Artificially Interpreted

[Silver]

I guess this is how the fields will look like in a few months when immigrants get deported.

The irony is that rich farm owners aren't going to allow their workers to be taken. Cheap labor benefits the country, and whitey isn't going to work the field at the same rate of pay. Thus, more disappointment for the dumb ones who voted red.

[The Grand Nudger]

It's complicated. If we think about rich farmers in a way that means anything across crops and states they're the least likely to employ hand labor. They're in grain and cattle, they had the funds to mechanize. Fresh fruit, fresh veg, and cotton are your big hand picks but the farms tend to be smaller and only a portion of each in the respective industries is hand picked. I won't have totally up to date numbers here ...and they get smaller on the hand pick side every year through mechanization and consolidation...but it's something like 50% for fruits and 25% for veg and cotton. The highest concentration of hand pick is the stuff at your local farmers market, which isn't the segment of the industry that has tons of political pull to get generous labor carveouts nor are the operators particularly wealthy by ag or any other standard. There are more immigrants in processing and retail than production...and we see how that plays out if we recall the captive labor forces during the pandemic. Basically, there are two very distinct types of ag in the us right now and the difference is apparent all the way down to the genetic level. With one type working on amenability to mechanization and transport, and the other on flavor and presentation.

In sum, less fresh food, more processed food, all of it at higher cost. The idea that white people won't do the work is a myth sold by racist fucks who don't want to pay anyone for the work. If a migrant can get any other job here they'll pick that job over picking cotton too. If whitey is forced to work for substandard wages or starve..well..we see that he picks substandard wages. Less than a 5th of farm labor is done by migrants.

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

https://www.farmworkerjustice.org/wp-con...docx-3.pdf

Immigration Status and Nationality

● The agricultural industry relies on a predominantly immigrant workforce. According to the NAWS, approximately 68% of farmworkers are foreign-born, the overwhelming majority from Mexico.

● 36% of farmworkers surveyed by the NAWS were United States citizens, 19% were lawful permanent residents and another 1% had other work authorization through another status (excluding H-2A visas).

● The NAWS found that approximately 44% of farmworkers are undocumented immigrants who lack work authorization.

● The NAWS results on immigration status may be skewed, with lower undocumented percentages due to a fear of self-reporting undocumented status. Other sources estimate that the proportion of undocumented farmworkers may be much higher. Regardless, even under the NAWS estimates, more than one million farmworkers are undocumented.

Boru

[The Grand Nudger]

The more you look the weirder it gets, because things true of the agricultural industry as a whole are rarely representative of just the farm sector, or individual farms for that matter. So, for example, we can get numbers like that only if we specifically focus on getting them* - as the majority of the us crop is not picked by any human hand, brown or otherwise. Then, if in whatever targeted segment a study overrepresents positions like hand pick or processor by number of people rather than amount of food produced, we will get higher numbers of people from mexico...but then not all people from mexico are still immigrants in a legal sense, and fewer still are migrant labor. Mechanization skews the whole thing because, by default, a small number of operators regardless of their ethnicity or national origins do the vast majority of farm labor even on farms that heavily employ hand labor.

Further militarization of the border would primarily effect migrant labor, but not the agricultural industry as a whole, as most undocumented workers are also in a category called settled. As in they live here, and have for some time. Mass deportations would primarily effect the (much larger) processing sector of the agricultural industry, but not effect migrant hand pick. They just cross again. Mass deportations along with the family of the targeted deportee would effect all of it but particularly cripple transportation and retail (and from both ends, producer and consumer).

None of these things means much to the largest farms or the wealthiest operators not just because their wealth affords them influence, but because that category of the ag industry isn't in the same crop. Even this conclusion is based on terms of art...because the most profitable farms -per acre- are often small...and in recent years...run by tech bros, if you can believe it. Niche farms for niche consumers run by niche operators. The big winners in the deportation game end up being massive grain producers and tiny affluent farmers market types. The first because the supply of human labor is a rounding error to their operation..and the scond because they are small enough and their product comes with a high enough premium to run on family labor or a small number of temporary employees (in recent years..we found that people in these markets will actually volunteer to do this work, agritourism, lol). I guess livestock is a tossup because of it's relationship to processing and specifically hand processing. It all depends on how much people are willing to pay for bacon.

*not that I think this is a bad idea, especially if you're working for farm worker justice

[The Grand Nudger]

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

That’s a lot of verbiage just to avoid admitting that you pulled ‘Less than a 5th of farm labor is done by migrants’ out of your arse. 

Boru

[The Grand Nudger]

Farm jobs and farm labor are not the same thing Brian. If you judge farm labor by the number of people doing things you will have missed the point of mechanization. Additionally, migrant labor and documented or undocumented illegals are not the same people. Migrant labor is going the way of the dodo.

According to the National Agricultural Workers Survey (NAWS), around 15% of farmworkers in the United States are considered "migrant" labor, meaning they travel a significant distance to find farm work, typically at least 75 miles within a year to obtain a farm job; this percentage has been declining in recent years.

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

Yes, I saw you sneak in the term ‘migrant’ when the actual topic is illegal immigrants.

Boru

[The Grand Nudger]

I didn't sneak in shit. The numbers came from the study you linked, before you linked it to me. This is ridiculous.

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

I didn't sneak in shit.  The numbers came from the study you linked, before you linked it to me.  This is ridiculous.

Something we can agree on.

Boru