I heard a report on the radio about a similar situation with cherry farmers in Washington. Many farmers are in a cycle where they have to take out loans to pay for maintaining their orchards during the off-season, and then make enough during cherry season to pay those loans off but not enough that they won't need a loan for the next off-season.
So far there have not actually been any mass raids on farms in Washington, and not many cases of migrants being arrested when driving from California to Washington for the cherry harvest but the workers know what is happening in California and are afraid it will happen in Washington so many are staying away.
What was baffling is that many of the farmers put the blame for this is on bad actors on the left spreading fear among the workers.
acjohnson55 · 7h ago
> "In the fields, I would say 70% of the workers are gone," she said in an interview. "If 70% of your workforce doesn't show up, 70% of your crop doesn't get picked and can go bad in one day. Most Americans don't want to do this work. Most farmers here are barely breaking even. I fear this has created a tipping point where many will go bust."
Presumably, there will be bigger pocketed entities waiting in the wings to snap up some distressed assets.
saalweachter · 7h ago
I assume there are indeed some buyers who will indeed snap up the assets, but I do wonder "and then what?"
They trust that their bigger political clout will let them continue to employee undocumented migrant workers at wages no one else will work for?
They wait for the political climate to change, and then they'll go back to business as usual?
They wait for produce prices to skyrocket/the job market to crater, and then pay minimum wage for the jobs?
Something something, AI/robots?
smilbandit · 7h ago
The cynic in me thinks that this is a way for bigger farms to gobble up smaller farms by calling in ice but knowing that they will be able to keep ice from raiding them unless a bigger farm pays to have them raided.
paxys · 7h ago
> They trust that their bigger political clout will let them continue to employee undocumented migrant workers at wages no one else will work for?
Yes, this is exactly what will happen.
2muchcoffeeman · 7h ago
I don’t think this is clear. They might just mechanise why have jobs when a machine can do the job just as well?
pseudo0 · 2h ago
Illegal migration makes it infeasible to invest in technology to automate the work, because any business that wants to invest in automation will be undercut by a less ethical competitor employing illegal, artificially cheap workers. This also makes it hard to attract investment for companies building technology to automate this work, because investors assume that the government will continue to not enforce the law, leading to reduced demand for labor-replacing technology. We won't get significant innovation and investment in this field until the government sends a clear message that they will be consistently enforcing the law going forward.
paxys · 5h ago
If a machine could have done the job it would be doing it right now.
Arnt · 7h ago
This assumes that a machine can do the job, but the present owners don't understand it. The article doesn't say "this will force farmers to mechanise more", see?
JumpCrisscross · 7h ago
Wait it out. Cropland is a solid asset. Lots of soybean farmland for sale in my neck of the woods.
spankibalt · 7h ago
> "[...] but I do wonder 'and then what?'"
America's prison industry, one of the Trump administration's biggest profiteers, might have some relevant answers for you. ;)
sundaeofshock · 7h ago
At what quality? Most frameworks are paid by amount harvested so they bust their asses to pick all that fruit. What’s the motivation for prisoners to do more than the bare minimum? Related question, what will the other inmates do to the inmate who works much harder than everyone else?
spankibalt · 6h ago
I'm sure a nation with such a... shall we say... "colorful" and rich history in prison and slave labor can muster some experts on the matter to answer your questions. Satisfaction guaranteed, or your money back. Et cetera.
What American would want to do the work when you're competing with people who aren't subject to labor laws like minimum wage, break times and so forth?
beej71 · 6h ago
But Americans are subject to labor laws and minimum wage and break times and so forth, so how is this a factor in whether or not they want to do the work? You'll get paid minimum wage and have breaks.
aksjsnxkkxx · 7h ago
And when people ask where is the money going to come from it’s very easy to point out the ever growing wealth gap and immoral levels of wealth our billionaire class has. But that never happens, and this meaningless left / right dichotomy continues to distract the population.
A few less iPhones and a few more automated farms. Billionaires would be hardest hit unfortunately.
babuloseo · 7h ago
do they have a source on many americans dont want to do this type of work part?
Very few U.S.-born workers respond to job ads for seasonal crop work, Show up when work begins, or Stick around through the harvest season. "Even when wages reach—or exceed $20–$30 per hour, seasonal U.S. workers overwhelmingly opt out of field labor. That persistent gap is why American agriculture depends so heavily on immigrant and guest‐worker programs, and why mechanization continues to accelerate."
sys32768 · 7h ago
Note that the same report says legal, temporary "H-2A workers are more productive and provide labor insurance for producers of perishable commodities, but cost $5 to $10 an hour more than settled farm workers because of recruitment, transportation, and housing costs."
aksjsnxkkxx · 7h ago
The simple counter is to offer higher wages. We absolutely have the capital and tech to ensure people can make a decent living doing farm labor.
It would require less billionaires and less chatgpt wrappers with billion dollar valuations.
s1artibartfast · 23m ago
or they just go out of business and we import our non mechanized crops to developing countries. Farming isn't a high margin business and if it were as simple are rising wages and prices, you wouldn't see the farms going out of business.
There is a reason European farmers are deeply subsidized.
msgodel · 7h ago
This. Labor markets cut both ways but you have to actually follow the rules for it to work.
2muchcoffeeman · 7h ago
Wait till you find out how much legal workers who make clothes in America make.
Go move to South America if you think their workers have something we don't and will make your life so much better.
2muchcoffeeman · 6h ago
That’s a silly response. Why do you think workers are exploited? You say we need to play by the roles, but you’re going to balk at the cost of playing by those rules.
msgodel · 5h ago
We have absolutely decided we're fine with it. We'd prefer a functioning domestic economy to cheap luxuries.
dv_dt · 7h ago
We have the capital and tech to ensure out entire population has living wages, and yet and increasing swath of them do not
The bigger-pocketed entities need a plan to make a profit before they buy. That plan isn't easy to make — that's why the present owners risk going bust.
e40 · 7h ago
Do you have proof of this, because I seriously doubt it is true. The idea there are unused assets waiting in the wings is just absurd.
acjohnson55 · 6h ago
This is what the private equity industry exists to do (particularly firms with strategies like distressed, roll-ups, take-privates, etc).
They raise funds from large pools of capital, like endowments and pension funds, and they invest it into assets they identify as undervalued or underproducing.
When there is a crash in an asset class, private equity has often stepped in to buy assets at firesale prices from forced sellers.
sebastiennight · 7h ago
Wait. Do you believe that right now, there are no large entities around with vast amounts of funds that they are looking to invest? None?
AnimalMuppet · 7h ago
Oh, it's parked somewhere - Treasury bonds, the stock market, or something. It's still liquid enough to buy a deeply discounted asset when you see one, though.
comrade1234 · 7h ago
Maybe Americans will finally understand that their cheap food and lifestyle has been dependent on essentially illegal slave labor with no rights. You can harvest your crops with legal migrant workers with legal temporary visas and minimum wages and labor protections but you'll have to pay a few cents more for those strawberries.
burningChrome · 7h ago
Used to stay and work in ND during my Summers in college. One of the businesses I worked for was a bin sealing company. The owner was a successful farmer and during the Summer, he would have two large families get work visas and would come up and help from Mexico during the Summer harvest.
It was basically three months of sun up to sun down work. At the end of the Summer, the family would celebrate and put on a huge fiesta and cook food for everybody. The farmer paid them extremely well and they would leave and go back to Mexico in August, fondly talking about coming back again the following Summer when the farmer needed them again.
This was my first exposure to migrant labor. It was clear the farmer took the appropriate steps to get visas and paid the family well for their efforts. Likewise, the family was thankful for the work, good pay and with the relationship.
When I moved back to Minnesota after college, I started playing hockey again and two of my teammates had done something similar and worked on poultry and cattle farms in the southern part of the state. Their stories were the complete opposite of what I had experienced. Illegals were used all over the operation. They were paid roughly $3/hour cash to work 12-16 hour shifts. If they spoke up about safety issues or the pay, a supervisor would pick them up, buy them a ticket back to the border and drop them off at the bus station.
The stories they had were pretty eye opening to say the least. I felt dumb for being so naive to think farmers just did everything legally.
JumpCrisscross · 7h ago
> essentially illegal slave labor
California’s farm workers are not slaves…
e40 · 7h ago
It's not even that. Most Americans would not do that job for $25/hr ($52k/yr). It's hard, backbreaking work.
EA-3167 · 5h ago
You famously the key point of slavery (at least the sort that existed in what would become The Confederacy) is that it was for life, heritable, and you had no way out, no human rights, and if you tried to escape you were hunted down and tortured.
It's possible to point out that there are problems with migrant labor without making such an inflammatory and inappropriate claim no one can really engage with you seriously.
tosser0001 · 7h ago
I know little about farming or harvesting, but I’m curious what types of crops actually require manual harvesting?
Do we really need to rely on stoop labor to hand-pick crops, or has a relatively cheap labor pool allowed farmers to avoid the costs of automation?
If labor is to be in perennial short supply in the future, I wonder if American farmers will simply be forced to turn to crops that allow machine harvesting.
comrade1234 · 7h ago
There are some crops that they've been trying for years to harvest robotically but they just require too many input variables that a human can see in seconds but a robot just can't do it yet. Do a search on harvesting cabbages with robots, for example they're close but not yet there.
korse · 7h ago
Things that are grown on trees and bushes and are also delicate. Most cereal crops and plenty of ground/root vegetable cultivation is already mostly automated.
analog31 · 7h ago
Anything that's processed into something else is likely to be more readily automated, such as grains and canned or frozen produce.
tom89999 · 8h ago
That was so crystal clear ...
netsharc · 7h ago
Wrecking the agricultural part of California's economy is probably part of the plan...
> One, age 54, has worked in U.S. agricultural fields for 30 years and has a wife and children in the country. He said most of his colleagues have stopped showing up for work.
> "If they show up to work, they don't know if they will ever see their family again," he said.
> The other worker in the country illegally said, "Basically, we wake up in the morning scared. We worry about the sun, the heat, and now a much bigger problem — many not returning home. I try not to get into trouble on the street. Now, whoever gets arrested for any reason gets deported."
Heh, heck of a job Donnie, creating an opressive regime. Anyone remember the 1990's Claire Danes/Leonardo DiCaprio "Romeo and Juliet", which is the Shakespeare play but set in the modern era, with cars and guns? Maybe somewhere out there is a little Latina girl doing a reimagining of "Diary of Anne Frank", but the book will be called Diary of Ana Franco?
chronoc7394 · 7h ago
> That was so crystal clear ..
Yeah, people just don’t care. Myself included.
If you want to come to america, come here legally.
We all want a better life for ourselves and family. Illegal immigrants “dreamers” are no different in this regard.
Well, except the fact, they snuck into a different person’s home (country) while hundreds of thousands are waiting in the legal line.
toomuchtodo · 7h ago
I support your right to your position, but also support doing nothing as rural america infrastructure is rapidly evaporated, first healthcare and then whatever else remains (because what will when the closest medical provider is hours away). It’s the only way people who think this matters (“do it the legal way” even though it’s borderline impossible and extremely expensive) will then understand food supply infrastructure is more important than residency status of the only people who will do these jobs, but maybe not.
Unless you’re a Native American, you’re an immigrant too.
wrs · 7h ago
Well, I enjoy having food available, so I do care about the effect of throwing a bomb into the agricultural workforce without any apparent planning or regard for the consequences.
nitwit005 · 7h ago
They, presumably, meant the side effects for the farm owners.
A lot of people voted to have their business ruined, and seem upset that it happened.
acjohnson55 · 2h ago
It would be one thing if it were some kind of sacrifice to have immigrants, but if all the undocumented immigrants disappeared, we would be substantially worse off as a country. We would have a shrinking, aging population.
The system of rules they are breaking is kept slow, arbitrary, and complex so that we can benefit from their labor without granting all the rights of being US citizens. This is so that they can be illegally exploited, but also because of the anxieties Americans have about the dilution of their culture (and to some, their bloodlines) by other ethnicities.
We didn't always have a system like this. It evolved into what it is, and now people feel morally righteous about upholding laws their own ancestors never were subject to.
And not a small number of people who did navigate the system but want everyone to have to pay the same dues. It's reminiscent to me of the folks with 4 year engineering degrees feeling salty that other folks have gotten into the industry through bootcamps, for a fraction of the time and money.
Ucalegon · 7h ago
This is just ignorant to how Congress has dropped the ball when it comes to funding a functional immigration system which provides for a speedy process. It is almost as if there is an economic interest to keep labor cheap via undocumented workers which is not alleviated at all through these raids, but does increase costs while undermining the US economy.
foogazi · 7h ago
> Well, except the fact, they snuck into a different person’s home (country)
Not true - false analogy
> while hundreds of thousands are waiting in the legal line.
Again - the legal line is fake too
jcranmer · 7h ago
First, the plurality of illegal immigrants in the US are people who entered the country legally but have overstayed their visas. There's not a lot of sneaking into a different person's country to do work.
Second, there is no "legal line" for immigration. The closest you get is that some visas where conversion to a permanent residency (green card) has an annual quota that is so heavily oversubscribed that there is a permanent backlog which stretches, in the most extreme cases, to over 20 years long.
Third, even when you're dealing with the legal immigration processes, that process is a bureaucratic hell that I don't wish on anybody. If you don't have anybody willing to descend into paperwork hell for you, then there is no way for you to immigrate to the US.
beej71 · 6h ago
It'll be interesting to see how this "screw the farmers" tactic plays out in the midterms.
cinntaile · 7h ago
People care about their wallets though and this whole situation isn't exactly fattening them.
Why doesn’t the government subsidize wages/salaries as an incentive for “Americans who don’t want to do this work for such low pay”? Or I guess they could just automate more.
comrade1234 · 7h ago
Americans don't have to do it. You can have legal seasonal workers on temporary visas. We do it every year here in Switzerland for the wine harvest and for the ski resorts with workers from Portugal for example.
yahoozoo · 7h ago
I think overstaying visas is a significant issue in America and one of the reasons they have so many illegal immigrants.
Ekaros · 5h ago
Why subsidise? If the plantation owners want the crops to be picked, they just have to pay enough to find willing worker. And then increase the price of food to still make same overall profit margin. It is how free market capitalism should work.
So far there have not actually been any mass raids on farms in Washington, and not many cases of migrants being arrested when driving from California to Washington for the cherry harvest but the workers know what is happening in California and are afraid it will happen in Washington so many are staying away.
What was baffling is that many of the farmers put the blame for this is on bad actors on the left spreading fear among the workers.
Presumably, there will be bigger pocketed entities waiting in the wings to snap up some distressed assets.
They trust that their bigger political clout will let them continue to employee undocumented migrant workers at wages no one else will work for?
They wait for the political climate to change, and then they'll go back to business as usual?
They wait for produce prices to skyrocket/the job market to crater, and then pay minimum wage for the jobs?
Something something, AI/robots?
Yes, this is exactly what will happen.
America's prison industry, one of the Trump administration's biggest profiteers, might have some relevant answers for you. ;)
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penal_labor_in_the_United_Stat...
A few less iPhones and a few more automated farms. Billionaires would be hardest hit unfortunately.
Very few U.S.-born workers respond to job ads for seasonal crop work, Show up when work begins, or Stick around through the harvest season. "Even when wages reach—or exceed $20–$30 per hour, seasonal U.S. workers overwhelmingly opt out of field labor. That persistent gap is why American agriculture depends so heavily on immigrant and guest‐worker programs, and why mechanization continues to accelerate."
It would require less billionaires and less chatgpt wrappers with billion dollar valuations.
There is a reason European farmers are deeply subsidized.
They raise funds from large pools of capital, like endowments and pension funds, and they invest it into assets they identify as undervalued or underproducing.
When there is a crash in an asset class, private equity has often stepped in to buy assets at firesale prices from forced sellers.
It was basically three months of sun up to sun down work. At the end of the Summer, the family would celebrate and put on a huge fiesta and cook food for everybody. The farmer paid them extremely well and they would leave and go back to Mexico in August, fondly talking about coming back again the following Summer when the farmer needed them again.
This was my first exposure to migrant labor. It was clear the farmer took the appropriate steps to get visas and paid the family well for their efforts. Likewise, the family was thankful for the work, good pay and with the relationship.
When I moved back to Minnesota after college, I started playing hockey again and two of my teammates had done something similar and worked on poultry and cattle farms in the southern part of the state. Their stories were the complete opposite of what I had experienced. Illegals were used all over the operation. They were paid roughly $3/hour cash to work 12-16 hour shifts. If they spoke up about safety issues or the pay, a supervisor would pick them up, buy them a ticket back to the border and drop them off at the bus station.
The stories they had were pretty eye opening to say the least. I felt dumb for being so naive to think farmers just did everything legally.
California’s farm workers are not slaves…
It's possible to point out that there are problems with migrant labor without making such an inflammatory and inappropriate claim no one can really engage with you seriously.
Do we really need to rely on stoop labor to hand-pick crops, or has a relatively cheap labor pool allowed farmers to avoid the costs of automation?
If labor is to be in perennial short supply in the future, I wonder if American farmers will simply be forced to turn to crops that allow machine harvesting.
> One, age 54, has worked in U.S. agricultural fields for 30 years and has a wife and children in the country. He said most of his colleagues have stopped showing up for work.
> "If they show up to work, they don't know if they will ever see their family again," he said.
> The other worker in the country illegally said, "Basically, we wake up in the morning scared. We worry about the sun, the heat, and now a much bigger problem — many not returning home. I try not to get into trouble on the street. Now, whoever gets arrested for any reason gets deported."
Heh, heck of a job Donnie, creating an opressive regime. Anyone remember the 1990's Claire Danes/Leonardo DiCaprio "Romeo and Juliet", which is the Shakespeare play but set in the modern era, with cars and guns? Maybe somewhere out there is a little Latina girl doing a reimagining of "Diary of Anne Frank", but the book will be called Diary of Ana Franco?
Yeah, people just don’t care. Myself included.
If you want to come to america, come here legally.
We all want a better life for ourselves and family. Illegal immigrants “dreamers” are no different in this regard.
Well, except the fact, they snuck into a different person’s home (country) while hundreds of thousands are waiting in the legal line.
Unless you’re a Native American, you’re an immigrant too.
A lot of people voted to have their business ruined, and seem upset that it happened.
The system of rules they are breaking is kept slow, arbitrary, and complex so that we can benefit from their labor without granting all the rights of being US citizens. This is so that they can be illegally exploited, but also because of the anxieties Americans have about the dilution of their culture (and to some, their bloodlines) by other ethnicities.
We didn't always have a system like this. It evolved into what it is, and now people feel morally righteous about upholding laws their own ancestors never were subject to.
And not a small number of people who did navigate the system but want everyone to have to pay the same dues. It's reminiscent to me of the folks with 4 year engineering degrees feeling salty that other folks have gotten into the industry through bootcamps, for a fraction of the time and money.
Not true - false analogy
> while hundreds of thousands are waiting in the legal line.
Again - the legal line is fake too
Second, there is no "legal line" for immigration. The closest you get is that some visas where conversion to a permanent residency (green card) has an annual quota that is so heavily oversubscribed that there is a permanent backlog which stretches, in the most extreme cases, to over 20 years long.
Third, even when you're dealing with the legal immigration processes, that process is a bureaucratic hell that I don't wish on anybody. If you don't have anybody willing to descend into paperwork hell for you, then there is no way for you to immigrate to the US.