In article ,
"JoeSpareBedroom" wrote:


The foods people might eat less of are exactly the ones they should eat more
of: Crops that are harvested by human hands. As far as crops and machinery,
certain crops CANNOT be harvested by any known machinery, and it has nothing
to do with whether farmers want the machinery or not. The companies who
design the stuff have never been able to figure out how to harvest certain
crops without damaging them beyond being saleable. You won't believe this,
so call John Deere, Massey Ferguson and whoever else you can think of, and
ask.



Food prices might not change that much if the illegals were
gone. A lot of stuff is imported anyhow.
Most of the money consumers spend at the grocery store doesn't go
to the growers. Growers get, at best, just over 25% of the money.
This is from the USDA/ERS: http://tinyurl.com/2n9fhm


Using the updated market basket data for fresh fruits and fresh
vegetables, ERS confirmed a gen-
eral trend: that the farm share of consumer food expenditures has been
shrinking. But the study
also found that the farm share for these two commodity groups has
decreased less than previous-
ly believed.
The updated estimates show a larger farm share than the current,
unadjusted data series. The
unadjusted data series estimates the 2004 farm share at 19 percent for
fresh vegetables and 20
percent for fresh fruit; the updated consumer baskets yield farm shares
of 23.5 percent for fresh
vegetables and 26.6 percent for fresh fruit. While the updated
estimates are lower than the farm
share estimates for 1982 (34 percent for fresh vegetables and 33 percent
for fresh fruit), they do
suggest that the existing (unadjusted) series has overstated the
decrease in farm share.
The unadjusted and updated consumer baskets differ in important ways.
The updated basket includes greater quan-
tities of high-value fresh vegetables, such as asparagus (with a
relatively high farm value in 2004 of $1.22/lb), bell
peppers ($0.34/lb), broccoli ($0.33/lb), agaricus mushrooms ($1.14/lb),
and romaine lettuce ($0.19/lb). By contrast,
celery ($0.15/lb), corn on the cob ($0.21/lb), iceberg lettuce
($0.17/lb), and onions ($0.11/lb) are included in the updat-
ed basket in smaller quantities than in the 1982-84 consumer basket.
End Quote.

A commentary on the effect of removing illegal workers from
agricultu http://tinyurl.com/2h2paw
This one talks about construction: http://tinyurl.com/yrd5es
From the bottom of the commentary:

And by increasing the supply of low-skilled labor relative to
high-skilled labor, illegal immigration effectively boosts the
purchasing power of the better-educated, more-skilled ‹ and richer ‹
portion of society.
The MIT study, by researcher Patricia Cortes, estimated that the
low-skilled immigration wave of the 1990s ‹ much of it outside the
bounds of immigration law ‹ raised the "real wages" of college graduates
by 0.71 percent, and of high-school graduates and people with some
college by 0.59 percent.
High-school dropouts? No discount for them: Cortes estimated that their
real wages were cut by 2.66 percent. But since most adult Americans have
at least a high-school diploma, Cortes concluded that most people
benefited from low-skilled immigration ‹ at least a little.
End quote.

Dean

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