Once most Americans were farmers. Towards the end of the 20th century, the vast majority of farmers had moved to the city for jobs in production and services. More recently, China is experiencing the same type of transformation, while hundreds of millions of people are moving from the countryside to the city. This has contributed to an amazing increase in Chinese productivity.
A recent article in the Financial times Discussed the effects of deporting employees without papers:
According to a survey conducted by the National Council of Agricultural Employers in 2020, only 337 employees born in the US requested the 97,691 seasonal agricultural jobs that were advertised between March and May that year.
Immigration critics often suggest that the so -called “shortage” of employees is a myth, and that if companies were to pay more, there would be many Americans who want to accept these jobs. But how much more? Suppose you have increased sufficient wages to double the number of employees born in the US who request jobs, which would still represent less than 1% of the required workforce. Suppose you have increased sufficient wages to increase the number of employees born in the US 10-fold. You would still only pay about 3% of the demand for agricultural workers.
To be clear, I do not deny that there is some Loon that would be high enough to produce applicants born in the US 97,691. But that wage is probably too high to make the profitable production of most labor -intensive crops possible. Fruit and fruit fields can be replaced by wheat fields.
You could claim that farmers can increase food prices to cover the extra labor costs. But that would lead to American products being replaced by imports from other countries.
You could claim that we can increase food prices and set rates for imported food.
I have no doubt that it would be possible to produce a mix of policy measures that led to a lot of employees born in the US in large cities and returning to the countryside, where they would pick vegetables and vegetables. There is a policy mix that would reverse the tides of history and return us to our agricultural past. But while we do that, I would expect the Chinese to continue to move millions of people from the farm to the city. Ask yourself this question: Has a country ever become a great power by encouraging its population to move from the city to the countryside?
Here is a prediction: the massive deportation that everyone is talking about will never happen:
“If there is an important enforcement event on a large farm or meat packaging factory that happens to be in a red state, you will have business owners who say this is not what we had in mind,” said Muzaffar Chishti, senior fellow at the non-party-related migration policy.