Why are you so in favor of developing and institutionalizing more programs for Latino “guest” workers in the US when we have 94 million people of our own not working, more low-skill citizens than we know what to do with, and massive social and taxpayer costs to those Latinos we have working here anyway?
I am only in favor of “guest” workers in the US when there are jobs that cannot be filled by US workers. See my comment #223. We must upgrade our industrial education, especially in large towns and cities so that our own workers are competent to fill these jobs. So much emphasis is put on getting a college education, that people think if they don’t have one they have no hope in the job field.
I looked at the video from Comment #211 regarding mechanized tomato harvesting. That works fine for the hard kind of tomatoes for sauces and canned, but not for good salad tomatoes. Tomatoes are either determinate or indeterminate. One ripens all at once which works for machine harvesting or traveling pickers, the other produces tomatoes over a number of weeks and is good for gardens for home or local markets. There are areas in this country where pickers travel with the crops as they ripen, hundreds and even thousands of miles. How can a low income citizen with a family afford to have a permanent home and do all this travel, and would they want to even with better pay? I was selling at a flea market on the Delmarva peninsula. A young Hispanic tomato picker came to my table. His hands were bright green from picking and you could smell the tomatoes from 5 feet. I had several thoughts: were there no washing facilities at that farm, was it really that hard to get the residues off the skin, how many Americans would want to do that kind of work? This was over an hour from a large town, and 1 1/2 hours from a city.