How to Solve the Migrant Labor Problem for Farming in One Year ... Humanely
It can be done, but the present rapid, militaristic methods are not the way for farm labor because we all still need to eat. And everyone CAN win.
Here’s my realistic farm plan, based on a comment I wrote today, referring to one of the articles included in the headlines below about immigrant labor. It started with a little MAGA civil war in the White House that broke out when the Secretary of Agriculture convinced President Trump for a minute to go all TACO and back down from deporting farm laborers (and conveniently, for him, cheap illegal immigrant hotel cleaning staff and gardening crews).
Suddenly Trump was saying—like he did when he chickened out from locking up Hillary Clinton to saying of the Clintons, “They’re good people”—suddenly he was saying of the Ag. workers “These people are good hard workers, and we need them to pick our crops.”
No kidding? I thought. You just figured out that they work hard (and cheaply) and are nice people and that farming has evolved over the past many decades to become completely dependent on them for its intensely hard and dirty manual labor requirements? This was a revelation to you? An epiphany? Classic TACO once Trump saw the farm lobbyists caving in on him and his own hotels getting hit by labor raids because apparently he didn’t know who kept them running.
Ag. Secretary Brooke Rollins success in lobbying her boss to chicken out on deporting these cheap labor sources that the hospitality and Ag industries have become dependent on, led to Stephen Miller and ICE Barbie teaming up against her, and they seem to have gotten Trump back in line … for the moment anyway.
A workable farm plan
We need to be careful we don’t shoot ourselves in the foot here just for the sake of making things right. After all, it took decades for things to become this wrong. Farmers have had no time to adjust to the nearly instant changes that mass deportation raids bring to their fields. Trump didn’t do this last time around, so they didn’t see it coming this time around.
Having trainloads of crops rot in the field due to lack of summer workers, starting right now as some harvests are already beginning, doesn’t do anyone any good. (Strawberries are in the peak season right now and their harvesting is completely labor intensive because they cannot be picked with commercially available machines like blueberries and raspberries can. There are machines that help, but you still need human hands picking the berries as the robots are not that available yet.) If migrant workers fear deportation raids, they won’t show up at the fields as early as tomorrow, and the berries will literally all rot on the vine because it is completely time-sensitive work. The crops won’t wait a day! That doesn’t do ANYONE any good because I still want to have my strawberry shortcake and eat it, too … this June!
So, here is my farm plan so that we go about changing the completely dependent farm economy that we’ve been establishing with a peasant labor pool for decades on a timeline where farmers can adjust, and we can all still eat later this year:
I definitely believe we need to end all illegal immigration and stop turning a blind eye to it. I do think, in the case of farm workers, however, we've spent decades creating a completely dependent labor economy that is practically based on slave labor; so, to make the change without hurting ourselves, we need a little more graduated approach than a broad axe to the roots of the cherry trees out in the orchards.
Cherries will need picking in a couple more weeks, tomatoes, strawberries, etc. There is no time to find the huge numbers of workers needed to replace all the illegal immigrants, and there is no point in having truckloads and warehouse equivalents in crops all rot in the field because every farmer was shocked to see ICE go into rampant military action exactly as harvest time hit—shocked to find none of the labor they usually call on showed up at the fields out of fear of deportation and of months separated from their families at Guantanamo for the crime of helping America harvest its crops. Let’s not be savagely inhumane, but let’s DO fix the problem permanently.
The hotels, I don't so much care about. We're not dependent on them for food, and the rooms won’t rot for lack of cleaning, and their owners are rich. So, we may have to pay a little more for a hotel stay without the cheaper labor. Big deal! Or the owners may have to make a little less bank in order to keep their customers. So what? That’s a Trumpian problem for the Hyatts and the Hiltons.
I fully agree with the article below about all the hidden costs of our peasant labor culture, which I’ve been arguing we need to end for a long time. So, every illegal who is not working the fields, needs to go now. Any illegal who is working the fields, needs to be vetted on a priority basis to see if he or she might be a terrorist, but most likely he or she would not be working the fields as a terrorist. Still, you don't know. If that's what you had to do as a terrorist in order to hide among the population, that would be what you'd do.
Process through the illegal farm workers that you deem are truly essential to not upsetting the existing farm economy as it currently is in order to give them photo-ID green cards so long as they can show they are actively working and not on welfare at all. We might even give preference to those who can speak English if we have more applicants than the current market demands in labor. But this cannot be the kind of amnesty we saw under Reagan that just got repeated again down the road as we kept turning a blind eye to illegal immigrants either. This year’s level of green cards based on actual need becomes the absolute cap for all future years under the law.
So, let the farmers know that, starting next year, if THEY hire any more migrant workers without the proper green cards, THEY—the FAMERS—are going to jail! Let them know the number of green cards issued will not be increasing. We’re not going to expand the peasant labor pool beyond our currently level of dependency in order to expand farming. We won't be growing the labor force for farming any longer in that manner. If a migrant dies and doesn’t need a green card, that frees up that card for issuance to another; but all growth in agriculture will happen from this point along a different path. No other industries are eligible.
That gives farmers (many of them big agribusinesses) time to adjust with a labor force that works for this year because crops won’t wait for solutions, but expansion down the road will require more dependency on mechanization or better wages to attract more American citizen workers. Make sure green-card laborer allowances are distributed fairly, by allotments of how many green-card workers each farm can employ (at any price) based on this year’s actual needs, and not just to Big Ag. Make sure the allotments take care of the family farmer. Farmers pay what they choose to pay but they have only so many allotments per farm for green-card workers based on the actual needs learned this year.
That will mean higher produce costs for the rest of us down the road as we ween ourselves off the "benefits" of peasant labor. There is no getting around the fact that produce will cost more without an expanding peasant labor pool. There is a reason societies like to have their peasants and slaves, but the social cost is enormous, while we can live with more expensive cotton. We won't LIKE living with fewer blue jeans or paying more to get the number we like to have, but that's the cost; and let’s face it, jeans with holes in the legs are popular anyway, so fewer won’t hurt.
We’ll develop new mechanization. We’ll shift to crops that already have mechanization and don’t require manual harvesting. We’ll use a lot of the existing migrant labor pool for those crops that can’t be done any other way at present, and we’ll transition, and we’ll do it without subsidies (if I’m Ag labor czar). We’ll do it as humanely as possible because most of these workers ARE good people, but we WILL end the practice of making people illegal just so we can turn a blind eye to their presence, forcing them to stay cheap, keep their heads down and work without benefits because they face deportation if they rebel (the sudden removal of the blind eye). True peasants. Most of them own no land. They usually don’t own their own homes. And they have no vote in the society in which they live.
We need to end that social blight that we do just for the sake of keeping ourselves in cheap cotton underwear and paying ten cents less per tomato. I guarantee you could find a LOT of American citizens willing to become tomato pickers if you added one full dime per tomato picked. (I used to pick strawberries as a kid. I know how piece-work works.) We need to adjust our society back to that kind of child summer labor, which was the original reason school was out for the summer. A little experience living closer to the land would be good for every city kid.
There are lots of kids who, if mom and dad didn’t buy everything for them, and they could make a dime per tomato would see dollar signs light up their eyes. (If I could pick one tomato every six seconds, that would be a buck a minute/$60 an hour! So, heck, a nickle a tomato would probably do the trick, and you’d find abundant pickers.) The rest of us wouldn’t suffer much. Problem is, everyone down the road milks pennies out of that nickel or dime until the most the crop worker gets is a penny.
But here’s the point. You end all expansion of migrant labor NEXT summer, so you have time to implement this system over the year ahead with a few simple laws to level the playing field and ease the transition. Start making it real clear how many green cards will be available next year and how those available workers will be allotted per farm and how toughly you’re going to enforce your immigration laws by locking up ILLEGAL FARMERS, and farmers will start paying the dime or whatever it takes to get the pickers next summer.
Farmers will have to figure out how to add that dime to their own tomato prices to cover the cost without the dime getting marked up all along the way by the middlemen and grocery stores because consumers won’t buy the tomatoes if everyone tries to jack up that dime because everyone expects to make their markup for greater profits. There will be time for the market to find a new equilibrium in prices.
To offset the food inflation, mom and dad can buy fewer Nintendo games and force their kids to go get a summer job out in the fields to buy their own Nintendo games since they are not necessary for the child’s health or survival, hand picking perfectly ripe tomatoes. That’s how I got my ten-speed bike. The point is we CAN find a way to make the shift, but it requires thorough preparation for the adjustments and maybe a few temporary labor laws to make sure that initial dime doesn’t get marked up by all the hands along the way who were making enough money this year, so they can be content with just passing the extra dime in costs along without marking it up for extra profit.
Add a little national labor-law change to make it clear that kids can work in fields in the summertime if they do so without being forced because they want the spending money. And add a tax-law change to make their income tax free, for crying out loud. No one forced me to pick berries. I wanted the money. So, I mowed lawns and picked berries; but I didn’t pay the government one dime on the undeclared income, and I bought my own mower and my own gas and oil and did my own mechanic work. And I still had plenty of time for having fun, too.
We have to implement a social change around all of this to make it work because we created our society around a peasant labor pool that will be phased out. Over time, we could probably reduce the number of green cards just by attrition as some workers die or just go away and you don’t re-issue all of those cards, and prices could slowly adjust.
The fact is, we choose to have peasant labor because it buys us a standard of living that we cannot have without the peasants doing the work the rest of us don’t want to do … at those prices ... because, at sixty bucks an hour, I might even go back to picking strawberries. (Well, probably not, but only because my old body would rebel, but there are plenty who are a little younger who would do a summer job for a nickel to a dime per tomato.)
You may need a few laws for the transition to make it happen in a way where the ag workers and farmers win, while the consumer pays a little more down the road in order to expand the labor pool or reduce the number of green cards/migrant workers, and the warehouses and grocery stores come out even, but those could be phased out over time, too. Doing it right now when Trump is doing his tariff thing anyway should make it all the easier by making it harder for foreign produce to compete, allowing our own produce to rise in price, though I think the tariffs are a nutty tax on US citizens, but if Trump is going to do them anyway … take advantage of them for the farm labor transition.
The alternative to paying more is to keep the illegal immigration. Keep the peasants. There is no room for pretend here. (Blueberries and raspberries can be easily picked by machine because you just shake them off the bushes and blow away the leaves and stuff you don’t want—so mechanization has largely solved that problem—but strawberries and tomatoes have to be individually plucked. It can be done by robots with fingers (or suction pluckers), but not nearly as cost-effectively … at present.) There are, however, ways to go about the transition more humanely and more intelligently so as not to cause needless harm to ourselves.
We may even decide we like the green-card system for actual green, farm labor, because that has been the most difficult migrant labor problem to solve, and the peasants may like it, too, at a higher price per tomato. The rest of industry can just do without migrant workers. We might decide we want to live with that much immigrant labor because food is essential, and hand-picked is usually the best and sometimes the only way that currently works.
But no welfare, other than tax-exemption. No free education or baby sitting for your children, unless the farmer chooses to provide that. No free medical. You’re here for the summer work, then back home. You need the medical, stay home and get what is available in your own country. It’s what you have anyway, and not our problem to fix your country. This is just a summer job, but we’ll try to make it pleasant while you’re here and worth your while and ours because we need you, and you’re good people, nice people, hard-working people, the kind we like; but we don’t owe the world welfare! And this IS just a summer job! And it helps if you can talk to us in our own language, so we might prefer those who care enough to try.