There are only 2 million unemployed Americans right now. Most of the illegal immigrants have jobs and fill in the gaps, such as working on farms and factories. If the 20 million illegal immigrants are deported, want that create a massive laborer shortage? Won’t the work follow the workers to Mexico?
Ever stop to ask why Americans arent doing those jobs? We have Americans that embalm dead bodies, clean sewers, and flip burgers. Is it true that we can’t find a few college kids willing to spend their summer out in the sun picking fruit? Ah wait a minute… perhaps Americans won’t do those jobs _for shit wages, no benefits, no holiday pay, no sick time, no 401k, no workman’s comp, no grievance process, no nothing. Maybe the companies that hire illegal immigrants are quite happy with the status quo. Maybe we need those immigrants so that rich white Wholefoods shoppers won’t complain about the price of strawberries.
Do you think middle class and working class people don’t shop at Whole Foods?
Do you think non-white people don’t shop there either?
Do you think they don’t already complain about fruit costs?
Do you think they have nowhere else to shop? Farmer’s markets?
Most of what you said is 100% correct, but Whole Foods doesn’t grow any strawberries. They are bad for other reasons, but supposedly a nice place to work. Figure out who you’re mad at and compose yourself. (Hint: minimum wage increase)
Rising food prices don’t just affect poor people, they affect poor people far more than they affect rich people. After all, a person can only eat so much no matter how rich he is.
That doesn’t matter if minimum wage goes up. Like you said, a person can only eat so much. Rising prices are not a problem if wages (especially minimum wage) increase faster than inflation.
I don’t think you’re taking the price hikes seriously enough. Look how lemmy bitches non-stop about grocery prices. Imagine if we had to actually pay agricultural workers. And it ain’t the rich people going to suffer. Poverty is expensive.
Also, most farmers are living hand-to-mouth. They take loans every year for seed, repairs, new equipment, etc., all to bet their crop profits them. Rinse and repeat, and one bad year might cost your home and land. Some might say that take is crap and point to megacorps like Tyson. Megacorps aren’t what I see traveling the countryside. Riding the Southern highways, I see thousands of small farms. I see broken gear and collapsed structures than can’t be removed because of the cost.
If the USA can get foreign workers willing to do those jobs for very low wages, paying Americans a lot more money to do them seems like a waste. I think the situation is similar to the outsourcing of American manufacturing to other countries. The main difference (other than the fact that one involves sending jobs elsewhere and the other one involves bringing workers here) is that the move to a post-industrial economy hurt those Americans who worked in industry even as it made the average American better off, whereas Americans already don’t work in agriculture so a guest-worker program would maintain the status quo there while restoring the rule of law.