Timothy Egan opinionates in the NYT:
Migrants from Sanity
With 14 million Americans out of work, you would think somebody could answer the desperation call from farmers offering to pay $150 to anyone willing to pick fruit in the orchards of Washington State. But no, the apples hang at peak ripeness, a near-record crop, and the jobs go begging, despite radio ads and an appeal by Governor Christine Gregoire to the other Washington for help.
One thing the United States still does better than most countries is grow food. But one thing it now does worse than others is govern to solve problems. And so, the apples rot, businesses are crippled, and dreams of fresh life in a new country are dashed. This dystopian status quo exists because the simple-minded who control one of the major political parties have shut down all adult talk on the subject of immigration.
Almost every harvest season, we read stories in the New York Times about how some crop somewhere is rotting in the fields which proves that civilization will grind to a halt unless we import lots more illegal immigrant stoop laborers stat. Could it be, however, that NYT staffers are not quite as sophisticated in their understanding of farm labor economics as they think they are after spending a half hour on the phone with noted agriculture expert Tamar Jacoby?
Back during the Great California Pear Picker Shortage Crisis of October 2006, I enumerated in VDARE a handy seven point guide to the subject for clueless city slickers.
Back during the Great California Pear Picker Shortage Crisis of October 2006, I enumerated in VDARE a handy seven point guide to the subject for clueless city slickers.
Maybe NYT is right, but unemployed people have unemployment checks and welfare, so why should they work?
ReplyDeleteDespite this apparent crisis, every supermarket I've been to here in NJ is stocked like a horn o' plenty with apples.
ReplyDeleteOf course, most of our towns are overstocked with illegals, too. Maybe they brought the apples with them?
Isn't Washington a high-cost-of-life state? I don't think too many illegals go work there. They can't even afford the rent.
ReplyDeleteI was just hearing about this in the local press. The point was made that unemployment benefits are so generous in WA that citizens can't be bothered to do something laborious like pick fruit. So it's less "jobs Americans won't do" than "jobs American are paid not to do by an overgenerous welfare state".
ReplyDeleteWould be nice to fix this at the same time as we fix our border. I can dream, right?
Why pick fruits when you can have more fun picking on Wall Street?
ReplyDeleteYeah, I saw that. There are about 300% as many Mexicans in WA as 25 years ago, yet there still aren't enough cherry pickers...
ReplyDeleteWhat do we need to do now, import Guangxi?
You know, the real problem is that they passed bills back in the 90s that gave the alien farm workers state-subsidized medical care (and other perks). Then, of course, the women followed the men, who had previously been seasonal workers, and now they are here to stay.
If the Mexicans were still picking fruit, this wouldn't be an issue, but the Democrats gave them other options. If they had been American citizens at the time that might be understandable, but they weren't, and many still aren't.
What was it about American politicians in the 90s and 00s that gave them the idea that subsidizing their children's dispossession was a good thing? What a lousy, waste of a generation...
Conclusion I draw from Egan's lede is that PNW agribusiness are idiots. Maybe next year they'll try not to repeat this crude business error?
ReplyDeleteWith 14 million Americans out of work, you would think somebody could answer the desperation call from farmers offering to pay $150 to anyone willing to pick fruit in the orchards of Washington State.
ReplyDeleteWTF does that even mean? $150 per hour? Day? Week? Lifetime?
With 14 million Americans out of work, you would think somebody could answer the desperation call from farmers offering to pay $150 to anyone willing to pick fruit in the orchards of Washington State.
ReplyDeleteAnd approximately 14 of those 14 million have heard of this incomprehensible offer.
I don't advise reading the NYT Opinionator link, which is only a waste of valuable seconds; here is the $150/day story he was "riffing" on
ReplyDeleteIs it the newspaper writers are gullible or lazy? I mean, if you can recycle the same story every year, hey that's one less story ya gotta write this year.
ReplyDeleteNot everyone can be a self-employed blogger and unabashedly re-use their old material. ;-) A lot of folks have to look busy for management.
The author couldn't be bothered to note the local, or state, unemployment rate. And, wow, is he nasty.
ReplyDeleteApplenoia!
ReplyDeleteLocal fruit gleaners are picking tomorrow in back yards and vacant lots. Fruit is shared between owners, pickers and local food banks. Doubt we could make minimum wage if we were commercial. Yeah, it's a damn good apple year in Northern CA.
ReplyDeleteTimothy Egan, the writer in question here, wrote a fairly decent book on The West, "Lasso The Wind." But this article is nonsense.
ReplyDeleteLarge swaths of Eastern Washington have turned into Mexico, Yakima, Omak, Pasco. I remember the 70's, when picking apples was a hippie sort of thing, where all manner of miscreants in Seattle and Portland would to harvest the crop, get stoned in the orchards and there was apparently quite a hookup culture involved - a real party!
Then the owners found out Mexicans could be had for cheaper, now formerly Mayberry-esque towns like Yakima are gang plagued hellholes rife with welfare, food stamps and Section 8.
Progress!
Ever notice how, when someone in the immigration lobby doesn't get what they want, it's because their opponents "won't talk like adults"? That's right, kids, the great race replacement isn't proceeding fast enough. Cheap immigrant labor isn't yet plentiful enough, even though more of the price of produce goes to the farmer's profit than to labor. If you don't support bringing in half of Mexico, giving them state welfare, education, and health services, and driving wages down to $5/hour so that whites can be a minority by 2020 rather than 2040, you're just being immature.
ReplyDeleteThese stories about crops rotting in the fields due to a lack of stoop harvesters always strike me as pure bull-poopy.
ReplyDeleteBasic, basic economics tells us so.
Being rational actors, not even the most mentally deficient farmer would plant crops without having the means readily available to harvest and sell the same crops.To do otherwise is pure madness and the road to bankruptcy.It really is as simple as that.
It's like a motor mecahnic taking on work when he owns neither tools nor garage.
Why does NYT (along with the rest of the MSM) have such concern for the owners of US fruit farms? Why didn't it show this kind of concern when 42,000 US factories closed forever during the Bush years alone? Let the damn fruit be grown in some Third World country.
ReplyDeletebut suddenly liberals aren't interested in raising the price of the lowest paid labor but rather increasing the profits of agribusinesses? everything takes a back seat to destroying the west. womens rights, safety, freedom, prosperity- nothing must get in the way of the askanazi imperative to wipe out western civilization.
ReplyDeleteI went to school in central illinois - local kids used to de-tassle corn ect for summer wages -
Could it be that YOU don't know what you're talking about? Americans are entitled and uppity and will not deign to pick fruits.
ReplyDeleteYour handy 7-point guide is excellent.
ReplyDeleteSteve,
ReplyDeleteSurely they have editors at NYT? What do they use to write these articles a boilerplate? Doesn't editor A remember what they wrote last year? Can't they find a new angle to 'rotting in the field'?
Why not have computer code languishing on the screen for Indian IT workers? Or perhaps we could have textiles pining to be woven?
That's not to mention all our girls waiting to be violated and kidnapped, drugs that need to be muled, and cars that feel neglected without someone drunk behind the wheel waiting to drag someone down the road.
Of course we have ER's that need more anchor babies being born. Food stamps that need to be spent. etc.
"Isn't Washington a high-cost-of-life state? I don't think too many illegals go work there."
ReplyDeleteI think this is the perception, but I haven't noticed it being a lot more expensive than the other states I've been in. No need for air conditioning probably makes it cheaper for me (I'm hot at 75 degrees).
But there aren't too many illegals in the Seattle area, though there are lots of hispanics. There are a lot of illegals in Yakima valley, where most of the farming is done. Yakima has a crime problem, though it is still a decent town and a nice place for a weekend getaway. The really sad one is Toppenish, a little town off I-90. It has these gorgeous murals depicting old west life painted on many of the buildings, kind of a civic pride project, but the town itself seems like little more than an illegal hiring post. I don't think I saw 2 non-tourist white people when I was there.
Why pick apples for $150 a week when you can get more in foodstamps and EBT fun money from the government?
ReplyDeleteCBS News had a similar story yesterday about Alabama and its new immigration law.
ReplyDeleteOf course all the other job issues the press loves to raise when the story doesn't relate to immigration ("These jobs don't come with health insurance!!!") don't get mentioned when it comes to farm labor.
This is $150 a day without health insurance. This is 150 a day without sick leave. This is $150 without paid vacation. This is $150 a day only if you hit the possibly ludicrous productivity goals (200 crates of apples, or tomatoes, or whatever). This is $150 a day for maybe a day, or a week, or, if you're lucky, a couple of weeks. Harvest seasons come and go. After the harvest is over in this town you're SOL and on your own.
Over at the CBS article one of the interviewees stated: "Spencer said the Americans he has linked up with farmers are not physically fit and do not work fast enough. 'It's the harshest work you can imagine doing,' Spencer said.'"
So you have a guy simultaneously bashing Americans for being fat and lazy (is it OK to call Americans fat and lazy?) while admitting that it's incredibly hard work that no reasonable American would do for what is paid.
The farm industry needs to innovate in how it attains temporary labor, and the media needs to stop suggesting that the only illegals working in the US are picking crops. Crop-pickers comprise maybe 4% of illegal workers, at best.
"Could it be, however, that NYT staffers are not quite as sophisticated in their understanding of farm labor economics as they think they are after spending a half hour on the phone with noted agriculture expert Tamar Jacoby?"
ReplyDeleteLove it.
$150 a what? $150 an hour? A week? A month?
ReplyDelete"Being rational actors, not even the most mentally deficient farmer would plant crops without having the means readily available to harvest and sell the same crops."
ReplyDeleteI don't know about this. Economics isn't driven by rational acting but by checks and balances among irrational forces. People do a lot of stuff in EXPECTATION of something good happening. Look at the housing bubble. How rational was that.
Maybe we need a fruit bubble. Everyone should invest in fruits. A box of apples will go from $20 a crate to $500 a crate.. that is until...
ReplyDeleteWilliam Houston writes:
ReplyDelete"The MSM is still pushing the narrative that "crops are rotting on the vine" in Alabama, the Alabama economy has been destroyed by HB 56, and that there are "jobs Americans won't do."
Readers have good reasons to be skeptical of these liberal propagadists who masquerade as journalists.
In Florida, superfluous blueberry production in Central Florida driven by diet fads derailed immigration reform in the Sunshine State. In Georgia, Morris Enterprises has a $30 million dollar business growing Vidalia onions and has received almost $1.8 million dollars in farm subsidies from the federal government.
The beleagured farmers of Alabama who are most commonly cited by the MSM are Wayne and Leroy Smith of Steele, Alabama. There are other tomato farmers (such as those in the video below) who have given interviews to the media about "crops rotting on the vine" and about how their "family members" have been forced to flee to other states.
How big is the tomato industry in Alabama? Tomatos account for a whopping 0.3 percent of Alabama agricultural commodities.
As we have already seen, the biggest crops in Alabama by a mile are corn, soybeans, cotton, and peanuts which have never been "picked" by illegal aliens. Greenhouse crops (including tomatoes) are also grown in the state, but that is not what is being referred to here.
Wayne Smith grows tomatoes on an awesome 75 acres in St. Clair County. Field workers get paid $2 for every 25-pound box of tomatoes they fill. Unemployment benefits provide up to $265 a week while a minimum wage job, at $7.25 an hour for 40 hours, brings in $290 a week.
What would happen to commercial tomato production if every illegal alien in Alabama vanished tomorrow? Surely, it would collapse, right?
In 2009, 1,400 acres in Alabama were planted in tomatoes and 1,300 acres were harvested. In 1973, 9,300 acres in Alabama were planted in tomatoes, and 9,300 acres were harvested.
In other words, 7x as many tomatoes were grown in Alabama in the early 1970s before over 100,000 illegal aliens were allowed to settle in this state, only a small fraction of whom are farm laborers.
Before there was a single illegal alien from Latin America in Alabama, native Alabamians produced 7x as many tomatoes as we do now, but according to The Washington Post and the New York Times and CBS News, Whites and African-Americans in Alabama are racially unfit to grow vegetables like tomatoes.
In reality, it was a common thing for Whites and African-Americans in Alabama to grow vegetable gardens and to raise livestock before the supermarket and the welfare state. Most families in rural Alabama were engaged in agriculture. In many places, this agrarian tradition has survived down to the present day.
You won't find such critical facts being reported in the MSM though which always adapts the truth to the fit the mold of its open borders "progressive" political ideology."
Local fruit gleaners are picking tomorrow in back yards and vacant lots.
ReplyDeleteAt my parent's very affluent Washington DC church, highly educated SWPL parishioners with successful careers go out to the countryside to glean fields after harvest, and donate it to the local food banks in order to feed uneducated, unemployed people.
There was a similar news story on CNN, with farmers crying that there are not enough illegals left in Alabama to pick their fruit. Later in the piece, an activist of some sort was interviewed, and they pointed out that the farmers likely contributed to the situation by voting for Republican state representatives who voted in favor of the recent strict state immigration law. Same media narrative from a different outlet, but this is how 90% of the illegal immigration stories go...
ReplyDeleteSo a little fruit goes rotting in one single state. That is a small price to pay to stop illegal immigration. Its not like a great famine is going to sweep over America like Ireland in the 1840's.
ReplyDeleteI haven't noticed any apple shortage at my supermarket.
ReplyDeleteI asked a roofing company representative yesterday if his company utilized E-Verify and/or employed American workers. He stated that the foremen had to speak English, but they did the subcontracting and admitted all of the workers were essentially illegal Mexicans. He said when they had tried to hire Whites the applicants were losers and/or stoned; the blacks didn't even bother to show up; he said the Mexicans would work until their fingers bled. This was a big White guy who was open to race-realist talk, but he admitted there are no Americans today willing to do the (admittedly hard, hot, and dirty) work of a roofer.
ReplyDeleteRegardless of the rate of pay, I doubt any of the DWL OWSers would consider getting their hands dirty with such labor. The question of the free-trade shibboleth and/or economic downturn aside, there might actually be some jobs available if we stopped using the illegal Mexicans. The problem is that the entitled generations, all of whom are above average, want jobs commensurate with their inflated assessment of their abilities. An entire generation of pseudo-qualified wannabe wiggers. America = FAIL.
Timothy Egan, the writer in question here, wrote a fairly decent book on The West, "Lasso The Wind." But this article is nonsense.
ReplyDeleteI read "The Worst hard Time", which was also decent. But like all the rest of America's "elite" journalist/opinionators, and like members of Congress and ag-business owners, Eagan is completely detached from the life of normal Americans. They really don't have a clue what's going on in this country.
"With 14 million Americans out of work, you would think somebody could answer the desperation call from farmers offering to pay $150 to anyone willing to pick fruit in the orchards of Washington State.
ReplyDeleteAnd approximately 14 of those 14 million have heard of this incomprehensible offer."
Yep social networks, probably an even larger issue than wages at this point, since Americans will work.
Isn't Washington a high-cost-of-life state? I don't think too many illegals go work there. They can't even afford the rent.
ReplyDeleteWashington State is flooded with illegals. In central Washington, there's a very large number of illegals who work in agriculture.
New Zealand has no migrant labor, they use machines to pick grapes. And Apples (which they export in plenty) and so on. Hawaii has no migrant labor, and they use machines to pick ... coffee (the only major coffee producer to do so, training coffee plants on grape-based trellises).
ReplyDeleteAny labor shortage (there is no shortage of Mexicans in the US) can be met by mechanization. Replacing a thousand crummy jobs with one high paying one.
Read this letter in the Everett Herald today in response to the avalanche of stories in the local Seattle papers about $150 a day jobs going unfilled, apples rotting on the ground, the extreme need for a guest worker program, etc.
ReplyDeleteIn response to the letters "Ag jobs show guest workers needed" and "How many willing to pick fruit?":
After reading the article about pickers needed in "Northwest Briefly" on Oct. 17, I decided to drive over to Wenatchee to see about picking apples. I am an unemployed carpenter so hard physical labor is not new to me. I also knew that making $150 a day was not likely. That is what the top pickers make and I am far from a top picker. I had a place to stay over there and figured if I could make at least $80 a day it would be worth my while.
There was no contact information in the article so off I drove. I got a number to contact at a convenience store in Cashmere. They had taken down an advertisement Sunday and I was the second person to ask about picking Monday. The number they gave me was for Wenatchee Work Source. They needed pickers. They asked me if I had any experience. I told them I had picked on weekends in college 30 years ago. They told me they wanted pickers with at least a season of experience. (Three months.) They couldn't help me.
I drove back to Dryden to NW Wholesale Inc. They packed pears but gave me numbers to contact.
•Blue Star: I called and they told me they were pretty much done.
Stimilt: They also told me they were pretty much done. But gave me a number to
Stimilt East Unit: I got an answering machine and left a message.
I then drove from Dryden to Wenatchee on all the back roads looking for any "pickers needed" signs. I saw none. I called Stimilt again at 4:30 p.m. and got an answering machine and left a message. It is now Wednesday and I am here in Mountlake Terrace still waiting for a return call.
I am a U.S. born Anglo American willing and able to climb those ladders and pick that fruit.
I did not get the chance.
*name removed*
Mountlake Terrace
If only there were some mechanism our civilization had worked out, to convinve people to take undesirable jobs. Some signal that could be passed back to buyers of produce that it was hard to get people to do peasant labor at peasant wages after we sent the peasants home, so that they would know that they were going to have to allocate more of their resources to getting these products.. Some mechanism that would cause more workers to be willing to do these unpleasant but valuable jobs.
ReplyDeleteI know, it's a utopian dream. Perhaps in some distant future, someone will invent such a mechanism.
Man, I rarely set an e-foot within the The Paper That Shall Not Be Named, and perhaps this last excursion will cure me of the impulse entirely. Egan is such a disgusting demagogue, his ludicrous claims about jobs Americans won't do pale next to his heated claims that "blackhearted" Republicans want to kill Mexicans, about how Mexicans are free to be slurred and so so oppressed in America. If I were in the same room as him it would be tough not to take a swing at him.
ReplyDeleteAnd, of course, most of the comments just sing along, even if there's a distinct minority who talk sense about the economic factors.
There's no reasoning with the left, they're too far gone. We are truly doomed.
"This dystopian status quo exists because the simple-minded who control one of the major political parties have shut down all adult talk on the subject of immigration."
ReplyDeleteQuite the rhetoric. The situation is *dystopian*. People on the other side are *simple-minded* and incapable of *adult* discussion.
Pretty fancy way of saying - If you don't agree with me you suck!
Beats having to make your point with facts I guess.
"Any labor shortage (there is no shortage of Mexicans in the US) can be met by mechanization. Replacing a thousand crummy jobs with one high paying one."
ReplyDeletecapital investment creates more jobs than that, they have to produce the machines, maintain them, get the resources for them, do additional R&D and so on.
Another thing to remember is that "our" growers with the most wretched cheap labor, need protection from the real innovators or they'd be wiped out in short order.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: if breaking Federal law is the only thing that stands between your enterprise and total ruin, then there's undoubtedly a serious flaw in your business model.
ReplyDeleteHey, if these farmers in WA, AL and elsewhere are so desperate for cheap labor that they will risk fines and imprisonment, why not just go to the elementary school playgrounds and offer 10-year-olds the opportunity to work long hours in the hot sun? Or perhaps they could just circumvent environmental protections, or health inspection requirements? In all honesty, what's the significant difference between that and hiring the undocumented?
Who (or more like what machines) picks the fruit in Japan?
ReplyDelete