Alabama Immigration Law on Rock Center

[MellowDem]

I gotta say, I get so angry with the hypocrisy everytime I see these newscasts on how the poor Republican farmer's crops are failing and are angry at the law.

The Republican farmers, crazily enough, don't get why they shouldn't be able to hire cheap, illegal labor. They say they can't find people who want to work 14 hour work days. Well, that's because the labor market for farmhands has been flooded with illegal labor for so long, there is no legal labor market left. And because the wages offered are too low, the conditions are too poor. It is possible for the wages to be high enough and labor standards made well enough for a legal farmhand labor market to form again. Indeed, even a professionalized, union labor market that can pick crops well and reliaily. But no, they just want illegal labor they can treat like crap and pay like crap.

The worst part is that the media reporting on it never really mentions this inconvenient fact. No doubt, Republicans who are against legal and illegal labor don't leave some businesses many options, but the labor aspect of the story is always ignored/shuffled under. It's always about the plight of the farmer, which I wretch at, and the workers, which I can only sympathize with to the degree that they are people, but not because they undermine the labor market.

It's one thing I hated about Colbert's reporting on this. I usually love the guy, but he misses the point big when he feeds the meme that no American will pick crops. No American will pick crops for crap wages and horrible working conditions. In other words, and here is where no one wants to go, prices on food will have to rise. Crazy, I know. We want our cheap food, and we don't care how many hypocritical hoops from whichever side of the ideological divide we have to jump through to get it.