[kaktuskid]

Question...will you pick lettuce, or your kids??? Who will???

[Aetius]

Of course the price for the marginally cheaper lettuce is a demographic shift that w/o question favors the Democrats.

[douglas1]

WE should not equate picking lettuce with our soveringty that is stupid, the job will get done and we might even start to truly mechanise this problem, a lot of the growers want to keep things the way they are, because if they have to pay for the machines to do this, the price will rise, and dont forget whether its machines or humans they dont pay for social services.

[Dat Mon]

"Question...will you pick lettuce, or your kids??? Who will???"

The same people who picked it 10 years ago, before the large increase of illegals starting probably in the late 90's.

A question for you.. How much of the retail price of a head of lettuce is due to the price of labor picking it. (Hint consider markup costs along the way, plus the cost of transportation and refrigeration.)

Another question...how many illegals do we need total to pick lettuce, or other farm produce? Hint consider the number of acres of farmland, and the number of illegals needed per acre. Is it 100,000 or 1 million, or 10 million?

[stopem]

People on welfare can pick lettuce.
We don't need illegals here!
I would do without lettuce to get them out!

[B4Ranch]

>>Question...will you pick lettuce, or your kids??? Who will???<<

Just so you don't lose sleep over who will pick the lettuce, allow me to explain some facts to you.

When Ceaser Chavez decided that he would organize the crop workers into not picking tomatoes, a couple of brothers decided that since tomatoes are a row crop, they could design a machine to harvest them.

What happened? In three years all tomatoes were being picked by machines, the farmers planted more acreage of tomatoes and the the price of tomatoes dropped.

Lettuce is a row crop. Get ready for a price drop.

[FBD]

"Question...will you pick lettuce, or your kids??? Who will???"

Ya ever hear of "mechanization"???

Welcome to 2005.
I'll bet you would have been one of those characters back in the slavery era; saying: "Who will pick our cotton???"

Cotton Pickers of the 1800’s:


The modern day cotton picker; (not ONE illegal immigrant required to run this machine!):

Machines…“doing the jobs that Americans refuse to do.”
Harvesting grapes:

Harvesting Coffee:


Harvesting blueberries?


Who will pick our berries?

[Little Ray]

Why shouldn't kids pick lettuce during the summer?

[FBD]

-B4 Ranch had the correct answer to who will pick our lettuce, and the politics behind old school farming, vs mechanization in post#24:

>"Just so you don't lose sleep over who will pick the lettuce, allow me to explain some facts to you.

When Cesar Chavez decided that he would organize the crop workers into not picking tomatoes, a couple of brothers decided that since tomatoes are a row crop, they could design a machine to harvest them.

What happened? In three years all tomatoes were being picked by machines, the farmers planted more acreage of tomatoes and the the price of tomatoes dropped.
Lettuce is a row crop. Get ready for a price drop"<

---

Here is an article by an agricultural engineer, Harold Brewer, on the subject of mechanization of farming, and the politics that stifle mechanical innovation:


"My favorite season on the farm during the 1930s was summer, when we harvested wheat, oats, and alfalfa. Harvest started when we rolled out a binder and thresher, stored since last summer. The binder cut stalks, tied them into bundles, and dumped them into rows. The thresher separated grain from straw and chaff. At threshing time, several neighbors and many itinerant workers assembled at our farm. With luck, no rain fell and the grain was safely stored in the granary within a few days.

Now, a combine rolls into a field. In a matter of hours, one or two workers harvest and store the grain. Labor is reduced at least tenfold.
Similarly, for harvesting alfalfa. What took many days and people is now accomplished in a few days with one or two people.

Childhood ended. I left the farm, completed military service, then enrolled at the University of California at Davis in the Agricultural Engineering Department.

Its researchers were world-renowned for developing machines for field production. Field production machines are important because each replaces ten or more workers. Nations with the lowest percentage of workers on farms are the wealthiest.

For example, the U.S.A. has 2% of its population working on farms, while Ethiopia has 84%. More? Japan 5% and China 68%.
My major at UCD, power and machinery, brought me into contact with people developing harvesters for crops such as grapes, peaches, and tomatoes.

The tomato project was particularly interesting. Several people contributed in various ways, such as developing a variety that could withstand mechanical handling. But the key element of the harvester proved elusive. This finally fell into place when Steven Sluka, a refugee from the 1956 Hungarian Revolution - (some immigrants can be useful!)
-
conceived the idea of cutting vines loose from the ground, lifting them, then shaking the tomatoes off the vines. His technique was the basis for the first successful mechanical tomato harvesters.

Growers in California were faced with the loss of workers who were hand-harvesting their crops. Politicians and Labor had teamed up to discontinue the bracero program, so that wages paid domestic laborers could be driven up. However, UCD researchers, with grower funding, had just successively tested the mechanical tomato harvester. When braceros walked out of the fields, mechanical harvesters rolled in.


Several years later, the mechanization program at UCD was shut down and dismantled. Politicians did not intend to have their labor-friendly policies thwarted again. Just to make sure, they and their allies reached out to the Agricultural Research Service in the U. S. Department of Agriculture and dismantled all field mechanization programs there, too.

Mechanical lettuce harvesters were under development in the 1960s. That work was stopped. Today, lettuce is still harvested by hand in the field.

The dismantling occurred over a period of years starting in the 1960s. Nothing overt, just not renewing any mechanization projects or starting any new ones. The mechanical tomato harvester had rankled a lot of labor-friendly people. When we say "labor," we might as well say Mexican workers, legal or illegal.

But the precipitating event - I am relying on memory - was when a Secretary of Agriculture was due for a photo op in Northern California with UCD researchers, spotlighting a fruit-catching frame used in mechanization. Word got out and the next thing we knew the event was called off.

Cesar Chavez, head of the agricultural workers union, pulled the right strings and stopped it cold. He didn't want any more mechanization, which would put his union members out of work.

That big hole in the Mexican border started in earnest when politicians and their labor allies stopped the development of any new agricultural field machines. The stopper on mechanization went all the way through the 1980's and extended into the Agricultural Research Service of the USDA.

Finally, around 1990, it was all right to "quietly" do mechanization research again, but it had to be labeled as being for the environment, or for food quality, or whatever. Field mechanization to save labor was still not allowed.

Meanwhile, across the Pacific at an Institute outside Tokyo, the mechanization work continued without interruption.

And rural America fills up with foreigners.

---

About the author- Harold Brewer:

(Harold Brewer was born in Wichita and raised on a farm in central Kansas. He served in the U.S. Air Force during the Berlin Airlift and the Korean War.

After leaving military service, he attended the University of California and received degrees in agricultural engineering from Berkeley and Davis. He has done research at the university and federal government levels on advanced agricultural systems."

This article is adapted from his recent book Fig Leaves And Masks; available at: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0967545501/vdare)

---

.

[philetus]

Here you go:

Do citizens really want these jobs?

From construction to landscaping, Bush 'guest worker' plan is controversial.
By Daniel B. Wood | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
LOS ANGELES – Scott Joyal says that if it weren't for illegal immigrants taking jobs that could have been his - first as a car washer or waiter, later in carpentry and construction - he would have had a lot easier time surviving financially over the past 10 years. The San Jose carpenter says he knows dozens of his colleagues who, like him, are also struggling to pay rent and keep food in the refrigerator because of competition from immigration.

It's a view that goes to one of the core questions raised by President Bush's proposal to let millions of illegal workers become legal "guest workers": Would they be stealing jobs that American citizens want and need?

Bush says no.

He calls it a "basic fact of life and economics" that some jobs being generated in America are ones citizens don't want to fill.

Yet that premise is controversial - in a slow job market in which millions are looking for work - and to many economists it is misleading. Many citizens will, and do, work side by side with immigrants who may be illegal in industries from meatpacking to hotels and landscaping. "Those workers are competing with US workers," says Dean Baker, an economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research. "It's simply not true that US workers won't take these jobs." But many, he concedes, won't take them at the going wage.

In the view of many economists, the question is less one of stealing jobs than of altering the balance in labor market. The influx of immigrants, legal and illegal, adds to the supply of low-cost labor and puts downward pressure on pay. The upside, for the US economy, is lower consumer prices and, in some cases, keeping some production at home that might otherwise shift overseas.

For example, what if instead of recognizing "guest workers" the government took a policy of aggressively weeding out illegal immigrants? The resulting upward pressure on wages might push some jobs in, say, meatpacking or agriculture out of the country. But in other cases, it might prod businesses to increase wages, expand the use of automation (such as in harvesting), and to pass higher costs along to consumers.

Gauging the precise impact of immigrants, especially the illegal ones for whom the guest worker program is designed, is tricky. And employer groups and groups favoring limits on immigration can come up with very different conclusions. In one 1997 study the National Research Council found that immigration depresses wages modestly for many lower-income workers - by perhaps 5 percent over 15 years.

To many on the ground, however, the impact feels large. Construction is one industry where Baker says pay scales have been hit by the immigrant influx.

"I'm not against [immigrants]," says Mr. Joyal, the San Jose carpenter. "It just makes it difficult for native-born Americans to get jobs when undocumented aliens are lined up to get them first."

Since 1993, he says he has been turned down by carwashes, schools seeking janitors, restaurants, and hosts of construction jobs because immigrants got there first or underbid him.

Landscaping is another industry transformed by immigrant labor, even in states as far from the border as North Carolina.

Keith Martin, who owns a Raleigh-area landscape business, says the native-born Americans he encounters don't want to do the type of jobs he routinely gives to immigrants.

"Through my experience, Americans don't want to do this type of work, no matter what you pay them," says Mr. Martin, who runs a small shop with a trailer of mowers and hedge trimmers.

This doesn't prompt him to support Bush's guest worker idea, but it's the current reality of a business that involves laboring in the oppressive heat of Dixie, trimming curbs of suburban ranch houses and keeping the flower beds at local high-tech firms looking healthy.

In Bush's plan, illegal immigrants already in the US could apply for a three-year work permit, which would be renewable at least once. By giving legal status to millions already working in the fringes of the US economy, observers say, Bush's plan is to help ease labor shortages, improve working conditions, and stabilize wages paid to previously illegal immigrants.

But with the president scheduled to meet Monday with Mexican President Vicente Fox, the merits of the plan are a topic of hot debate.

"This is really a far bigger issue than just who gets low income jobs in immigration and border states," says Mark Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies. "There are no numerical limits on these guest workers or what sector of the economy the jobs apply to. If employers can bypass American workers and not have to offer better wages and conditions ... the consequences to the American workplace could impact everyone."

According to the Center for Immigration Studies, there are more than 5.5 million working immigrants in America - legal and illegal - who lack high school education. Eighteen percent are in agriculture, 18 percent in construction, 16 percent in retail, 23 percent in manufacturing, 7 in business services/repair and 6 percent in personal services from maids to limo drivers.

"When we have 18 million Americans who can't find full-time jobs, it seems ludicrous to even be considering a program to import more foreign workers," says Rosemary Jencks of Numbers USA, an immigration reduction organization.

Kate Bronfenbrenner, a labor expert at Cornell University, says you can't draw a one-to-one comparison between the estimated 7 million illegal immigrants and the ranks of the US unemployed.

Some jobs categories are growing fast, she says, and they are often low-paying ones such as nurses' aides and housecleaners. "It's not true that Americans aren't working in them. There are just are plenty of those jobs to go around."

She worries, however, that Bush's plan tilts power heavily to employers, since the guest workers are not granted permanent residency. "Bush has established a program that gives employers the opportunity to exploit immigrant workers to an even greater degree."

• Patrik Jonsson and Mark Trumbull contributed to this report from Raliegh and Boston.