On Mon, 17 Nov 2003 12:31:58 -0800, "Harold & Susan Vordos" wrote:
Back to the immigrants and the work they do, I'm certainly not in favor of
people taking our jobs away, but I don't see that happening, not at the
hands of the immigrants, anyway. We're in a tough position, of that
there's no doubt, but almost to a man, all of us benefit by the folks from
south of the border, for if it weren't for them, the crops would most likely
still be sitting in the fields, and the cows left unmilked. Many of us may
resent these people coming here, but we should appreciate the fact that they
are doing work that would otherwise not get done.

It is true that a lot of the mechanization and automation which have
taken place in agriculture, along with the consolidation of small farms
into larger ones, are directly the result of the inability to get enough
farm labor to be able to operate in the old ways. Instead, we've had
to turn to large machinery in large fields to allow those we can get
to work to do the job.

This all started after WWII, when the mass migration from the farm
to the city became a tidal wave. But it didn't really start to get critical
until the late 1960s when it became easier to draw welfare than to
do farm labor. At that point, farm labor essentially dried up. That
was the point where farms under about 1,000 acres started to be
uneconomical, because the required mechanization to farm them
with available labor cost so much that one couldn't amortize the
equipment on a smaller farm.

But some forms of agriculture remain labor intensive because they
are not easily mechanized or automated. If sufficient workers can't
be found here to do that sort of work, those agricultural products
would have to be imported from farms in countries where people
are willing to do that sort of work.

So we face a choice, import the crops, or import the labor. Neither is
a good choice, but as long as we can't get enough Americans to do
the jobs (and currently we can't), they're the only choices we have.

Gary