Comments Elsewhere

JimBob, in reply to claim that he is both supporting, and benefiting from, immigrant labor every time he shops at the grocery store, objects: “Most if not all agriculture harvesting can be done by machines today.”

Of course, most if not all agricultural harvesting can be done by tech industry CEOs—you just have to pay them enough. But there’s the rub: the reason that so much agricultural labor is done by migrant farmworkers—many of them immigrants from Mexico and Central America—is that it’s more cost-effective for farmers to get their tomatos picked that way than to automate the process.

That’s not to say that farm labor is great for the immigrants. It’s hard work and the bosses usually treat you like shit. But workers do it because they are willing to put themselves through a lot in order to improve their lives. Also because, thanks to anti-immigrant blowhards like you, it’s often very hard to find work in any other field.

I’ll leave the question of historical food price trends to those who have spent more time researching it; I’d only like to point out here that the issue is not whether the price of beef now is more or less than the price of beef in 1960, but rather whether the price of beef now is more or less than the price of beef would be now if fewer Mexican and Central American immigrants (documented and undocumented) agreed to work at the prevailing wages in the industry. (And as for privatizing profits—I’m all for it. Would that more profits were privatized.)

What about the claim that immigrant labor “socializes the costs” of the labor? It’s hard to see how—and hard to see how it would matter if it did. Documented immigrants pay much the same taxes that you do. Roads are paid for primarily by gasoline taxes, which everyone who drives on a road pays. Schools, local law enforcement, and state law enforcement are all funded primarily by property taxes and sales taxes, which immigrants (documented or undocumented) pay whenever they buy anything and whenever they live anywhere (either directly, or through their landlord). Nor would it matter very much if these things were funded primarily through taxes that immigrants don’t pay: in that case, the fault lies on the government that imposes the taxes and uses the money to provide the services—not on the peaceful immigrants who come here to work.

As usual, people who favor assaulting peaceful immigrants neglect the obvious. The overwhelming reason that Mexican immigrants come to the United States is to work. They benefit from work; and they can find it because employers benefit from hiring them. When employers can produce goods at a lower cost, it helps you, because they will make more of the goods and/or lower the price at which they sell it. The laws of economics are not repealed just because the people involved happen to speak Spanish. Markets work.