Mmm, will you be first in line to pick lettuce? It’s back breaking work and we can’t require people to be migrant farmers.

If there were no illegal aliens that would be far fewer jobless Americans. Here’s a link for you on the impact illegal aliens have on our country:

http://www.thedustininmansociety.org/no_more_deaths/no_more_deaths.html

Well it is within their right to collect considering their employer AND themselves paid in. See, this is a benefit of actual U.S. tax paying citizens. The illegals would jump right on unemployment if they qualified you better believe it. There has been very little necessary farms “shutting down”. In fact, prices have remained the same where I live. So, it is either that these jobs are still being done without some illegals or that the farms were not needed to start with.

Farms aren’t shutting down b/c of labor shortages…at least not in California.

Farms are shutting down here due to lack of water. There’s an ongoing battle for water here between the North and the South. Many years ago CA developed and implemented the Central Valley Project (CVP) which comprises of all the damns and rivers to capture fresh water/snow-melt out of the Sierras. This allowed water to be pumped from the Delta in the north to the Central Valley for farmers to grow food — and then further to LA and San Diego for drinking water.

Recently, the pumps in the Delta have been shut down repeatedly due to a small fish called the Delta Smelt which is on the Endangered Species list.

When the pumps shut down, farmers don’t have accessible surface water so they have to turn on the pumps at a premium. Many farmers don’t have pumps in their section so they have to buy water from neighboring farmers. When a resource is scarce, the price goes up.

Last year the pumps were turned off in middle of the growing season — requiring farmers to pump and borrow water for $500/acre foot (that’s enough to cover 1 acre in a foot of water). The fields in the CV are typically 150 – 250 acres — an expensive and crushing blow to all farmers.

Unless CA can gain support for an alternate conveyance system (building the Peripheral Canal around the Delta), anyone south of the Delta will be subject to the pumps being turned off without notice.

If it’s too expensive to farm — farmer’s let the land lie fallow…so they don’t need the extra help — worker’s are released.

It’s insanity that a fish that is struggling to survive anyhow is crippling the farming industry in the central valley.

There wouldn’t be enough of those jobs to go around. I haven’t heard any news in my area of farms closing down due to lack of labor. In fact I’ve seen no indication of farms in my area needing employees. Also the growing season is over here.
You, and your community would complain endlessly if we did the Patriotic thing, which would be to physically remove every last one of the illegals from the jobs we will do. Farms are just a small portion of the jobs illegals take. Over one million in construction alone. I think I could find more than enough citizens who would happily fill those jobs.

Edit: I see you are still having trouble defining what a patriot is. Look up “The hyphen” by John Wayne.

If there were a restructuring of Unemployment and Welfare benefits people would be forced into taking whatever job they could get. then again knowing this country, people would start looting and killing before they went out and got an honest job to try and make it. I know that if i were out of a job and couldn’t find a comparable one to replace my old job, i would be fine with picking cotton, or lettuce or whatever, but if the government is going to pay me $300 a week to stay home and a job is only going to pay me $250 (40 hours x $6.25/hr), i think people are going to do the obvious and just stay home

Anyone remember the bracero program? It was because there was a HUGE demand for farm labor in the U.S during WWII. Americans won’t pick anything – if anything, history tells us that European Americans for the most part didn’t. They owned the farms. There has always been a usually “dark skinned” underclass doing the jobs other European Americans WILL NOT DO. In all, if you want to farmhand, be my guest. But you will make an insignificant impact on the economy that way. If we really have a large demand for farm labor, then the Government will ramp up its guest worker program.

why do you insist on this so called labor shortage on farms. There are no farms in my area going under and they do not hire illegals, that should say something to people. And now your on the patriotic kick. One of the most unpatriotic things is to want to sell your country out to a bunch of illegal criminals. That is scraping the bottom of the barrel in unpatriotic. I have worked farm jobs when needed and many Americans will do this job too and be proud of it. Tell the farmers to pay a legal wage and stop hiring illegals that infect our food.

and we are waiting for YOU to apply first since you are so pro illegal grease.