Posted on 07/10/2006 11:11:56 AM PDT by Jean S
I've hung sheetrock - I think I'd prefer picking oranges. :)
Well, at least the oranges you can eat!.........
They don't have to do jobs. Welfare is far more profitable.
Your correct to point out that legal as well illegal immigrants have hidden costs. But if there had been an adequate domestic birthrate such there had been no need to import labor(legal and illegal), the domestic born low wage earner would have the same hidden costs.
Let them go under, we don't need agriculture in this Country. Just turn them into high tech jobs like all the FReepers say.
Pray for W and Our Freedom Fighters
Easy to see what happened, orange groves go away, neighborhoods come in. Workers learn new trade on same land.
West Texas peacan growers use a shaker to shake the pecans out of the trees. They sweep up the pecans with a tractor mounted sweeper and load them into a truck.
"If true, it would seem growing oranges is too expensive to do in the US!"
Yep. So it's OK to put hundreds of thousands of American manufacturing jobs in China because "labor is too expensive here" but it's not OK to do the same with oranges?
If the free traders want us to concentrate on what we do best here in the US, why do they care about oranges?
If they are cheaper from South America, why not let them grow them?
I haven't been down Highway 27 in years. The loss of the groves doesn't surprise me though. In the early to mid 80's all of those hard freezes in that area wiped out a lot of the smaller growers. It looked kind of weird for a while with some areas having a large mix of dead and living groves.
The freezes in the 80's and recent hurricanes have caused a lot of growers to shut down. They can get more money selling the groves to real estate developers nowadays. Another stake in the heart of old Florida.
I suppose the Walmart store brand OJ that I buy comes from Brazil.
Forgot about the 3 hurricanes that crossed that area back in 2004. I believe those were the first ones to hit central Florida since Claire, back in the 60's.
Yeah the Florida of my childhood is long gone and is something my children cannot even comprehend.
A-the Ledger is a liberal rag owned by the NYT with identical editorial policy.
B-the labor market will adjust if given a chance. I picked oranges in HS and it major league sucked for the money, BUT I have done worse jobs more willingly because the pay was better.
C-this whole line of "reasoning" about the necessity of illegal labor is bogus. These stories are all written from the same template.
D- it is a lot cheaper to pay $3.50 for a half gallon of OJ, or $3 a pound for tomatoes than it is to pay the cost of all these illegals.
And the week before, it was cherry-picking shortages. Ladies and gentlemen, I present the MSM template.
You are absolutely right. In a small northern California town where I lived briefly in the late 1960s, they closed the Jr and Sr high schools at harvest time and adjusted the school calendar accordingly. The kids got to learn the value of work and responsibility and earned some money that all their parents certainly appreciated. The work was open to all the kids in the area, not just those whose families were involved with the farms (mostly orchards). I remember this because I remember asking my sister (who I lived with) why the schools were closed and it was not summer, Christmas or Easter.
Our addiction to tax incentives throughout our farming industry has created an industry that (1)lives for the tax breaks or subsidies, (2)over produces, (3)drives prices so low that small operatons must sell the land to the larger ones, (4)destroys the family farm, (5)destroys small towns across rural America and thus (6)destroys the sources of the native labor in agriculture and (7)turns agriculture from a part of the nation's culture to (8)a mega-industry addicted to either tax breaks or subsidies or cheap imported labor.
There are farms near where I live where, you can go pick your own fruits and veggies at a per basket price. The rest is picked by kids with summer jobs. There's something very dirty in Denmark.
The farmers want their usual profit margin and they're not going to let some 'illegal immigration problem' get in their way!
Picker Pedro Picked a Peck of Pickled amnesty.
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