Thursday, December 6, 2007

Farmworker Farce

The shortage simply doesn’t exist.

Time and again we hear from the agribusiness lobbyists about the pressing need for a continuous flow of foreign peasants to pick vegetables. The most sweeping claim was from lobbyist Sharon Hughes: “We are either going to have our food produced by foreign workers here in the United States, or the farming process will move to foreign countries.”
[snip]
Since only two percent of Americans still work in agriculture, many of the rest of us fall for this baloney. The research in this area, however, paints a very different picture. In a new paper, published by the Center for Immigration Studies, agricultural economist Philip Martin of the University of California, Davis, finds “little evidence” to support claims of a labor shortage on America’s farms.
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=MjEwM2RmZTBmZDU2MzI1YTEyOTRkZjk4MWE2NDE0NjE=

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