Maybe people don't want to move to deep red Pennsylvania?
Lots of black folks left the South and it's not like they were handing out bags of money in New York.
bruceb · 2h ago
Article doesn't mention the pay once. No matter what you think about this issue, this is total trash journalism by the reporter Samuel Benson and Politico. No wonder people don't trust news sources.
cosmicgadget · 1h ago
Can you elaborate?
rincebrain · 1h ago
I assume GP's point is that the farms rely on being able to pay below minimum wage (IIRC at least some places have carveouts in minimum wage laws for farm labor, not just tipped workers), and that's part of why it's so difficult to find replacement workers.
The lack of mentioning that in a story about the economic impacts of this seems like a deliberate choice to garner more sympathy than "I want to pay people $2 an hour to work" might otherwise. (That is a made up number, I did not go dig up the relevant PA pay rates.)
adiabatichottub · 1h ago
I think GP means that illegal workers have no guarantee of making minimum wage or any legal protections against wage theft.
quantified · 1h ago
> “But the big reason why nobody fixes it is because it’s a big political bombshell, and both parties can use it against the other one.”
Except... a bipartisan fixing bill was nuked on Trump's disapproval shortly before the elections, so that immigration and immigrant status could still be an issue at election time.
Farmers followed up by voting to have all immigrants deported quickly after Inauguration Day. That was clearly communicated.
Farmers FAFO again.
yks · 1h ago
"Immigration question" doesn't have a solution because without the immigrants the economy collapses. And, besides, not having it solved allows Republicans to run on the platform of solving it, as you said. But if there is a single politician in the US history who is not only willing to kill the economy, but has an unquestionable approval from the voters to do it, that's Trump, so who knows.
32k to 34k from entry-level to expert level. Basically businesses choosing to close over offering pay raises.
Which actually can make sense with competition still on illegal workers, and larger scale competition using prison labor.
throwawayqqq11 · 2h ago
I am sceptical about raises solving workforce shortages in agriculture, even in the long term. Immigrants are more willing to relocate, have higher work moral, are less likely to resign on the spot and less likely to officially complain or make demands. All this is a huge boon for the lower income labor market.
The biggest problem with immigrants is not their crime rate (its below natives), its the trump voters who repeatedly vote against their interests and disrespect human beings, their economy relies on.
How do you solve that? My bet is on slavery.
Yeul · 5m ago
The word you're looking for is "desperate".
general1465 · 2h ago
I think more automation is likely.
cosmicgadget · 1h ago
> Painter voted for Trump three times, but he said he’s “very disappointed” in how the president has handled immigration policy this term. “It’s not right, what they’re doing,” he said.
He was apparently conditioned to not believe the person he voted for would follow through on his campaign promises.
rincebrain · 40m ago
One thing that Trump did very effectively was take advantage of how people will selectively hear what they want to hear if they're desperate, and not pay attention to fine details that might suggest a different meaning than they're taking.
For example, someone who thinks that doing a lot of labor is a sign of good moral character might think "deport the lazy criminals" sounds reasonable, and ignore the details which suggest that the crime in their mind is "being foreign", leading to surprise when those you thought of as "good people" are being deported.
(None of that removes the responsibility for the consequences of your actions, of course, just that it's not necessarily that they thought he wouldn't follow through, and more that they only remembered what they wanted to hear.)
Lots of black folks left the South and it's not like they were handing out bags of money in New York.
The lack of mentioning that in a story about the economic impacts of this seems like a deliberate choice to garner more sympathy than "I want to pay people $2 an hour to work" might otherwise. (That is a made up number, I did not go dig up the relevant PA pay rates.)
Except... a bipartisan fixing bill was nuked on Trump's disapproval shortly before the elections, so that immigration and immigrant status could still be an issue at election time.
Farmers followed up by voting to have all immigrants deported quickly after Inauguration Day. That was clearly communicated.
Farmers FAFO again.
Which actually can make sense with competition still on illegal workers, and larger scale competition using prison labor.
The biggest problem with immigrants is not their crime rate (its below natives), its the trump voters who repeatedly vote against their interests and disrespect human beings, their economy relies on.
How do you solve that? My bet is on slavery.
He was apparently conditioned to not believe the person he voted for would follow through on his campaign promises.
For example, someone who thinks that doing a lot of labor is a sign of good moral character might think "deport the lazy criminals" sounds reasonable, and ignore the details which suggest that the crime in their mind is "being foreign", leading to surprise when those you thought of as "good people" are being deported.
(None of that removes the responsibility for the consequences of your actions, of course, just that it's not necessarily that they thought he wouldn't follow through, and more that they only remembered what they wanted to hear.)