Hazelton ans Riverside

[wolf]

Originally Posted by headsplice

So what would you have illegal immigrants do? Live outside and be homeless?

In their own home country, preferably.

[headsplice]

I guess I don't understand what the objection to illegal immigrants is...they come here, they work, they do jobs that no one else wants to do, they (in a lot of cases) pay taxes, then they go home. So?

[Spexxvet]

The objection is that what they're doing happens to be ILLEGAL! I love the "they do jobs no one else wants to do" rationale - they do jobs that employers don't want to pay American employees enough to do, is more like it. Americans don't want to pick tomatoes? Noooooo, Americans don't want to pick tomatoes for $5.00/hr. They'll pick tomatoes for $10.00/hr, though. Illegal immigrants may pay taxes (and they may not), but they absolutely will use our police, fire, medical, schools - something, and if they haven't paid taxes, they shouldn't have access to these things. I welcome them if they want to do what it takes, through legal channels, to become an American citizen. I totally understand why they come here and want to live and work in America. I do not welcome illegal immigrants.

[glatt]

OK. You (and others) don't welcome illegal immigrants. Would you welcome the increase in prices that would occur when employers no longer have that source of cheap labor, and they pass the costs along to you? Everything from produce to new homes will increase in cost. Are you willing to pay for that?

You can argue that with no illegal immigrants that local taxes will be reduced once that drain is eliminated, but do you actually think the savings will be passed along to you?

[Flint]

Originally Posted by glatt

...do you actually think the savings will be passed along to you?

We got Tort Reform in Texas, to save those poor insurance companies form having to pay back some of that money we pay them to do their job. They said that Doctors were suffering with high insurance bills. I, seemingly the only one, wondered "why would the insurance companies volunteer to pass this money back to the Doctors?" and guess what, they didn't. Surprise, surprise.

[warch]

Food consumers wont pay more. We'll just buy the cheap stuff elsewhere. Actually, such a move could prove a boon for Mexican and Chinese farmers, ranchers and meat packers, and kill off our own. Hmm. or it could lead to more government subsidies for those industries to compete. Lots of complex possibilities!

[Trilby]

Cheap immigrant labor is a fantasy. You don't think the US is paying for that 'cheap' labor in heath care and social costs, esp on the borders? I'd rather pay higher wages to tax paying legal migrants for their labor (from 5$/hr to 10$/hr) than illegals who pay nothing and invest nothing and have all their children as health and social welfare guests of the US.

don't think this is true? go to the nearest border ER and see who is being served, who is being born.

[glatt]

Originally Posted by Brianna

You don't think the US is paying for that 'cheap' labor in heath care and social costs, esp on the borders?

I agree with you that we are paying for the "cheap" labor through higher taxes and insurance premiums.

What I'm saying is that the taxes and insurance premiums are not going to go down even if the illegals are eliminated from the equation. There will be savings, yes. But you and I won't see them. The local governments will keep taxes at the same level, and spend the money on some other pet project, and the insurance companies will keep the money as profit. All we will see is the increase in the costs of goods.

[warch]

go to the nearest border ER and see who is being served, who is being born.

The uninsured. both homegrown and import.

[Spexxvet]

Originally Posted by glatt

OK. You (and others) don't welcome illegal immigrants. Would you welcome the increase in prices that would occur when employers no longer have that source of cheap labor, and they pass the costs along to you? Everything from produce to new homes will increase in cost. Are you willing to pay for that?

You can argue that with no illegal immigrants that local taxes will be reduced once that drain is eliminated, but do you actually think the savings will be passed along to you?

They can be legal, then work for $5.00/hr. Or I'll raise the price of my glasses to pay for increase in farm produce cost, or 9th engineer will build a machine that will perform the labor for even less than an illegal immigrant.

Asking if I am willing to pay for the increased cost associated with legal labor is tantamount to asking a parent if they are willing to pay for the increase cost of not killing their child - it's illegal, for goodness sake!

[tw]

Originally Posted by Brianna

Cheap immigrant labor is a fantasy. You don't think the US is paying for that 'cheap' labor in heath care and social costs, esp on the borders? I'd rather pay higher wages to tax paying legal migrants for their labor (from 5$/hr to 10$/hr) than illegals who pay nothing and invest nothing and have all their children as health and social welfare guests of the US.

Well, you paid for it this year. Produce prices were significantly higher this year across the country due to a 20% shortage of farm labor. Many crops rotted on the vine because farmers could not find sufficient labor to harvest it.

Reality, immigrant labor means you were paying less in taxes. Immigrant labor takes far less from government services than it puts back. Only unsubstantiated myths say otherwise.

To have a fact - and Brianna has nothing more than wild speculation - one must also have experimental evidence. Reality says that when illegal immigration laws were enforced, the local economy suffers (a Nebraska example was cited here previously at Immigration). Nebraska region then requested that the Immigration service leave because without illegal labor, that economy suffered drastically.

It is easy to hype Republican propaganda when reality says otherwise. Illegal immigration does not mean Brianna's taxes increase. Her taxes will increase massively with a $400 billion Defense Budget and then another $100 billion tacked on in emergency spending for Iraq. She would foolishly blame illegal immigrants? And yet that Cheney "Reagan proved that deficits don't matter" agenda has but started to cause tax increases.

Blueberries that last year were selling for $2 a box sold this year for $2.59 and almost $3. Peaches that sold last year for $5 a box in the farm market sold this year for $6. Good. We wanted that which is why we want illegal immigration laws enforced more strictly.

Loss of immigrant labor means economic downturn. That is obvious from the theory AND demonstrated by repeated example. Healthy immigrants actually mean a healthier economy AND a better economic future for America.

[xoxoxoBruce]

Every time the illegals come up somebody screams the prices will go up on fruits and veggies. Diversionary bullshit is what that is.
CIS

What Would Happen (without foreign labor)

Costs:

Even with transitional government assistance, some marginal, undercapitalized farms propped up by foreign labor would fold or have to sell out to better-capitalized, more progressive competitors. Such a shakeout, though difficult in the short term, is inevitable when an industry loses the subsidies protecting it and is forced to rationalize and become more efficient and competitive. But the reallocation of capital and labor to more productive uses benefits the nation in the long run.


There might be modest price increases. I say "might" because farmworker wages typically account for less than 10 percent of the retail cost of fresh fruits and vegetables, and even in the absence of a new guestworker program, there is no possibility that all illegal workers would disappear overnight; ending illegal employment, were we to make such a choice, would be a process, not an event, permitting farmers time to adjust. But even if the entire illegal agricultural workforce were somehow to magically disappear overnight, the impact on supermarket prices would be extremely modest and short-lived: Research suggests that supermarket prices for fresh produce would rise about 6 percent during summer and fall (when imports are small and prices are lowest) for one or two years, before farmers adjusted to the new circumstances. In the winter and spring, the price rise would be even smaller, perhaps 4 percent for one or two years. Such price increases are less than the variation between supermarkets, and would in any case apply to only a very small portion of the nation's food bill.


Some crops now grown in the United States would be imported, primarily very fragile crops intended for sale as fresh produce that will have to be picked by hand for the foreseeable future; fresh produce represents a relatively small portion of fruit and vegetable production, since most fruit and vegetable production is destined for processing and thus better suited for mechanization. The phasing out of production of certain goods which are not suited to high-wage, capital-intensive methods is a natural consequence of modernization; indefinitely subsidizing industries (or crops) which can no longer operate economically without government assistance is simple protectionism.

Benefits:

Harvest productivity would increase dramatically, strengthening the long-run competitiveness of American agriculture. Only by emulating other industries, which have prospered by evolving beyond the low-wage production methods of the past, can American fruit and vegetable farmers remain competitive with the growing number of commercial agricultural producers overseas. Attempting to maintain the status quo through guestworker programs is a dead end which we will all pay for in the long run. As several noted agricultural engineers have written, "while the U.S. was in the past the leading country in the world in mechanical harvesting, the majority of the research work in recent years is conducted outside the U.S."


Price increases, if any, would not only fade very quickly, but they would likely be followed by actual decreases in the real price of certain fruits and vegetables, as was the case with processing tomatoes after the end of the Bracero program. This should not be surprising, given the proven power of innovation to reduce real prices, as demonstrated by the late University of Maryland economist Julian Simon's famous bet with Stanford ecologist Paul Erlich (which Simon won) that the real prices of five commodities would all be lower in 1990 than 1980 due to innovation.


Employment would stabilize, eliminating many of the political and legal controversies that have surrounded agricultural labor for many years. In other words, much of the regulation of agricultural labor issues would be rendered moot, or at least less pressing, with the gradual evolution of farm labor into more steady, year-round employment, marked by wages and working conditions more in line with the rest of our society.

The guestworker approach is widely supported by agricultural trade associations. One would expect farmers to know their own interests. But a guestworker program is simply another kind of subsidy, and the experience of other industries, both here and abroad, shows that industries often seek the short-term comforts of government largesse to the long-term benefits of bracing competition and the innovation that results from it.

The dependence of our horticultural sector on foreign labor is a genuine problem — but the solutions so far proposed would only spawn new difficulties. The national interest demands that we reject the false choice of either illegal immigrants or guestworkers. A modest, transitional program to promote mechanization would better serve the long-term interests of agriculture and be far more cost-effective and have fewer unintended consequences than importing a vast new poverty class. Helping agriculture disentangle itself from foreign labor would strengthen the competitive position of America's farmers, avoid burdening taxpayers with huge new liabilities, and lighten the load of those who continue to toil in the fields. Seldom does such a small measure have the potential for so much good.

[xoxoxoBruce]

No, I'm not done yet... From the Chicago Tribune

But is it true that illegal labor is needed to put food on our tables? Although some agricultural economists have come up with informal, back-of-the-envelope estimates on the impact on supermarket produce prices when illegal immigrants are barred from the agriculture industry, the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Immigration Studies recently released an analysis of this issue.


The study found that even a sudden transition to an all-legal, non- guest-worker farm work force would be a non-event for consumers. Price increases would be small and short-lived — less than the seasonal fluctuations that occur naturally.


Specifically, price increases would depend on the season, according to the study's authors, economists Wallace Huffman and Alan McCunn of Iowa State University. During the summer and fall, when most fresh fruit and vegetables in the stores are domestically grown, prices would be about 6 percent higher for the first one or two years, and after that transitional period would level off about 3 percent higher than what they would have been.


In the winter and spring, the initial impact would be under 4 percent, then settling to less than 2 percent. (At my supermarket in Manassas, Va., that would mean tomatoes would see an increase of 3 cents over this week's price of 78 cents per pound.)


Note that these modest price increases would be counter-cyclical — that is, they would be greatest when prices are naturally lower (summer and fall) and least when prices are naturally higher (winter and spring).


In any case, even these results are probably exaggerated. In real life, illegal immigrants would not magically be removed all at once — their proportion of the agricultural work force would gradually decrease over a period of several years as law enforcement improved, allowing time for growers to adjust.


Nor would imports of fresh fruits and vegetables explode: The study found that they could be expected to increase by a mere 1 percent.


So, who would pick the tomatoes? Despite the increase in wages that would result from cutting the supply of illegal workers, growers' spokesmen are correct in saying that unemployed Americans not already familiar with farm work are unlikely to be attracted.


Freshman economics tells us what would happen. First, growers would use the now-limited resource of labor more efficiently, in contrast to the notoriously wasteful practices they've grown accustomed to, thus drawing in many unemployed and underemployed farmworkers. In addition, growers would do what other businessmen do when faced with a finite supply of labor —mechanize.


If removing illegal workers from agriculture would have no discernible impact on consumers, and would not lead to a surge in imports, then what rationale is there for a guest-worker program? The only remaining argument for such an arrangement is that it would help maintain the profit margins and market shares of certain American corporations by expanding the supply of farmworkers and thus keeping wages low. This may be reason enough to institute what amounts to a new farm subsidy. But whatever benefits might accrue to growers would have to be weighed against an unavoidable increase in illegal immigration; a reduction in the educational attainment of our work force; the retardation of technological development in agriculture; the deterioration of wages and working conditions in agriculture as more workers chase fewer jobs; and ever-higher social welfare expenditures for the throngs of idle farm workers.

The Pew Hispanic Center says;

Less than half fit the profile of young men sneaking across the border to find jobs and send money back home to their families. Today, most bring their families with them, according to an analysis by the Pew center.

"There's about 6.5 million adults who are in families, either couples or couples with children, and there's another 2 million children," said Jeffrey Passel, a senior research associate at the center. "The vast majority of this population is families."

Illegal workers make up about 5% of the U.S. labor force. More than nine in 10 males illegally here are in that labor force, compared with 83% of men born in the United States.

Illegal immigrants tend to be younger than American workers, which helps explain why they are more likely to hold jobs, researchers said.

Female illegal immigrants, however, were less likely to work than their American counterparts, perhaps because most have young children, the Pew analysis said.

Illegal immigrants are concentrated in construction, agriculture and cleaning jobs. They make up 36% of all insulation workers, 29% of agricultural workers and 29% of roofers.

The Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates restricting immigration, recently issued a report saying that immigrants compete for jobs with less-educated Americans, especially high-school dropouts.

About half of adult illegal immigrants have not graduated high school, the Pew analysis found. About a third have less than a ninth-grade education.

About a quarter of illegal immigrants have at least some college, with 15% holding at least a bachelor's degree.

[Urbane Guerrilla]

Yet another demonstration that the root of the problem is south of the border: Mexico still doesn't have a middle class visible without magnification.

[xoxoxoBruce]

Smithsonian Magazine quoted a mayor in Mexico saying, "Most of my constituents live in NYC."