Posted on 06/18/2011 7:18:07 PM PDT by Cardhu
Contractor Don Pedro — like farmers across Georgia — is worried that the state's tough new immigration law is scaring away an illegal immigrant workforce.
Reporting from Wray, Ga. — It was a Tuesday afternoon at the height of blackberry season, and the Paulk family farm was short 100 pickers. It was Don Pedro's job to find them.
The Georgia Department of Agriculture this month released a survey of farmers who said they needed to fill more than 11,000 positions lasting from one day to a year. Critics of U.S. farming practices have long said Americans would take such jobs if they paid better.
Don Pedro said his job has never been so tough, nor workers so scarce. His boss had told the state Labor Department he needed pickers, but he had received no responses. He wasn't surprised, even though the jobless rate in Irwin County was 13%. Few here believe that native Southerners, white or black, wish to return to the land their ancestors once sharecropped or tended in bondage.
Pedro Guerrero, 54, the smiling, soft-spoken man in black cowboy boots whom everyone calls Don Pedro, was barreling down two-lane roads in a compact Chevy on a hunt for his own people. He was searching amid the trailers and tumbledown rental houses and mercados that have sprung up since the 1990s, when waves of Latinos began arriving in Georgia to harvest food, serve it in restaurants and scrape it from soiled plates.
Don Pedro kept one hand on the wheel. The other sorted paper scraps stuffed in the pocket of his Western shirt. On a flip phone, he punched in numbers for guys named Felipe and Miguel and Sixto, surfing an analog network of cousins and friends of friends and old sources who might know where the hard workers
(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...
These LAT MSM have honed this Don Pedro 'narrative' to absolute perfection. There is a Pulitzer in the offing here. I thought real liberals hated scape-goats and slave labor.!!
That’s what I was thinking. Work-release programs for non-violent offenders with an opportunity to learn farming.
Next, get the American family farm back, and stop the conglomerates feeding off of the cheap illegal labor.
No - one thing needs to happen and happen now! Stop the gravy train. Cut welfare, subsidized housing, section 8, WIC, food stamps, free telephones and free cars.
If the recipients can't get out and go to work then let them lose some weight.
The white kid had a job. —— Official ice cream taster for Blue Bunny Ice Cream. The Hispanic guy was doing what any hard working guy should be doing on his weekend off —— cutting his grass on Saturday morning.
Exactly. Both my grandmothers would work on tobacco farms in Connecticut. Supply and demand.
Today I pick blackberry’s in the SC sun for free. Of course, I then eat them for free. That’s also supply and demand.
I started with maters and graduated to 2 pennies a bale. What is their bitch again........
I don't know, that seems like a decent "living wage" to me ($900 for a 40 hour week).
As I understand your comment here’s my solution:
1. Send illegals home.
2. Pay US citizens wages according to the skill required for the job. (Not all jobs demand a living wage for each worker. A married couple can make a very comfortable living with their wages combined. Done it for the first 5 years of marriage.)
Mechanical crop sorting - harvesting machines will be the answer. Regular preventative maintenance not free medical care, free education and scholarships to college, social security or open borders.
We find that buried pretty far down in the article. There is a lot of garbage in this article. One major point is that no one with a lick of common sense has ever said that the seasonal, migrant work could always be done by US citizens. It does make sense to have a guest worker program for migrant, seasonal agricultural work.
But I've read many times that US farm employers avoid using the programs for various reasons. These programs should be improved and made less cumbersome, but they should also implement reasonable means of keeping track of guest workers to ensure that they leave after a period of time.
I'd bet that, like most aspects of immigration law, that there are mountains of BS erected by those who don't want to follow the law because it's easier just to hire a bunch of illegal aliens. The government should develop workable programs and costly punishments for those who refuse to use them.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
At least one Georgia lawmaker was proposing that a couple of weeks ago. Haven't heard if it was taken seriously by others.
You took one sentence out of context and ignored many others. If there are real problems with those programs they should be improved. If employers are simple ignoring them because they're a hassle, and it's always been easier to just hire illegals, then those employers should be dealt with under the law.
But like everything in immigration enforcement, the guest worker programs have been ignored because those laws aren't enforced either. People just hire illegals and get away with it.
The government could change that, just as it could enforce the border and many other things related to illegal immigration it chooses to ignore.
A labor shortage will spur adoption of ATM machines to tend the fields and pick the crops.
Seriously, we are just a few years away from the first generation of farmerhand microbots that use DARPA-level swarming technology in hunter-killer missions against crop-destroying insects. This would be as major an advance in agriculture as the invention of the tractor or insecticides.
Rational economics (as opposed to Keynesian “economics”) will quickly tell us there is no such thing as a labor shortage. There is only a shortage of people willing to work for the wages being offered. There is a wage level that will bring enough workers into the field, but the farmer may not find it acceptable. He soon may find it costs less over time to buy a few hundred farmhand-microbots instead.
Not the welfare folk that take it for granted that they can avail of all this wonderful food via food stamp programs . . . ?
Two things need to happen. The farmers need to pay a bit more and America’s lazy ass youth need to get out there
Ping!
I’m sure the prisons of Georgia could grow most of the food they eat or hire the inmates out so they could make restitution for the cost of their crimes or care for their families.
Think of what could be done in a place like Detroit that can’t afford to tear down its condemned houses. There’s lots of valuable material in those houses if the labor was cheap, like inmates, that is being left to rot like the berries going to rot for lack of workers.
But....I don’t see it happening any time soon.
There, fixed it.
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