Re: Georgia's anti-immigrant law leaves millions in crops rotting in the fields

This is something I had broached a while back, with a different thread: is the migrant worker/illegal immigrant situation in this country really a legalized form of slavery? When I was serving my parish in Virginia Beach, years back, we had a ministry to the migrants on the Eastern Shore, supplying them with the basics of life: blankets, clothing, and so on, because these people had *nothing*. If we were to treat them like human beings, like the article states, farmers couldn't afford to plant crops that require human industry to harvest. When you consider, from what I have been reading, that slavery would have died out early on in the Republic if the invention of the cotton gin hadn't made growing cotton profitable, and caused slavery to hang on in the South, aren't migrant workers just a
  replacement for slavery?

-Fr. Ron

On Jun 23, 2011, at 1:55 PM, James wrote:

> With the level of unemployment in the US, I'm surprised.
> 
> =====
> 
> http://www.boingboing.net/2011/06/22/georgias-anti-immigr.html
> 
> Georgia's anti-immigrant law leaves millions in crops rotting in the
> fields<http://www.boingboing.net/2011/06/22/georgias-anti-immigr.html>
> 
> Cory Doctorow <http://www.boingboing.net/author/cory-doctorow-1/> at 8:44 AM
> Wednesday, Jun 22, 2011
> 
> Georgia's tough anti-illegal-immigrant law drove a sizable fraction of the
> migrant labor pool out of the state, and as a result, "millions of dollars'
> worth of blueberries, onions, melons and other crops [are] unharvested and
> rotting in the fields." The jobs the migrants did paid an average of
> $8/hour, without benefits, a wage that is so low that the state's
> probationed prisoners have turned it down. Guest-writing in the
> *Atlantic's* economics
> section, Adam Ozimek doesn't believe that the farms would be
> viable<http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/06/georgias-harsh-immigration-law-costs-millions-in-unharvested-crops/240774/>
> if
> they paid wages that legal American workers would take: "it's quite possible
> that the wages required to get workers to do the job are so high that it's
> no longer profitable for farmers to plant the crops in the first place."
> 
> After enacting House Bill 87, a law designed to drive illegal immigrants out
> of Georgia, state officials appear shocked to discover that HB 87 is, well,
> driving a lot of illegal immigrants out of Georgia.
> 
> It might be funny if it wasn't so sad.
> 
> Thanks to the resulting labor shortage, Georgia farmers have been forced to
> leave millions of dollars' worth of blueberries, onions, melons and other
> crops unharvested and rotting in the fields. It has also put state officials
> into something of a panic at the damage they've done to Georgia's largest
> industry.
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