by John Young
This editorial is inspired by Alex Nowrasteh’s Who will pick our apples? in the Orange County Register. Mr. Nowrasteh is an immigration policy analyst for the Cato Institute. The reason this piece stood out for me is the way it exemplifies the vision that dominates conservative and libertarian circles. In this vision, Man is a purely economic being and fungible commodity and the marketplace is to be served by Man rather than the other way around.
You can tell the value of an idea by examining its results. The results of these underlying premises are seen in Nowrasteh’s conclusion that we need to import even more non-European immigrants in order to help 3000 acre orchards make a profit. Because the Cato worldview creates boundaries to acceptable thought, the author can conceive of no other way for the orchards to be profitable. And, of course, the profitable functioning of orchards through reduced labor costs is sufficiently important as to justify bringing even more immigrants into the country.
Nowrasteh acknowledges that most immigrants involved in agricultural work — and it is almost all done by immigrants — are here illegally. He explains that the paperwork for handling migratory agricultural workers legally is just too complex. He explains that only a minuscule number of farm jobs are taken by American citizens, and that their productivity compared to the illegal immigrants is poor.
Nowhere in his analysis does he consider that 70%+ of illegal immigrants make use of welfare of one form or another. This means that the farm workers’ low cost to the orchard owner is only made possible through taxpayer subsidy of the cost of living of their workers in the form of housing, food and medical benefits. In other words, the illegal immigrant labor is a form of corporate welfare funded by taxpayers. He also fails to take into account the increased costs in bilingual education, the lower quality of life due to increased crime and the fact many illegal immigrants manage to vote and overwhelmingly vote Democrat, thus increasing costs to taxpayers even more. By the time all is said and done, the total social costs of apples picked by illegal aliens is high indeed. I have worked on a farm. I have bailed hay, plowed fields, harvested vegetables, sorted eggs, slaughtered livestock and more. I know this is hard work, and I have no doubt many illegal aliens have a solid work ethic.
But we should also be honest in acknowledging that a workers’ illegal status puts him in a relatively powerless position compared to his employer, and this allows employers to engage in abuses. As a matter of fact, and I am not using hyperbole, many illegal immigrants wind up in situations that are not just de-facto slavery but are ACTUAL slavery. They are, in fact, denied wages, beaten when they do not work, slashed with knives, and kept in chains. It is impossible to keep up with all the agricultural slavery going on in this country, but in Florida alone, from 1997 to 2009, over 1,000 slaves were freed in Florida.(1)
Yes, yes, I realize that according to stereotypes promulgated by the SPLC, I am supposed to be cool with non-white people being held as slaves. But quite frankly, the idea is repellent to me at a visceral moral level. Most of the slavery is not even identified and prosecuted in this country. There are winks and nods and nobody can prove who knew what and when, so it just goes on. This is disgusting, and the large orchards and corporate farms that support these practices are owned by people who should be investigated, prosecuted and punished to the fullest extent of the law. There are likely more slaves in this country today than there were in 1865 and nobody is making a peep so long as lettuce is cheap.
When you understand what we are really dealing with in terms of agricultural labor, I’m sure these are jobs that are offered under conditions that Americans wouldn’t want, and quite frankly shouldn’t have to accept. Nobody should have to accept such conditions.
Having owned a couple of businesses, I know that the costs of unemployment insurance, workman’s compensation insurance, the employer’s share of social security plus other benefits are expensive. And I’m quite sure that an illegal immigrant who can’t complain about OSHA violations in insecticide application or file a workman’s comp claim is a lot cheaper. A slave that the owner can just shoot in the back if caught running away is cheaper still.
Rather than looking into this situation, and seeing that the vast commodity market we have in agricultural products and the oligarchies we have running agriculture have combined to create human tragedy, the anarcho-capitalist mindset of the tunnel-vision libertarians simply sees a labor shortage that needs fixed by flooding our country with more non-whites.
Has the author considered that maybe, if apples can only be produced profitably on the backs of illegal aliens with no recourse to law if they are abused, the price of apples is too low? Has the author considered that those apples are being paid for twice: once at the supermarket and then again by taxpayers who have to foot the portion of the bill from which the orchard owner is exempted? Has the author considered the moral cost of a society in which any tomato consumed in winter has been touched by the hand of a literal slave?
This country already has a crumbling infrastructure. We are so busy paying for ever-expanding welfare costs that we can’t even maintain existing infrastructure, much less expand it adequately. People spend hours in traffic jams daily. We do not need even more people on our inadequate highways. Rents are sky-high because the demand for rental housing is high relative to its supply. We don’t need even more demand for housing. Waiting lines in emergency rooms are causing people to die, because our illegal alien population turns to emergency rooms for primary care. The current population of this country at 315+ million is more than sufficient. We have plenty of people.
What we lack is people with common sense who can look beyond ideology to see the reality that business men are not automatically virtuous angels, and that the profit of people who are so morally bankrupt that they would resort to slavery is not sufficiently important that it justifies ruining both the economy and the European demographics in this country.