man id love to be working on that wall making some $$, in tucson arizona i believe they had a tunnel in a old KFC that went straight to mexico underground, so they better put a heck of a concrete footer 20 feet under the wall or more to stop them dirty buggers from getting tru

 

My wife and I were very impressed with the border patrol agents we saw doing their job. They were not standing around drinking coffee and shooting the bull. They were working diligently. You see them in their trucks on the roads, and then if you start looking closer, you see them being less obvious. The whole thing very much reminded me of hunting. You spend hours behind binoculars attempting to find your quarry, then it is a race to plan how to intercept the prey. Only the BP has to get within arms reach of their game to be successful. It looked exactly like hunting. A wall would definitely make that part of their job easier. In fact, just clearing a 1000' wide swath of brush would be a big help.

The goal should be to prevent or dissuade, not to apprehend.

 

 

I'm envisioning how would America look in that scenario. No or severely limited jobs for illegals, same with Gov't. assistance & benefits for illegals, etc.

I bet we'd embrace mechanization pretty quickly across many industries. Cost of goods/services might increase for a while, until the machines picked up the pace and cost comes down.

US and other 'wealthy' countries are pressure relief valves for the 3rd world. Now that valve turned to drip, drip, drip; globally we might expect more civil unrest in countries where the quality of life sucks.

Of course we'd mechanize our military; so we quell those uprisings efficiently if they interfere with our national agenda.

Soon enough, we'll control human reproduction and be able to weed out those annoying genes; keep the 'happy with my impoverished place in society genes' (cheaper than drugs in the long run).

Jeeze, this is starting to sound like a SciFi book/movie/mini-series.

Sure, this scenario is a leap - going from an immigration challenge to Brave New World. I wonder if there wasn't the immigration issue, with all the $ saved border patrolling, crime, loss, etc. would we shrink Gov't spending or find another way to spend it and more?

 

 

With the exception of you Skip, our construction crew might need a few (minimum wage) illegals to help build that wall in Tucson between say May and October.

 

My experience is in Agriculture, for sure mechanization is happening, but the pace seems glacial (that term used to mean slow pace, now I'm not so sure) to me. We'll speed up mechanization pronto if tomorrow we have no illegal field workers (with their valid ID and SSN).

 

I've spent my entire career in packaging automation. My job has been to eliminate other jobs.

We might mechanize field work. Or a shortage of workers might force wages to increase to where people will want to do those jobs. There was a time in this country when teenagers had jobs in the field.

I have never accepted the old saw that illegals are doing the jobs no citizen will do. The truth is, they are doing the jobs at a rate of pay that a citizen won't do. All the while we pay welfare to those same citizens. So an illegal not only costs us for himself, he costs us in support for his potential replacement.

The only beneficiary of this nonsense, is the farm business and the politician.

In my own lifetime, I have seen a political party inversion. At one time, Democrats wanted lower immigration to protect workers jobs, and Republicans wanted more immigration because it was good for business.

 

I wonder if that ship has sailed Bill? Teens have many more distractions than they did 40 years ago. Even with $20-40 an hour, I'm not sure young Americans today would last a day humped over, picking produce. Of course some would get into better shape over time; for sure one could say he/she 'earned' their wage at the end of a warm day.

I'd like to test that old adage and see what happens. Might make a good dissertation for some young entrepreneur wanting to make a name for him/herself.

I bet you've worked with the technology needed to mechanically plant, spray, prune, pick and process nearly every crop grown in Cali. We haven't invested in this because the current labor force is an easier solution. (and we can't sell a jillion of them in a niche, Farming market).

As the old latin proverb goes: 'Mater artium necessitas' (considering our workforce, it fits nicely ). The really innovative stuff doesn't come from Deere, AGCO, etc, but from a farmer/welder/fabricator who needs a solution by harvest.

For sure, politicians will float with the current wind; no answers will come from them. Sigh, Atlas Shrugged.

 

My product (more accurately, my employers product) is the bags and boxes that ship the field produce. So we were as close to the field as the "packing shed". We did a few jobs where our box makers were mounted on flat bed trailers and towed through the field. But I've never tromped through muddy fields as you have Sean.

By my estimation, field hands make up a very small percentage of the illegal immigrant population. That's were the exodus started, but it is far past that now. Now your illegal immigrant is working in construction, landscaping, street food vending, pretty much every type of manual labor. There are even some doctors and lawyers. But mostly where there is a cash business.

So I'm not really worried that a shortage of field hands would be a problem. We've had successful guest worker programs before, and we can do it again. Transportation is relatively cheap these days. We can bring them from anywhere in the world.

One of my first real jobs after high school was as a carpenter. I was in the union. I think myself and one other guy were the "token" union employees. We made squat, but we were the greenhorn helpers. The guys who made the money were the piecework framers and flat work masons. It wasn't something I questioned at the time, but looking back, they were being paid cash and I have to believe many if not most were undocumented. It was a different time. But I could already see that competing with, or even working as hard as those guys did, was not where my future lay. My family had quite a few friends who worked in construction, and as a teenager I can remember them bragging to each other about some job where they were pulling down $100 per day. Sounded pretty good, but within just a few years when I needed to start my own career, I learned that things had changed. And it has been one good skill after another going the same way as the flood of cheap labor has spilled up from the south. Met any good Japanese gardeners lately? It isn't just us WASPs that get hurt by an unlimited supply of cheap labor.

 

 

Cesar Chavez?

I think I have also read that he despised illegal immigrants in the CA fields. But it was a different time, and I'm sure he would have a different view today.

 

I still have one of these that I use all the time. In fact, this looks almost exactly like mine. That fight was a bit before my time, having been outlawed in 1975.

 

 

Makes me think about managers I've had in the past, Ted. Likely we've all had good ones and bad ones. The good ones made you feel good about your contribution and valued to the organization. When push came to shove during a busy period, you'd put in the extra effort and felt proud of the teamwork and success. It wasn't about only about pay; it was also about the spirit of the group and their ability to rise to a challenge. With a bad manager on the other had, just pay me more so I can go home and not think about the next days work...

A good manager of people doesn't have to pay top dollar; they motivate and develop a team of workers to do their best. The workers feel fulfilled at work.

I don't understand how one can live without gainful employment (retirees, disabled, etc. excluded) and simply live off the teat of others. A percentage of those folks will always be with us, but let's not encourage it by gov't giveaways.