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.
Oh, stop—pay people enough money, be creative enough in getting people there at harvesting time, make the jobs attractive enough and there are plenty of Americans who will pick tomatoes. And, if the labor costs are high enough, we’ll develop tomato harvesters that are more gentle with the produce.
The taxpayers of America end up paying for cheap legal or illegal foreign labor—and we can’t afford it culturally or financially.
If employers have to be creative in training their labor forces, as they used to have to, they can do that too.
We already have more than enough low-skill Americans!
You’ve made a strong argument for a ‘guest worker’ program.
I don’t think the argument isn’t strong enough to justify continuing what most people would consider a ‘slavery program’ if they could see exactly what is going on.
We tried that once before, and the results were catastrophic, which is where we are headed now.
As a retired farmer, I know a little bit about hard, often thankless, jobs. I think we have to allow the market to sort these things out, and not let government interfere.
We need more jobs training programs. Not all are cut out for college. And if we want manufacturing in this country to be the best, we need job training programs to go with college educated people. Jr College can be a big help along with job specific training programs. Some one has to repair cars, HAVC, things like that. And we need construction workers who can read a ruler too.