With wedge issues like immigration, we end up playing broken records of heated debate.
Ultimately these issues—from abortion to the death penalty—come down to fundamental differences in ideological principles, in which there is very little room for productive discussion.
In the immigration debate, it is a common complaint that undocumented immigrants are taking jobs from their documented counterparts.
The standard objection to this claim is that they are only filling positions that Americans are unwilling to take in the first place — and in this sense, these workers are critical to the economy.
According to a February NPR article, foreign-born workers in Phoenix are recovering from the recession and finding jobs more quickly than unemployed native-born workers.
And that is simply because they are more willing to take any job that is available to them—a combination of “flexibility and desperation.”
Meanwhile, native-born workers often won’t take jobs too far below their expected pay grade, even if they have a completely different skills and qualification than the job requires.
Their pride is so valuable apparently, that they would rather ironically collect unemployment benefits from the government instead.
Perhaps this is where the divergence of fundamental principles arrives.
Sometimes the work is just too hard, which is the purpose of the H-2A program. According to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the program allows “U.S. employers to bring foreign nationals to the United States to fill temporary agricultural jobs for which U.S. workers are not available.”
That last line is rather curious, considering the current U.S. unemployment rate sits at 9.1 percent, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
How can there be any jobs for which U.S. workers are not available?
Well, the plain truth is that native-born Americans have gone soft; simple farming jobs are too difficult for us.
Just ask John Harold, owner of a 1,000-acre corn and onion farm in Colorado. According to The New York Times, Harold tried to scale back on the H-2A program and hire more local workers, due to the high unemployment rates.
Six hours into the first shift, Harold realized he had made a grave mistake: Most of the local workers quit by their noon lunch break. “Twenty-five of them said specifically, according to farm records, that the work was too hard,” according to the article.
This is by no means an isolated issue. Severe farm labor shortages are seen regularly in many other states like California, Arizona and Georgia — where new immigration laws and strict enforcement are scaring away, not just cheap labor but any prospect of labor at all. These trends could end up costing the agricultural industry billions of dollars.
The days of John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath,” when desperation from the Great Depression fueled an eagerness for hard work and manual labor are thankfully gone.
But unfortunately an entitled working class with few skill sets, who would rather collect an unemployment check than work up a sweat, has replaced them.
I’m not saying I’d be more willing or eager to run off and start harvesting onions, but you can’t have your anti-immigration laws and eat too.
Maybe it is time the working class took a long look in the job market mirror.
Reach the columnist at djoconn1@asu.edu.
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