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[–] WORF_MOTORBOATS_TROI 0 points 1 point (+1|-0) ago 

One of the things that often gets overlooked in the discussion about migrant workers and offshoring is that the alternative to those options is to invest in automation. It isn't "pay 500 workers in china or pay 500 factory workers in the US" it's "pay 500 workers in china or pay 60 factory workers in the US and invest X dollars in machinery/robotics/software so that the 60 factory workers are just as productive as the 500 chinese would be." That's why you hear a lot about manufacturing coming back to the US but you don't hear about them coming back with 10,000 worker campuses. What migrant workers do is distort the labor market in favor of labor-intensive methods and away from machinery and automation.

Take garbagemen for example, it's a job that isn't seasonal and can't be offshored. 40 years ago every garbage truck had a crew of two or three people that went from stop to stop and manually lifted up each garbage can and dumped it into the back of the truck. This was a job that nobody really wanted but there was job security in it and the pay was OK and there weren't a lot of jobs around so there were plenty of willing workers. Like 25 years ago there were far fewer workers around who were willing to be garbagemen and the pay rate for garbagemen went up dramatically because workers demanded a premium to work around garbage all day. By now almost all garbage collection is done by trucks with robot arms that lift the garbage cans, there is usually just one driver, he almost never has to get out of the cab and he deals with the actual garbage far less than he used to have to. He's a driver and robot operator more than anything else.

The bigger issue is the seasonality of the farm work that they do. It's much harder to run a business like that when you don't know where your employees are going to be coming from and when the crop has to be harvested when it's ready, it can't wait while you find people to harvest it. Before the migrant worker program the local high school kids would go and do the picking, but that's not a feasible alternative at this point. What we've missed out on with this migrant farm worker thing is how would things be different? We'd probably be less urbanized because there'd be more work in the country and because there'd be less incentive for kids to feel they needed to go to the city to work. We'd probably have developed better tools, machinery, and farming methods to get the most out of the limited amount of farm labor available. Maybe instead of farmers planting 400 acres of the same crop that needed an extra 10,000 man-hours over a 2-week period in September to harvest it, they might plant different crops at different times so that extra 10,000 man-hours was spread over a 10-week period. In that scenario they'd only need 1/5 the workforce to get the job done and those people would get 10 weeks of pay instead of 2. That's much more competitive when you're offering a high school kid 10 weeks worth of farm work as their summer job versus working part time at a movie theater or an ice cream shop over the summer.