Jophiel wrote:
Apart from the questionable math, I notice the author leaves out the rest of the food industry such as meat/poultry (remember the Perdue chicken plant raids from some years back?). He quotes someone saying Americans spend more on alcohol than fruit which is sort of perplexing since, last I checked, alcohol production has a pretty significant agricultural component. I think more people are worried about the rising cost of "food" than the explicit price of strawberries.
/shrug
You also gloss over the elements he does discuss, specifically which farm types have the bulk of illegal aliens working in them (seasonal "picking" based labor which isn't really surprising). He's focusing on the agricultural businesses which would show the greatest impact. While I'm sure there's "some" impact in other areas, they're going to be even lower.
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Beyond that, it's amusing to see the author contradicts Gbaji's original claim that both workers are lumped together into one happy payroll:
Immigration article wrote:
What is misleading about such claims is that they ignore that there is a visa program for foreign agricultural workers that allows an unlimited number of annual entries of legal workers if the employer first tries to find American workers, complies with protections for the foreign workers, and pays wages high enough to not undercut wages for American workers. [...] But, because it is cheaper for the employer to hire illegal workers, the program has been underused.
Yeah. I don't agree with everything the author writes Joph. He's clearly got an agenda (and I said this). I'm looking just at his analysis of the cost "savings" which food buyers gain from having illegals continuing to work illegally.
I'll also point out something I mentioned earlier, but bears repeating. I don't discount that whole sections of the agricultural industry have lower wages *because* there's a large percentage of illegals working in them. However, within those sections, it's incredibly unlikely that illegals are singled out from legals when getting paid (which was the claim I was refuting). I would presume that when he (or anyone else) talks about rates of pay for legal versus illegal, he's looking broadly at workforces with a high percentage of illegals working in them, versus those which don't. Or job sites which employ illegals, versus those which don't. Frankly, neither you nor I know exactly how those statistics are generated, but I doubt very much they come from going out and looking at pay rates for individual workers right next to each other in the same field and noticing that the legal guy gets paid more than the illegal guy.
A little common sense goes a long way, right?
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Forget quibbling over "per apple" prices -- You don't think a 13% change in payroll is significant? Aren't you the one who throws conniption fits when someone suggests raising the minimum wage sixty cents because it'll be too much of a burden for the businesses to handle?
Is it? The question is how much that actually equates to when you or I go to the store to buy food. As the author clearly states, it *is* significant for the workers, but it's not so much so in terms of how much it costs us to buy food. Remember, my whole response was to question the assumption that if we eliminated illegal workers (or legalized them) that this would create some kind of massive and economy busting increase to our food prices.
Even if this guy's math is off significantly, and the effect is much more widespread, it's still not that massive an effect on the final cost. And no, it's not the same as raising minimum wage. Unless your argument is that a part time high school student's need to make an extra 60 cents an hour is equal to ensuring that we aren't taking advantage of an illegal workforce then they aren't even in the same ballpark.
