Just Wondering wrote:
J. Clarke wrote:

Just Wondering wrote:

dpb wrote:

Just Wondering wrote:


CW wrote:


Would you be willing to pay $15.00 for an apple? How about
$18.00
for a pear? Those who claim that the problem is as simple as
throwing out the illegal either don't live in farm country or
are
not paying
attention. Ever
picked apples? I have. You won't find enough Americans to get
the
crops in.
You couldn't pay most people enough to do the work. It is not
because of low
pay. A (Mexican) apple picker can easily make $20.00 an hour.
Mexican labor
is what keeps the fruit producers going.


So how did the farmers get their crops in, say, 40 years ago,
before
there was the massive flood of illegals we have now?


Combination -- mostly the itinerants were still around, just
there
weren't the other 10-20 M of so besides in the case of the
seasonal
picking and so on. Earlier ('30s and so on), there were the
Okies
and similar of Steinbeck fame...

The difference now is the US demographics are far different and
welfare programs mean the unemployed don't starve so they
don't/won't work at all in large numbers...

--

If that's true, then the answer isn't turning a blind eye to
illegal
aliens, it's changing welfare to workfare.


What I'd like to see is a system where people on Welfare get
rewarded
to work. On the current system if you get a minimum-wage job then
you lose more in benefits than you make in wages, so why bother?

Workfare was tried--it was called "WPA" and "CCC" and now it's
called
"Pork Barrel Politics".


At least we got more for our money with WPA and CCC (a little
something here and there) than we do now (which is nothing).

However the unions felt that CCC took food out of the mouths of union
members who could have been doing the same work and WPA was criticized
for overpaying liberal intellectuals to do nothing much.

And both did something that would be political suicide today, they
allowed able bodied men into the program.
--
--
--John
to email, dial "usenet" and validate
(was jclarke at eye bee em dot net)