October 12, 2006

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10/11/06 - A Canadian Reader Wonders If The United States Needs An Immigration Head Tax?

A New England Reader Says Harvesting Machines Can Replace Stoop Labor

From:  [Name Withheld]

Re: Steve Sailer’s Column: Pearanoia—Latest Scam From The Cheap Labor Lobby

About a year and a half ago I saw an hour-long cable-TV channel special devoted to the latest state of the art in crop-harvest mechanization.  

The program showed an excellent harvesting machine for all the crops traditionally thought to require human labor, and demonstrated the ingenious ways in which the harvesting machines work, from ones picking apples, pears, plums, olives, oranges to stoop-harvesting crops like strawberries, broccoli and tomatoes. 

A whole gamut of crops can now be harvested by machine with excellent results:  non-bruised fruits and vegetables and therefore no more need for farm harvest labor, just the initial investment in the machine. 

I remember the program's pièce de résistance, saved for the very end, was the mechanical harvester for dessert grapes. As opposed to grapes slated for wine making, dessert grapes—also known as table grapes—cannot be bruised at all in the harvesting process or consumers won't buy them. Historically, table grapes have been harvested by labor-intensive hand picking. 

Table grapes were the last hold out among fruit and vegetable harvests believed resistant to mechanization.

My conclusion: there is no more reason for importing Mexican labor for the cyclical fruit and vegetable harvest in the U.S.