🚀 go-pugleaf

"Hoy Paloy" <was-alcibiades@postamerica.net> wrote in message 
news:r7jmi2l235omg4nvf0klr3m9qhgb8bmc6b@4ax.com...
>
> [Remember when they were doing this last year? And the year before?
> They keep on doing this, and the disaster just never happens. What the
> heck is up with that?]
>
> http://www.vdare.com/sailer/061008_pearanoia.htm
>
> Pearanoia - Latest Scam From The Cheap Labor Lobby
>
> By Steve Sailer
>
> You've been hearing it everywhere: a shortage of illegal aliens has
> caused The Great Pear Crisis of 2006.
>
> This storyline showed up first in the New York Times (Pickers Are Few,
> and Growers Blame Congress, by Julia Preston, September 22, 2006), and
> then on CNN and Fox News.
>
> Senators Diane Feinstein (D-CA) and Larry Craig (R-ID) have been
> lecturing us on how $10 million worth of pears are rotting in the
> orchards of Lake County in northern California because there just
> aren't enough illegal aliens to pick them - not for love or money.
>
> So, the Senators inform us, we need another Guest Peasant program to
> import more pickers or (so I gather) we'll never taste a pear again in
> our lives.
>
> (Cue the voice of a hungry Homer Simpson in a reverie: "Sweeeeet
> juicccy pearrrsss").
>
> Piling on, the Washington Post ran an AP story, complete with a quote
> from the appalling Tamar Jacoby, entitled Farms Facing Worker Shortage
> for Harvest about how we'll all be boiling old shoes to gnaw on for
> our suppers, or something, unless Congress opens up the borders
> further.
>
> Needless to say, the article is lacking in evidence documenting a
> shortage of illegals other than the testimony of their employers.
>
> You'll recognize these as the typical prefabricated "news" stories
> that the Open Borders lobby generates on autopilot to justify
> importing more cheap labor. It's in the same vein as The Everlasting
> Nurse Shortage that we've been reading for decades. Google lists
> 111,000 pages featuring the phrase "nurse shortage," even though
> economists point out that there's no such thing in a market economy as
> a "shortage": there is just a price that somebody with political
> influence (in the case of nurses' wages, doctors and hospital
> administrators) would rather not pay.
>
> The amusing thing about the late-September round of Pear Pearanoia
> articles is that the local Sacramento Bee had already exposed them
> back on September 12, 2006 as the pre-planned product of growers
> trying to badger Congress:
>
> Labor Shortages Don't Materialize in California
>
> By Jim Downing, September 12, 2006
>
> "All year, California farm groups have complained that congressional
> inaction on overhauling immigration laws, coupled with tightening
> border controls, would lead to a critical shortage of labor.
>
> "With harvest time having arrived, state agricultural leaders are
> preparing to join their counterparts from around the country this week
> for a major lobbying push in Washington. They have been gathering
> anecdotes describing what they say is a damaging labor crisis in the
> state: Overripe pears are rotting in Sacramento and Lake counties,
> peaches went unpicked near Fresno, and according to one industry
> group, at least a few farmers are contemplating a move to Mexico,
> where cheap labor is plentiful and legal."
>
> Downing's article went on to debunk the main claim:
>
> "So far, however, state surveys show no discernible drop in total farm
> employment for May, June and July, though an uptick in farm wages
> suggests a tighter labor supply"
>
> "Looking only at state agricultural employment data, though, there's
> little sign of farm jobs going unfilled. The market usually varies
> seasonally with about 300,000 jobs in the winter rising to roughly
> 430,000 jobs from May through September. This year - at least through
> July, the latest figures available "was little different."
>
> Metropolitan news outlets like the New York Times are particularly
> gullible when being snowed by the agricultural interests' public
> relations flacks. Big city reporters and editors just don't understand
> the peculiarities of agricultural economics:
> bullet
>
> First, the ungrasped key to understanding the Great Pear Crisis comes
> in the opening lines of Julia Preston's NYT article:
>
> "The pear growers here in Lake County waited decades for a crop of
> shapely fruit like the one that adorned their orchards last month - 'I
> felt like I went to heaven,' said Nick Ivicevich, recalling the
> perfection of his most abundant crop in 45 years of tending trees."
>
> Oh yeah? A basic rule of agricultural economics: a good year for a
> crop tends to be a bad year for the crop's farmers. When the harvest
> is abundant, prices go down and the cost of hiring enough labor to
> pick all the extra produce goes up. Sometimes it doesn't even pay to
> harvest the full crop.
> bullet
>
> Second, there are dozens of different crops. Every year there's an
> over-abundance of something.
>
> If it's not pears, it's walnuts or strawberries or something else.
> That allows the PR consultants to concoct fill-in-the-blanks press
> releases about the shortage of ____ pickers long before the harvest
> begins.
> bullet
>
> Third, due to weather fluctuations, crops mature at different times,
> making efficient scheduling of labor difficult.
>
> For example, according to Downing's Bee story, Lake County pears
> normally ripen after Sacramento Delta pears, so the same workers can
> pick both. But this year, unusual weather delayed the Delta
> pears-meaning the experienced crews were still tied up in the Delta
> when the huge crop in Lake County ripened on roughly its normal
> schedule.
>
> This unavoidable uncertainty means that harvesting is prone to a
> hurry-up-and-wait syndrome making it an inefficient user of labor.
> Citing Philip Martin, the UC Davis economist who is the leading expert
> on farm laborers, Downing explained:
>
> "The agricultural labor market in California differs from other
> industries in that the total number of laborers in any year is
> typically much larger than the number of jobs. A state study based on
> 2001 data found that while the number of farm jobs averaged 388,000
> through the year, about 1.1 million different people filled those
> jobs."
>
> In other words, the growers suck in three people from south of the
> border for every job they have on average.
>
> The social problem with this inefficiency is this: the farm owners
> aren't paying the full cost of their illegal laborers. The farmers are
> massively cost-shifting to the public. We pick up the tab for their
> workers' medical care, their workers' children's education, and so
> forth. Thus, the inevitably awkward use of labor on farms exacerbates
> the growers' socialization of what should be their costs.
> bullet
>
> Fourth, farm jobs are a "gateway drug" for illegal immigration, luring
> in huge numbers of immigrants who get used up and then move on to
> something else, leaving the growers with a voracious hunger for new
> illegal immigrants.
>
> For instance, pear-picking is a young man's job in California because
> there has been an endless supply of young men from south of the border
> to clamber up and down ladders.
>
> In contrast, in Spain, growers have bought motorized picking platforms
> that don't burn out their employees as fast.
> bullet
>
> Fifth, the cost savings to consumers from cheap farm labor are
> minimal.
>
> Of course, politicians who rely on agribusiness campaign contributions
> would have you believe otherwise:
>
> "Feinstein predicted sharp increases in the prices of fruits and
> vegetables, and a revolt by consumers if they find themselves faced
> with 'buying lettuce at $2 a head or more, or broccoli at $5 a head or
> anything else because of the dramatic shortage.' [ A Plea to Save
> State's Farmers, By Carolyn Lochhead, San Francisco Chronicle,
> 9/30/06]
>
> Oh yeah (again)? The official Consumer Price Index inflation rate for
> food and beverages was only 2.5% in the year ending last August,
> compared to an overall inflation rate of 3.8%.
>
> Consider strawberries, the notoriously labor-intensive crop called "
> la fruta del diablo" by the stoop laborers who pick them. The San
> Francisco Chronicle quoted economist Martin:
>
> "'If (the consumer) spends $1 on a pint of strawberries, the farmer's
> getting 18 cents. He gives about one-third of that to farmworkers, so
> they make 6 cents.' So even if the labor cost were to double, that
> would still only be a 6 cent increase per pint." THE IMMIGRATION
> DEBATE | Effect on economy depends on viewpoint, by Carolyn Said,  May
> 21, 2006]
>
> For many fresh fruits and vegetables, the price increase would be
> significantly less. And, over time, growers would mechanize or, in the
> rare cases where that was impossible, would shift their operations to
> Mexico.
> bullet
>
> Sixth, farm work attracts to America laborers who even by the
> standards of illegal immigrants bring minimal levels of human capital
> with them.
>
> Many farmworkers from Mexico don't even speak Spanish. There are
> approximately 100,000 Mixtec-speaking Indians in California now. How
> they are going to assimilate into the American middle class when they
> haven't assimilated into the Mexican working class in the 485 years
> since Cortez?
> bullet
>
> Seventh, as historian Cletus E. Daniel has pointed out, the defining
> characteristic of California's corporate farms has been " the search
> for a peasantry." Does 21st Century California truly need more
> peasants?
>
> As the great management guru Peter Drucker pointed out in 2004:
>
> "But the immigrants have a mismatch of skills: They are qualified for
> yesterday's jobs, which are the kinds of jobs that are going away."
>
> But if California's Big Ag continues to get its way, these primitive
> jobs will be around forever-along with an endless stream of new
> peasants...and an endless supply of new social and political problems
> for ordinary Americans.
>
We must all understand that with millions of men in uniform and overseas, we 
harvested
the crops in WW2. The cheap labor/illegal alien lobby must be smashed.

Fred-----