"anti-immigrant sentiment, fanned by incendiary Tea Party–style politics...in the South...

It was mid-June, and we were in town for the watermelon harvest, but we might as well have walked into a ghost town, thanks to Georgia's recently signed Illegal Immigration Reform and Enforcement Act, otherwise known as House Bill 87. And thanks to HB 87, a copycat law of Arizona's infamous SB 1070, millions of pounds of watermelons were left to rot in the fields this summer—along with peaches, blackberries and cucumbers—as many of the most dependable and experienced farmworkers steered clear of Georgia and headed north for friendlier states...

A similar story is unfolding in neighboring Alabama, where a federal judge recently upheld most provisions of an even more draconian bill, championed by Governor Robert Bentley as "the strongest immigration law in the country." The ruling spurred frantic midnight evacuations, as immigrants fled rural towns across the state, leaving a trail of abandoned homes and businesses.

"How did Georgia come to suffer such a painful, self-inflicted wound? The proximate cause is the intoxicating power of spreading anti-immigrant sentiment, fanned by incendiary Tea Party–style politics, which have found fertile ground throughout much of the South.

But like most things in the South, the roots of this particular problem run deep, into a long regional history of undervaluing agricultural labor. Georgia's leaders (and much of its agricultural industry) were confident that replacement workers could be hired without a hiccup in the harvest. This particular confederacy of dunces believed their own rhetoric and are now paying the price. And from the look of things, it really hurts when you shoot yourself in the foot.

http://www.npr.org/2011/10/17/141413786/the-nation-the-high-cost-of-anti-immigrant-laws

Needless to say, Georgia, Alabama, Arizona and South Carolina all have republican governors and legislatures.

are screwed. too bad, no hard as rocks green peaches from georgia in the stores this fall lol

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/lost-in-detention/

:hi:

:shrug:

Their disdain for agricultural labor is matched only by their antipathy of immigrants and any "others" from whom they want to take the country back. Makes it easy for them to pass laws that drive Hispanics (citizen, legal and illegal immigrants) from the state.

stand a better chance of accomplishing that than these republican state immigration laws.

:hi:

the chamber.

You're right. Legal workers resulting from comprehensive reform would mean paying a legal (higher) wage. It certainly wouldn't please Alabama farmers and the chamber to lose that pool of exploitable workers.

And so we go around the Maypole. "Comprehensive reform" will not provide the cheap labor agri-business demands, so a NEW round of exploitable labor will be required.

a certainty. But without effective employer sanctions and enforcement (such as e-verify and other measures) ANY immigration reform will not work and the status quo will continue.

The CPC agrees with you that tough enforcement is critical to the success of immigration reform. Consequently tough enforcement is a key part of their comprehensive proposal but there is more to it than just enforcement in their proposal.

Republicans, OTOH, are pretty much "enforcement only" supporters. The chamber and agri-business support it because they have historically been able to get around enforcement measures and continue to exploit workers. (Comprehensive reform would make that more difficult.) They hope/assume that they'll be able to figure out a way to continue to do so in the future.

Teabaggers and the base support "enforcement only" because it is the "tough" approach and gives no quarter to those "illegals". Teabaggers dream of all the 'illegals' "going home" (despite studies that show that won't happen) if they just make life here miserable enough for them.

"Comprehensive reform", we're told, will make such cheap labor a thing of the past, and we'll pay $10/lbs. for tomatoes (or so goes this argument, to which I don't subscribe.)

We currently have something like a quarter million children in our fields. What happens when labor laws suddenly apply to this shadow work-force? The cheap-labor advocates just give up and pay a living wage? Unlikely.

More info from CIW:


No wonder it's mostly people who are here living under the radar doing this work. The pay is ridiculously low.

That's the reality that many "comprehensive reform" advocates can't/won't engage--this cheap labor system is ultimately unaffordable, and cannot survive true comprehensive reform (which includes strict enforcement of extant labor laws, let alone affording basic protections, such as a prohibition on child labor, to farm workers.)

But the problem with the above is that much of the "comprehensive reform" rhetoric is centered around the desirability of cheap labor, such as the OP...

We have existing ag worker visas but they're problematic when applied to workers who want to migrate from crop to crop and from farm to farm before going home for the off-season. Combined with wage and working condition improvements a modernized H2A visa program would pretty much resolve the issue of illegal immigrant farm workers by replacing them with temporary, seasonal residents who are aware of their legal standing. Furthermore, a record of some number of years as productive visa workers should open the path to permanent residence and citizenship status.

labor.

The DEMANDS from the right will never stop. Does that mean that reform is hopeless? If businesses and farms will never pay higher wages to legal workers no matter what we do, then you are right - reform is useless, but then so is any form of labor law that forces businesses to deal with their workers in prescribed ways.

When immigration law changes, business owners and farmers will have to change with it, if the enforcement is there. (And whatever we can question about the motives of Alabama's legislators and whether they went too far, they have set quite a standard for enforcement if the disappearance of so many Hispanics is any indication.) There will be a certain amount of "turmoil" but there alway is when major new laws come into effect, e.g. civil rights, environmental, etc.

Your OP is a complaint about how the cheap labor has dried up.

which have found fertile ground throughout much of the South." It is not solely about farmers being unwilling to pay a legal wage.

"Tea Party-style" politics has thrived with a "spreading anti-immigrant sentiment" to empower the Alabama legislature to pass an immigration law that has smacked Alabama's farmers and chamber right in the forehead. I doubt they saw this coming (or thought there would be exploitable loopholes in it). I would imagine that a labor system like this that has existed for a long time isn't going to be replaced in a day or two with a whole new labor structure with trained and legally paid employees.

In some other Southern states, like Florida, farmers and the chamber were able to stop or weaken the tea party drive for a similar kind of immigration law. In Alabama either the tea party was stronger or the chamber/farmers were weaker and the "toughest in the nation" state immigration law passed.

It's hard to synthesize all of that.

Only wages people won't work for.

Hell, I'll go pick tomatoes, peaches, whatever and I know many other Americans who would do the same if the pay was halfway decent. I've done far more difficult and painful work than that.



But I'm not breaking my back for $23 a day.

So now what do these Southern states do? Do the rich farmers secretly bring in their own stash of immigrants, or do the farmers decide they need to pay better wages or lose their crops?

Well first of all, it's not just happening in the south'n states. It's happening all over the country in all sorts of industries.
Second of all, I don't think the farmers are rich in most cases. I think they're probably highly dependent on loans and a number of things not going horribly wrong in order to make a profit.

I've never tried to hire people to work in the fields but I have tried to hire people to low skill assembly jobs in an un-airconditioned warehouse. Not heat-stroke hot but hot. This was at a time where construction was booming but what I found was that the undocumented aliens wouldn't work for less than $15 an hour. And when someone came along that would, they'd last one day and never come back.

I found it just as easy- if not easier to hire American citizens to do the work at $15 an hour. In fact even then I had parents of young children that needed more hours and worked hard. Never complained about the heat. I had students from the local high school that would get let out of school on some work release program. They never bitched about the heat either or anything else.

There was a farmer interviewed on the local news who tried to hire people by placing a wanted ad for $10 an hour. That's completely unrealistic. Even for less hellish working conditions. I think at $30 an hour, they'd have all positions filled.

A buddy of mine is in the landscaping business. He hires only documented citizens. He's been filling his positions at less than $15 an hour. These are jobs working long long days in the sweltering heat. And I know at least one guy he's got working for him now commutes a long way.

I get that the farms are far away and that it's hard to entice people to do it but money talks and bullshit walks.

Going by the headline, I thought there was actual anti-immigrant sentiment, you know, for those here legally.

Apparently the open-borders utopian dreamers (as well as the 1%ish fans of cheap labor) find it convenient to deliberately conflate the two. Nice to see all are not fooled by their shamelessly dishonest rhetoric.

I imagine that rather than conflating the two, it may simply be prioritizing humanity over imaginary red-and-blue lines on a map.

reminds me of the anger directed at immigrants during the great depression. What some of these americans don't realize that NAFTA has caused some mexican farmers their livelihood, which means a migration north. Some of our unfair treaties have not only hurt us, but other countries as well.

In recent weeks, local police have been circulating predominantly Hispanic neighborhoods in Alabama, asking those standing on the street to go inside their homes or face arrest — all because the state passed a law requiring police to be immigration agents.

During the past decade, as international terrorism became a subject of intense concern, Arab Americans and South Asian Americans have been spied upon, stopped, questioned and subjected to intensified inspection based on their racial characteristics rather than any evidence of wrongdoing.

And for more than a century, black men and women traveling through predominantly white neighborhoods have been questioned for no reason — simply because police officers felt they didn’t belong there.

Before there was even a name for it, racial profiling has been engrained in our country’s law enforcement practices. But racial profiling not only goes against our Constitution and our country’s value for equality — it also hinders law enforcement officials from doing an effective job.

http://www.aclu.org/blog/racial-justice/three-faces-racial-profiling-aclu-connects-dots

doesn't impact all immigrants.

Nobody can be that dense.

Enforcing our laws is not hatred.

leave Alabama along with the "n......", I mean the "illegals". Minorities of any type are not exactly on the top of their list of friends.

While teabaggers must pay lip service to their support for legal immigrants, they do not look at Hispanics, Blacks, Asian and other minorities (whether immigrants or native born) as one of "us" but rather as one of "them" from whom the teabaggers want their country back. The more minorities that leave Alabama the better for your typical Alabama teabagger.

Firing people up about the "n......", I mean the "illegals", is a good way to reinforce the message that "they" (and you can't tell a legal Hispanic from an illegal one by looking at them, you know) can't be trusted. Southern republicans know they can't appear to oppose legal immigration, but if some legal Hispanics immigrants or citizens get swept up in the "growing anti-immigrant sentiment", well you sure can't blame the good ol' republican politician who never meant for things to go that far.

by Jay Feldman on his book "Manufacturing Hysteria". He's not the world's most exciting speaker but his argument is right on:

http://www.booktv.org/Watch/12802/Manufacturing+Hysteria+A+History+of+Scapegoating+Surveilance+and+Secrecy+in+Modern+America.aspx

:)