They were also fairly common in Pennsylvania.
This is a long, interesting, and thought-provoking article about the refugees that settled in Canada a year ago.
A straight line?
But at least you got Kick-Ass biscuits.
Wonderful WaPo analysis on the agriculture employment market in North Carolina and the willingness of Americans to work in it.
That willingness [to work in agriculture as a laborer], he finds, is basically nonexistent. Every year from 1998 to 2012, at least 130,000 North Carolinians were unemployed. Of those, the number who asked to be referred to NCGA was never above 268 (and that number was only reached in 2011, when 489,095 North Carolinians were unemployed). The share of unemployed asking for referrals never breached 0.09 percent.
When native unemployed people are referred to NCGA, they’re almost without exception hired; between 1998 and 2011, 97 percent of referred applicants were hired. But they don’t tend to last. In 2011, 245 people were hired out of 268 referred, but only 163 (66.5 percent) of the hired applicants actually showed up to the first day of work. Worse, only seven lasted to the end of the growing season.
Ah, say the anti-immigrant folks – that’s because the H-2A people are working for far less than minimum wage! Not so in this case.
[The author] looks at a labor market where employers are only using legal labor, which under the H-2A regulations means they have to pay the same wage to native and non-native laborers (a wage set by the government, according to the type of work and the geographic area where it’s being done), and thus can’t benefit from paying lower wages to migrant workers. If even under that standard, Americans aren’t applying for the jobs, even when they have automatic preference over foreign workers, that tells you Americans are really avoiding them.
What is the hourly wages for that job? It’s tough work, so I assume 30or 40 an hour?
For farm labor? Lololol
no
There is no such thing as a job no one will work, but there are many jobs people will not work for the price offered. I am not anti-immigrant, but I am tired of this claim that Americans won’t do these jobs. They need to pay more for the work, and we need to pay more for our food.
Ha, yeah. Can you imagine paying a farm laborer over $50,000 a year ($30/hour)? Half that would be too much for most farms.
Which is probably why so few Americans bother to work those jobs. It’s not a high bar to get a job that pays better.
The thing is, what isn’t what will happen. What will happen is that the cheaper imported food will still be the current price while “American Grown” prices for labor intensive crops (lettuce, strawberries, etc.) will skyrocket. People won’t buy the American sourced crops and we’ll end up with a situation like we had in the 80’s, where farms and farmers started disappearing. Wheat, corn and soybeans would be OK since they are almost exclusively mechanically farmed these days. Anything labor intensive will disappear within a few years of labor prices increasing.
It would be the manufacturing spiral, applied to farms instead.
How is that different than what we have now? All these small farmers telling everyone around them it’s harder and harder to make ends meet, that they can’t compete with some xyz country’s imports, or because of taxes, or because of prices in the stores.
The family run farms have been disappearing for years, and that’s with the ability to use legal and illegal immigrants. The problem isn’t that Americans are too lazy to do work. They won’t do it for the wages offered, and if you can’t get legal workers to do your work, and stay in business, that’s not the fault of the workers.
We also export a lot of food though, a lot of it. It would hypocritical to get all hot and bothered about food imports when we do this to other countries ourselves.
To be clear, there is nothing in this discussion that really singles out “family-owned” vs. “corporate” farms… it’s all about margins as @JFrazer said. If you have a crop (say, oranges) that requires human labor to harvest, you apparently can’t offer wages high enough to temp “native” Americans to do the work without pricing yourself out of the market.
And “lazy” is probably a poor word-choice, but it is a kind of labor that US citizens will apparently not do for minimum wage. At least not in North Carolina.
Sure but the big corporation farms, to my understanding, have already begun to shift towards machine and automation for all the crops that’s reasonable to do. They have no intention of keeping farm workers no matter how cheap they are or where they come from. And yeah American workers aren’t likely going to sweat under the sun for 12 hours a day destroying their back for the same wage McDonald’s pays… but hard work, well we still have coal miners who face long-term health issues, we have tree fellers, people working on roads… lots of hard work type jobs but all for a higher price.
This is why the plutocrat wing of the Republicans wants to destroy the welfare state- make things bad enough that Americans will work those slave-like jobs for slave-like wages- at least until the machines become cheaper- then it doesn’t matter if the poor live or die.
“OK, Athens is 50 miles from here, but how do I know which direction? Wait, nevermind, I get it now…”
Looks like the road gently bends to the east!
This. We’re a generation or two away from the 99% becoming unpaid slave labour for the 1% or a bloody purge of the middle and landed classes that will make Year Zero look like a picnic. Right now the 1% are driving the working classes towards a future of bonded labour or indentureship, we’ll certainly see this if they remove the immigrants from agriculture. No welfare? You want food? heat? A roof? Then you work 16 hour days, 365 days a year and you’ll get it, and perhaps a handful of company scrip for the company shop if you are lucky.
That will never happen though as long as the middle and lower classes are armed to the teeth. The 2nd Amendment rights the GOP is so fond of will come back to haunt them should anything like the above scenario begin to play out. And don’t expect that the military will step into line to protect the 1%…the military is made up of 99%'ers, even the top brass. If push comes to bullets, much of the military will side with their own families and join in the pillaging/purging of the wealthy as American society redistributes it’s resources and resets it’s class system. It won’t be pretty, it will resemble a modern day French Revolution on a grander and bloodier scale, but America is highly unlikely to go full-on feudal system when the peasants are armed with far more than pitchforks and cleavers.