Crops rotting in Ga. without immigrant workers

The migrant farm worker look is in with the tight economy.

 

FWIW I would hazard a guess that I am one of the few people on the board who has actually worked as a farm worker.

I was completely broke living in Australia and could not get a job but did not want to go home.

I picked watermelons, cantaloupes, peppers and grapes.

It is physical work but not something that you have to be especially physically fit to do. I saw lots of larger folks doing it, one even said it was agreat way to lose weight.

For me it was the sheer boredom and mindlessness of the work rather tha the physical demand that drove me nuts.

I worked 3 weeks straight, 6 days a week and then left. My motivation for getting a better job before my holiday work visa ran out had increased immensely.

 

Of course you wouldn't and good for you.
You are college-educated with quicker access to white-collar work.
That doesn't mean there aren't a ton of lazy, uninspired people in this country who a.) didn't make a choice to participate in the readily-available, learn now, pay later higher education avenues we have in USA, and/or b.) don't want to get off their asses and earn some honest money
All they want to do is bitch and moan about how bad they've got it, and they damn sure don't want to get up every day and go to work.

 

I was talking to a friend this afternoon and he posited that Americans have largely deemed these jobs as beneath them. I've not seen or read anything that contradicts that sentiment.

A thought about the hourly rates: If you make the rate hourly rather than piece rate, then the workers will almost certainly be less productive. Pay them $20 an hour, and they'll want to make the work last as long as possible. Pay them a piece rate, and they'll try to get it done as fast as possible.

 

True

 

Lots of good points here. To me the bottom line is that we need to get these very issues out in the open and address them in an honest and comprehensive manner. Just targeting migrant workers without consideration for the downstream consequences is not going to work. The simplistic "Build the dang fence" tea party crowd now gets to figure our how they want to operate in the real world.

 

Ironically, it would be cheaper to build the fence using undocumented workers.

 

Can't they just stand on the south side of the fence as they work?

 

Do you make 40 an hour?

 

Alabama's racists finding out just how expensive racism is:

http://motherjones.com/politics/2012/03/alabama-anti-immigration-law-self-deportation-movement

 

Since this thread got bumped, I'll tack this on: The appellate court will delay a ruling until a SCOTUS ruling on the Arizona law.

http://www.ajc.com/news/georgia-politics-elections/court-to-rule-later-1368578.html

 

In a perverse sense, I think these laws have been good because there is no better way to get enough people to appreciate the need for comprehensive immigration reform than to let the most virulent opponents have a little taste of reality. Might actually wake folks up to the complexity and real life consequences at stake.