Ugh jobs at good wages

Whatever we think of the Trump Administration's crackdown on illegal immigration, it bothers me to see immigrants on farms praised for doing "work Americans won't do". That phrase is an evasive way of saying "Work that plenty of Americans will do, quite eagerly, *if* you pay enough".

Is the farm work that illegal immigrants do unpleasant, exhausting, health-damaging, and low-status? Absolutely -- even Stephen Colbert has tried it and vouched in person. I bet it's even worse than working at an Amazon.com warehouse (although worse in degree, not kind). All of those are great reasons not to take work.

On the other hand,
I'm pretty sure being paid $30, $35, $40 an hour would buy a lot of things that are pleasant, restful, health-enhancing, and higher-status. The poor Americans I know include people undergoing all sorts of indignity with great courage and stamina. Given the chance to undergo some percentage more indignity but also leap safely into the middle class, I believe a fair number would do so.

Would food prices go up? Sure, because we're getting away with horribly underpaying people, taking advantage of the even worse circumstances they came from. Then again, food prices are not market-based, not really: government subsidies warp them dramatically. Right now those subsidies encourage empty carbs and factory-chemical meat, and discourage vegetables and fruit; they already should be overhauled. No reason they couldn't be overhauled in a way that supports good farm wages, and still makes good food affordable.

The only reason farm work doesn't *already* pay well is that agribusiness companies break the law and import people who come as under-class citizens with limited rights. The Republican Party is not, of course, going to crack down on agri-business: any anti-immigrant feelings it claims are far weaker than its pro-big-money ones. It's cracking down on the workers, who are the wrong people to blame, and who will simply be replaced by others in search of the same illegal opportunity. But the theoretical idea, that American jobs should be done by American workers for fair market wages, is a good one.

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In the end, of course, agri-business will overcome a lot of the obstacles to replace all the workers with robots. And then when the mineral supplies run out (and are anyway buried under former Antarctic icewater), all we'll be able to do is ask the programmer robots to design us gill-making robots so we can swim across Iowa and eat kelp. Sad! I will have the best gills, though.