"Look out third world, here we come"

This sounds a bit over the top. Let's have a look-in at a piece about immigration and follow-on reader comments to a story in The Beaver County Times & Allegheny Times: "Stoop labor: lack of migrant workers to pick fruits and vegetables could drive up prices"
From the opinion piece:

In addition to being more expensive because of higher fuel costs, fruits and vegetables might become even pricier because of scarcity.

The Associated Press reports that Pennsylvania’s largest grower of fresh-to-market tomatoes announced Monday he will no longer produce the crop because he can’t find enough workers to harvest it.

And the reason is simple: Americans don’t want to do this kind of work.

Keith Eckel, 61, a fourth-generation farmer and the owner of Fred W. Eckel Sons Farms Inc., told the AP his tomato pickers made an average of $16.59 per hour last year. However, he said the relatively high wage is not enough to attract local labor to work the fields of his 2,000-acre farm in northeastern Pennsylvania.

“A lot of people think with immigration that we’re talking about immigrants taking jobs from others. Let me tell you, there is no local labor that is going to go out and harvest those tomatoes in 90-degree temperatures except our immigrant labor,” Eckel said. “They come here to do a job that no one else will do in this country.”

He’s not alone.

Carl Shaffer, president of the Pennsylvania Farm Bureau, predicted other farmers would follow Eckel’s lead and stop growing labor-intensive crops.

Eckel and Shaffer blamed Washington’s failure last year to pass legislation that would have allowed immigrants — some already in the country illegally and some who would come from abroad — to work through guest-worker and legalization programs.

The AP reported the farm bureau is calling for a reliable guest-worker program to be built from scratch, one that would provide a stable, legal supply of labor. (Our editorial position is similar. In past editorials, we’ve argued for a system that allows adequate numbers of immigrants to come and go legally with greater ease.)

Given the anti-immigrant nativism — and that’s what it is — that has swept the United States and the refusal by politicians to deal with the matter realistically, the farm bureau’s reasonable approach to solving the problem is a pipe dream.

Curse the illegal immigrants all you want, but they help put inexpensive food on the table. When it comes to anti-immigrant resentment and the domestic food chain, Americans are cutting off their noses to spite their faces by being so obdurate.

On the other hand, if the economy continues to deteriorate, inflation kicks in and food and gasoline prices continue to soar, Eckel and farmers like him might not have as much trouble finding laborers. That’s because more Americans might be willing to stoop to this kind of labor to supplement their incomes so they can afford to buy the very fruits and vegetables they are harvesting.

Look out, Third World, here we come.


Comments below:

Tired Too wrote on Mar 28, 2008 1:57 PM:

" Tired of This is right but allow me to expand on this a bit.

Anyone applying for unemployment within 50 miles of these farms that need workers is to have two choices. As long as you are able bodied you must accept the work or you get no benefits. I'm sure it will be amazing how so many will find work. Or they'll expose themselves as the lazy bums they truly are.

Bad enough the taxpayers have to fund those who refuse to work let alone have to pay higher prices for produce while available work is disdained.

"

Edgar wrote on Mar 28, 2008 11:06 AM:

" Take all those locked up in minimum and medium security prisons and have them pick veggies and fruits. Oh yeah, I forgot, they have rights and we cannot ask them to work for their upkeep of what, $40K per year? "

Tired of this wrote on Mar 28, 2008 9:01 AM:

" This smells like democratic views, Here is a novel idea. How about all those welfare babies who refuse to work because it is easier to accept the democrats handouts, do the work in order to collect any more freebies? We seem to moan about lack of jobs, yet they are there, we are just to lazy to do them. "

TK: Public opinion seems to hold that prisoners or unemployed "bums" head to the tomato fields. How many would want to see their own son or daughter working in the tomato field? The public is still blind to the needs of agriculture, and this doesn't bode well for the future of farms like Fred W. Eckell Sons Farms Inc. and others that have and will continue to rely on immigrants, not Americans, to meet their farm labor needs.