Economic Man Turning Against Mass Immigration


If you ever get into an argument
about immigration, sooner or later (probably sooner)
somebody will majestically inform you, "But
immigrants take jobs that Americans won`t do. Without
immigrants, lettuce would cost 10 dollars a head."

Sometimes the lettuce will cost 20
dollars a head, but the point—and absence of facts—is
still the same: Immigration is necessary for national
economic survival.

The argument was never very
compelling, if only because it`s

long been known
that the labor that goes into
producing a head of lettuce accounts for a measly 10
percent of its retail price, so it would take a good
deal more than

raising the wages of farm workers
to hike the price
to 10 dollars a head.

Today, however, the

cheap labor
argument has been definitively exploded.

The explosion took place last week
on the pages of the New York Times, where a major
story by Eduardo Porter went through the facts and
figures—about how the cheap labor that mass immigration
provides has helped

keep
American farm technology in the Dark Ages and
caused American agriculture to wither in the face of
global competition—and how the federal government has
helped undermine the

American farmer
on behalf of

Third World immigrants.

For decades, as everyone knows,
American farmers have relied on the cheap, mainly
illegal and mainly Mexican labor immigrants provide, but
now, because of such nifty gimmicks as

NAFTA
and similar

global trade agreements
, the even cheaper labor of
such paradises as Brazil, China, Chile and Turkey is
making illegal immigrants unprofitable for the American
farmer. American workers long ago discovered what
"unprofitable"
meant for them: They had to go, and
that`s what it means for the immigrants too. [In
Florida Groves, Cheap Labor Means Machines
,
By
Eduardo Porter, March 22, 2004, also

here
]

"The Florida industry has to
reduce costs to stay in business,"
one agribusiness
manager told Mr. Porter. "Mechanical harvesting is
the only available way to do that today."
 

As a matter of fact, it has always
been the way to do that, but agribusiness didn`t want to
believe it. Hence, as Mr. Porter writes, "Rather than
make such investments
[in new technology],
farmers mostly focused on lobbying government for easier
access to

inexpensive labor."
The result was

guest worker
programs that let immigrants come here
temporarily to work.

In 1979, President Carter`s
Agriculture Secretary

Bob Bergland ended government financing of research into
farming technology
because he didn`t want to replace
"an adequate and willing work force with machines."
That was just about the time we started hearing about
how Americans wouldn`t take those jobs anyway.

The

"adequate and willing work force"
Mr. Bergland
was talking about was made up of immigrants.

Later still, in 1986 "farmers
were instrumental in winning passage of the

Immigration Reform and Control Act
, which legalized
nearly three million illegal immigrants—more than a
third under a

special program for agriculture."

Another result was that the
progress of American farm technology shriveled.
"Farmers` investments in labor saving technology all but
froze, and gains in labor productivity slowed,"
Mr.
Porter writes. As mass immigration rose in the 1980s,
"Farmers` capital investments fell 46.7 percent from
their peak in 1980 through 1999."

Today, with the competition from
the cheaper labor of those portions of the Third World
that remain where they are supposed to be, the days when
American farmers could ignore technological improvements
and investments are gone.

Hence, orange growers in Florida,
for example, are now desperately trying to

deploy mechanized "canopy shakers"
that rake
some 35,000 oranges out of a tree in 15 minutes. It
would take four workers all day to do that.

There are theories about why the
Greeks and Romans, who acquired a respectable knowledge
of science and engineering, never developed an
industrial revolution. One such theory is that they had
too much cheap labor to need labor-saving industry—in
the form of slaves. When you conquer the world, slaves
are a lot cheaper and easier to take care of than
machines.

Today, we have our own form of
slavery in mass immigration. Instead of America
conquering the world, the world conquers us.

There are agricultural jobs that
machines can`t do, and there are certain kinds of crops
and terrains for which

machines
aren`t appropriate (yet), but one benefit
that the otherwise disastrous globalization of the
economy may yet bring may just be the end of mass Third
World immigration into this country.

With the remorseless logic of
Economic Man, the agribusiness manager Mr. Porter quoted
earlier in his story summed up the implications of the
new interest of American farmers in technological
innovation: "If there`s no demand for labor, supply
will end. They will have to find another place to work,
or stay in their country."

If a commitment to nation and
civilization won`t stop mass immigration, maybe
economics finally can.

COPYRIGHT

CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.

[Sam Francis [email
him] is a nationally syndicated columnist. A selection
of his columns,

America Extinguished: Mass Immigration And The
Disintegration Of American Culture
, is now available
from

Americans For Immigration Control.

Click here
for Sam Francis` website. Click

here
to order his monograph
,
Ethnopolitics: Immigration, Race, and the American
Political Future and
here for
Glynn Custred`s review.
]