perforce offer the higher wages necessary to attract American citizens to pick the country's fresh produce. What alternative would they have? Let crops rot in the field?
Field workers pick strawberries in Oxnard, Calif.
In reality, agriculture is no more of a zero-sum industry than any other, and there is no fixed number of people it must employ.
That point is strikingly made by recent stories on the development of new technology poised to transform the nation's $2.5 billion strawberry business.
While most grain crops in the United States have long been cut and gathered by giant combine harvesters, growers of strawberries have continued to employ human workers to pick a crop too delicate to be left to mechanized equipment. That was "partly to avoid maladroit machines marring the blemish-free appearance of items that consumers see on store shelves," as The Wall Street Journal noted last Friday. No less important was the "trained discernment" needed to select only the ripe strawberries from plants that also have immature fruit not yet ready for picking.
Traditionally a large pool of farmworkers, mainly foreign-born, was available to supply that "discernment," along with the backbreaking effort involved in gathering crops by hand. But the number of unauthorized immigrants in the United States peaked in 2007 and has fallen markedly since. The wave of immigration from Mexico in particular has reversed: For the first time in four decades, the Pew Hispanic Center reported in 2012, more Mexicans were leaving the United States than entering.
From the standpoint of strawberry farmers, it doesn't much matter whether the dwindling of migrant labor is due to tougher border enforcement in the United States, better economic prospects in Mexico, or some other factor. The farmers' overriding concern is that the fruit must be harvested, and they can no longer rely on immigration flows to get the job done.
Nothing to do, then, but boost the pay and perks for strawberry-pickers until they're high enough to induce more US citizens to work in the fields?
Far from it: With human workers harder to find, strawberry growers have become increasingly committed to finding a technological solution. The Journal story describes the Agrobot — a prototype of a 14-arm automated harvester that couples vision sensors and advanced software in a device capable of "pluck[ing] ripe strawberries from below deep-green leaves, while mostly ignoring unripe fruit nearby." When migrant labor was plentiful, the Agrobot's $100,000 price tag would have seemed exorbitant. Now it increasingly looks like a sound capital investment.
The Agrobot is only one entrant in the race to revolutionize the strawberry industry. Another competitor is Harvest CROO Robotics. The Florida-based engineering team is at work on a high-tech harvester able not only to pick ripe fruit at the rate of one per second per mechanized arm, but also to run continuously for an entire day.
Luddites in the 1800s smashed weaving machines to prevent the new technology from putting laborers out of work.
Secure-the-border hardliners regularly claim that immigrants "steal" jobs that would otherwise go to US citizens. But if migrant workers reduce employment opportunities for Americans, don't robotic harvesters and every other labor-saving technological improvement? Shouldn't immigration restrictionists, so intent on protecting US workers from the competition of foreign immigration, seek just as intently to protect them from new technology?
Such an argument seems manifestly crazy today, when all around us is evidence of the myriad ways in which technology multiplies wealth and increases employment. Yet there was a time when Luddites smashed machines to prevent them from putting laborers out of work. We understand now that for every job technology makes obsolete, a dozen — a hundred, a thousand — new jobs are created, often in fields that until then never even existed.
Any society that cuts itself off from labor-saving technology needlessly harms itself. The same is true of a society that cuts itself off from an influx of willing and peaceful workers. Free minds and free markets constantly come up with innovative ways of accomplishing old tasks — even a task as old as picking fruit. Our best bet isn't to stifle those minds and markets, but to liberate them.
Strawberries and strawberry fields may be forever. But the strawberry industry, like every industry, changes. If those changes make it more productive, the whole economy stands to gain.
There are more logical fallacies in this editorial than there are almond trees in the Central Valley.
Wow.
I thought I had seen some bad logic before but that takes the cake.
A robot is not going to refuse to assimilate, join a gang, drive drunk or commit other crimes.
Actually my main objection to so much undocumented labor is that it seems that nearly the entire younger generation around this area has never had a hard, nasty, unpleasant job working in the fields like I did, and as a result damn few of them even have the work ethic of a Hippy trying to hitchhike to Woodstock.
Robots are doing the jobs that Mexicans don’t want to do.
The bigger problem with robots is that they won’t vote Democrat or pay union dues.
Machinery doesn't shift costs to the rest of society like cheap farm labor. There are no hospital bills (or full emergency rooms) which have to paid for by other patients. There are no classrooms full of students that cost $10,000 or more each. There are no law enforcement problems. There are no future social security benefits to be paid to robots.
Most illegal aliens don’t do agricultural work. Many have displaced US workers in factories and construction. I dare the author to find a construction crew that doesn’t have at least one illegal alien on the job.
“a society that cuts itself off from an influx of willing and peaceful workers”
The problem with these open borders types like Jacoby is that they never seem to want to focus on the tremendous welfare burden taxpayers shoulder for immigrants (both illegal and legal). Immigrants suck off the system at a higher proportion than citizens. Is Jacoby advocating that the industry who imports these foreign workers will pay all their attendant expenses and not stick the taxpayer with the bill? Or is Jacoby himself going to pay for their government schooling, school meals, etc.? Will Jacoby reimburse citizens who have to pay higher insurance rates to compensate for all the illegals who use emergency rooms as their primary health care provider free of charge? Is Jacoby going to compensate every American family who loses a family member to a drunken immigrant driver (who often has neither insurance or a drivers license)? Will he voluntarily pay higher taxes to offset the cost of the disproportionate part of the prison population made up of immigrants? And, if Jacoby recommends that these immigrants become citizens, can he give us a ballpark figure of what percentage of them will be voting Dim?
I won’t go into the displacement of American workers by massive importation of cheap labor, since Jacoby is focusing his argument on very low skill workers here. For an article earlier today on what massive immigration is doing to American mid-level workers:
http://freerepublic.com/focus/news/3284825/posts?page=1
I can understand if he has Chamber of Commerce/Big Ag Business buddies to watch out for. However, I would prefer to consider it from a more holistic cost/benefit point of view and what is in the best interest of the country as a whole.
From age 14 on during summer break I picked strawberries, de-tassled corn, milked cows, put up hay, and if I could travel a few miles south, picked peaches in August. During school months only worked the milking barn. My kids had none of these opportunities, and my grandkids won’t either. Sad.
This weekend, my little sister and I will comb the river bottoms for wild mushrooms to eat now and freeze for later. I can hardly wait. Girls of a feather still stick together. Grand daughter is only 7 months old and can’t come until she’s three. Maybe I can teach some of the past.
What a dolt....as with so many other things they will automate
Jackie Kennedy’s 1960 Spanish-language appeal to Hispanics.
http://free-classic-tv-shows.com/History/1960-Presidential-Election-Commercials/1960-Kennedy-Election-Advertisement-Jackie-talks-in-Spanish/index.php
A low-slung rolling robot would do a better job on strawberries.
Span across a row or two and get right up close.
I have a lot of friends in the construction industry... who regularly try to hire other minorities, and white people for starting positions, which are usually grunt work. Nope, nobody... no American wants to do that type of work anymore... At least not here in the mid-Atlantic. These type of jobs also pay much more than minimum wage... but they’re dirty jobs.
They don’t need migrants to do this any more. They need them now to do slightly better jobs, collect welfare and other bennies and VOTE.
Shrill shill is right! Has this dope ever heard of immigration laws that allow for seasonal farm worker visas?
Once in a while, an article comes along that is so distorted and wrong that it defies discussion. This is just such an article.
I gather that the author’s point is that if you appreciate technology that does a better or cheaper job then you should appreciate an illegal who is not cheaper—you just pay only a tiny fraction of his family’s costs while the taxpayer pays the remainder for eternity and does a lesser quality job. Is that the point?
Everyone who lived in Oxnard, stand up. Future Farmer of America member right here. Love those strawberries. One of our few claims to fame, that and a really cool town name.
Must be one of Jeb’s boys.
You buy a machine and rent it out to individual farmers as needed.
70% of the people who pick US crops are American citizens. A well hidden fact.
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