I own a modest orchard in south Texas. It was harvested this past Friday. I contract out the work and have no idea of the legal status of the workers.
T'wasn't, however, a whole lot of English spoken out in the orchard that morning. Meanwhile, English speaking America works at my neighborhood McDonald's. McDonald's does not pay nearly as well as grapefruit harvesting does (which is why immigrants come), so where are the English speaking or Anglo grapefruit pickers?
You state Americans (do you mean white Americans? or just the brown ones?) would love these jobs, so I must ask: would you care to harvest my orchard next year with a crew you can find of the citizens you profess covet this work? With your crew of English speakers or Anglos, whomever you organize, you could thereby make your point in the realm of deed and not rhetoric. I pay market price, no more. As a capitalist, the market will always govern-- and thus the immigrants come.
Do you dream of this enterprise for your children? Will you smile proudly when your grown children punch their ladders into the dirt, climb among the raspy limbs and tree after tree, row after row, twist the heavy fruit into their waist sacks, quick as light? (For if they lollygag, they will not profit.)
Migrant children are eligible for federal funding and unique scholarship opportunities, you know. But you probably wouldn't like that. Don't guess I'll be seeing the Americans you speak of in the family orchard next December-- just those damn budget bandits, legal or not.
Well, this explains a lot. You have no problem w/ illegals, because you can exploit them to reduce your labor costs. BTW, knowingly hiring illegal aliens is a crime. Maybe you should ask for documentation next picking season.
You state Americans (do you mean white Americans? or just the brown ones?) would love these jobs, so I must ask: would you care to harvest my orchard next year with a crew you can find of the citizens you profess covet this work? With your crew of English speakers or Anglos, whomever you organize, you could thereby make your point in the realm of deed and not rhetoric. I pay market price, no more. As a capitalist, the market will always govern-- and thus the immigrants come.
Americans, of any color (don’t try to invoke racism here), may not love, but would take these jobs if the wages were comparable to comparable jobs in the market.
No, I would not care to participate in your harvest next year. That is because I worked full time while putting myself to school and earned a college degree. I then went on to become a certified professional in my field. However, I have a more-than-full time position & during tax season I take on extra work on the weekends & after work preparing tax returns.
Now, I’ll tell you that growing up in Central Illinois during the ’60 & ‘70’s I started out in about the 5th grade walking beans. This is manual field labor walking miles in bean fields pulling, by hand, weeds. I did this during the summers until I was old enough for the local grain company to hire me to detassel corn. This is standing on a rickety old machine, going through the fields, pulling tassels out of corn plants. If you were real good, you could get a couple of extra weeks at the end of the season doing hand-inoculation. These jobs usually lasted until early afternoon, at which time I would come home & mow lawns in the neighborhood. There were plenty of (white, if it matters to you) high school kids doing this right alongside me for generations in my town. Plenty of them were farmer’s kids & are now farmers. Many others went into the armed services to protect the citizens of America.
Would I like this as a career for my kids – no. But, I wouldn’t mind if they did it for a summer job, in order to learn what real work is & the value of a good education. I’ll tell you, when my kids are big enough, they will be mowing my lawn, and performing other chores around the house. Where I live, most people hire gardeners & maids. Not me. I will not hire anything done that I can do myself.
Not just them ---have you ever seen ANY of the immigrants' kids willing to do this work? You won't, they're less likely to take these jobs than Americans' kids, a life on welfare and government handouts has them expecting free tuitions and the rest.
If you paid a decent wage and it was year-round work, you should have no problem finding American workers to do that type of work. So, would you care to tell us how much you pay your workers, and is it year-round work?