Posted on 06/01/2005 11:26:35 AM PDT by JZelle
Jack Brooks observes the 25 or so women sitting at stainless steel tables, picking lumps of meat out of blue crabs fished from the Chesapeake Bay. There are a handful of Americans and about 18 Mexicans packing up small tubs for sale to restaurants and markets. "We have to have the Mexican workers just to sustain our business. American workers simply are not available," the co-owner of J.M. Clayton Co., a Cambridge, Md., business founded by his great-grandfather in 1890, said last month.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtontimes.com ...
Oh!! They are available, it's just easier to sit at home and collect the check than get up and go to work.
If they are legal immigrants, then there is no problem here.
Crab Pickers - Sorry!!
pay more.
the discovery channel is running that show now on alaskan crab fishing - they have no problem finding workers, because they make decent money.
Supply and Demand. As long as they can find migrant workers to work for minimum wage there's no urgency to raise wages to attract US Citizens.
You are exactly right! I cashed checks at the local bank from Mexican workers and seems like they earned a very decent wage. Also they lived rent free in the packers quarters. They did have to pay for food, but most of the money went right back to Mexico. Transportation was free from Mexico but they needed to pay the return fare.
I was amazed at the number of women willing to leave behind a family for 9 months to work in the US. After 2 or 3 years of saving the earnings, they could live quite well in Mexico for a very long time.
I agree, but are you willing to pay $15 for a crab coctail or po'boy?
"American workers simply are not available," I think he meant to add "at the wage we want to pay"...
and its the same reason why we don't have agricultural investments in automated harvesting of vegetables - why bother when the migrant farm workers work for next to nothing. maybe someone could invent a machine that cracked crabs and harvested the meat, but we will never know because no one invests to invent one. its the same thing in industries going to china - why can't we have US based automated assembly of furniture for example? at least we would provide some jobs here in the US in the industries needed to support the automated machinery, instead of sending it all to china.
I will say this again -- if you want to end illegal immigration, then get rid of the jobs by making employers strictly liable for unlawfully hiring illegals. The penalty should be a minimum of one year in the pokey, no excuses. "Strict liablilty" means that the employer is guilty even if he had reason to believe the employee was legal or at least didn't know the person was illegal. Statutory rape works the same way. If she's 16, your getting 20 even if she had 20 forms of picture ID to "prove" she was 18.
let the market dicate that. when the price becomes too high for customers to bear, that would be the trigger to invest in automation.
taken to its extreme, this is the same line of reasoning that would argue for slavery. I am sure that somewhere, someplace, there is some business that could sell something at a profit if only they had zero cost labor - slaves. Should we give that to them? At what point do the social costs of giving the business what it thinks it needs, outweigh the economic benefits of having them stay in business? That's what is happening now, I'm saving $2 on my restaurant bill because they hire illegals - and I am paying for schools, medical, and other social services for those illegal employees.
Hiring foreign workers to pick blue crabs is far preferable to importing foreign crabs and falsely advertising them as home grown!
Please correct me if I'm wrong because I am not a farmer or commercial fisherman but I do know a little history on the subject and the very reason that children were out of school during the summer was so they could help with the farming of crops or commercial fishing whichever area they lived in! Correct?
So that these jobs that illegals are doing in farming or fishing industries could be and have been done by the young folks in the past...
They get the guys to go fishing because they make $10,ooo for a weeks work (solid week, no sleep, basically).
Did you notice last night that all the unloaders/processors were mexican?
very difficult to enforce. even your statutory rape example - 1/3rd of young girls have sex by age 16, 2/3rds by age 18. That's alot of guys you need to put in jail.
why don't the owners of the ship offer less in salary, and pocket the profits for themselves and/or lower the price of the crabs? its the same analogy.
If DHS f/k/a the INS finds illegal workers at a Tyson Poultry Plant, then only one person goes to jail and that person's name is Tyson. You can bet if Tyson has to spend a year in jail, his company will never, ever hire an illegal again.
So why must the workers be Mexican?
The potential shortage of seasonal workers along the Chesapeake illustrated a broader problem in the United States — a mismatch between the supply and demand for legal foreign labor.
... John Gay, vice president for government relations at the International Franchise Association and a co-chairman of the Essential Worker Immigration Coalition, a business group that is pressing for more legal, year-round foreign workers for restaurant, health care, construction, building maintenance, landscaping and similar jobs.
Gentlemen, do you "need" seasonal workers, or do you want more cheap foreign labor overall?
"Regardless of race, heritage or national origin, we are one family under God," Cardinal Theodore E. McCarrick said last month at a press conference announcing "Justice for [Illegal] Immigrants," a church campaign led by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. The conference has joined the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the union Unite Here, National Council of La Raza and other groups seeking broad immigration reform, including amnesty for illegals.
Forget about it.
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