**Welcome American Patrol readers and happy Thanksgiving weekend! Once done with this post, please feel free to look around Tammy Blog. Also, please see my related update to this post here.**
Yes, that’s right. If the agriculture industry doesn’t get its endless stream of cheap, illegal labor, pears and/or puppies will die.
Actually, it’s the “Pears Are All Gonna Die!” Without Illegal Aliens rant. Brought to you by ABC. Get your little violin out.
Pear Crop Rots As Field Hands Kept From Crossing Border
Nick Ivicevich has been growing pears in northern California for 45 years, but never had he seen as good a crop as the one that blossomed here this season. “I thought I died and went to heaven,” he said. “I kept pinching myself. I could not believe how beautiful my crop was.”
But now, much of his crop, almost two million pounds, lies on the ground — rotting away.
Thanks to increased security along the Mexican border, thousands of migrant workers who harvest the nation’s fruits and vegetables never showed up for work. Ivicevich’s pears ripened and then just fell off the tree.
“I’d lay in my house,” he said, “and hear, ‘plop, plop, plop’ …and I’d have to look at them out my window. And, it’s just sickening.”
Let me make one simple correction about why that man let his pear crop die. And I mean “let” the crop die, and it’s not because illegals are being kept from this country. It’s a good bet it’s one of two things (or perhaps both) 1) He didn’t want to pay Americans a higher wage than he pays the Mexicans or 2) He wanted his crop to die so he’d have a dramatic story to tell and which an American television network could feature about how mean and awful having a secure border really is, because he doesn’t want to pay Americans a higher wage. Oh wait, that’s the same thing.
So, instead of sitting on his probably pear-shaped rear, here are a few things, just off the top of my head, Nick could have done:
**Placed that new invention, the “help wanted” ad, at local high schools and community colleges offering a wage higher than McDonald’s, while emphasizing the great tan workers would receive. Place an ad in the local town paper offering the same. Also, try Craigslist.com for your local area.
**Check with half-way houses in the area (and every town has one or two) offering a decent-paying job to men and women making the transition from prison to regular life. They need jobs, and usually find it difficult to get hired. Making work known to addiction recovery centers is also a good idea. Those people also have a difficult time finding work, especially within traditional environments. In the fields, they’d be outside and have a nontraditional experience with no one necessarily looking over their shoulder. Oh, Nick would have to pay them, too, more than he pays Mexicans.
**Liaise with state and federal prison officials about using minimum security prisoners for field work. We have them making license plates, doing laundry, gardening, and a variety of other chores on prison grounds. Sending them to be field workers would ease prison overcrowding (put them up in tent cities during the seasonal work). Getting out of the prison environment would probably be a welcome change. we could decide if this perk is on or off limits to the 30 percent of the California prison population that is illegal alien Mexican.
**Advertise in the coal mining states for coal miners to consider a change in profession, while extolling the wonderful weather and beauty of California. The farm owner should probably emphasize that when you work as a field hand, you have no risk of your workplace exploding or falling down on you, leaving you trapped for days, as your oxygen slowly wears out, as you watch your fellow workers suffocate to death. None of that in the fields, all for the same twelve bucks (or more) an hour.
The average coal miner starting salary is $12 an hour. The average pay overall is $63,000 a year, or $33 an hour.
That could mean we’d have a shortage of coal miners. What are the odds there would be a rush for the border from Mexico for that job? Not much. This could then mean energy companies would have to pay more for that dangerous, back-breaking work. Now wouldn’t that be nice? In other words, right now Americans are doing all the low-paying hard and dangerous work in this country, while illegal aliens, Mexicans primarily, come over to work in our sunny border states doing a job a 12-year-old could do.
If the migrants don’t show up for the next harvest, Ivicevich said he’ll have to destroy entire orchards that were planted more than a century ago.
Now this man threatens to rip out his orchard if he doesn’t get his slaves back. Oh so dramatic, and made-for-TV news, isn’t it? This refusal to consider an American workforce is akin to a man who hasn’t stood up for years, has sat on his easy chair for so long that his skin has grafted to it. His legs are still there, and even work, but the idea of getting up ios now so foreign, and would just be too darn uncomfortable. So, he insists, it’s impossible.
Well, it’s not impossible. Will it hurt a little? Maybe. But don’t sit there and say you can’t do it when it’s obvious you can. “I’m gonna have to rip out my whole orchard.” Wah, wah, wah. Let me get the tiny violin.
So, do not cry for the pears. If anyone rips out an orchard because they can’t have their slave-class Mexicans, offer them a time and travel machine back to the 1800s where they can either stay in California and enslave the Chinese, or go south and buy some of those darkies for whatever work they need done.
Sheesh.
Steve Sailer at VDARE has a terrific roundup and commentary on “Pearanoia—Latest Scam From The Cheap Labor Lobby.” Seeing the background of this ridiculous, and false, scare tactic is invaluable.
Related Post:
John McCain Thinks Americans are French
I look forward to horror stories about dishes piling up unwashed and tables going unbussed in fashionable restaurants because the illegals who ordinarily do that menial labor have not showed up; and of course, in upper middle class neighborhoods, the lawns will be unmanicured and houses untidy because of the dearth of Spanish-speaking hired help. This could turn out to be a catastrophe of epic proportions for the well-heeled of America; all that disposable income and no peons to hired with it.
ABC failed to let us know that his destroyed crop (even though he chose not to pick it by any means) is a write off and he will get compensated for it through tax losses. Who does he think he’s fooling.
Being in Iowa now, instead of SoCal, I see the menial tasks being performed by non-Mexicans in most cases. Nobody seems to object to working for less than prime wages. A lot of the work is performed by kids still in High School. They make more working farms than they do working for Wal-Mart.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1744091/posts
[Thanks for the cross post Dave. It’s appreciated.–ed].
I’ve just spent much of the weekend in an online “debate” with a Californian who lectured me on how so many crops will go bad as they are unpicked.
I mentioned to him that while I am not anti-crops (mmm, I love fruit!), I care more about my nation than the desires of the agriculture industy in having a never ending supply of cheap, illegal labor.
A true guest-worker plan can be used for such things as crop harvesting but let’s face it, most illegal ARE NOT picking crops. They have flooded Atlanta, Denver, Chicago taking construction, carpentry, janitorial, lawn care jobs, jobs that many younger Americans did in the recent past (and still do in most of the mid-West and Northern plains and New England states). Remember, in the South of the 19th century, slave owners also complained that ending slavery will ruin the economy. No it won’t, on the contrary it will help spur technical innovation in farming.
Ditto your comments on where to find, and or go about finding ‘legal’ American citizens to do the/this work.
Recently, I spoke with a ‘housekeeping’ company and asked what problems he/she were facing i.e., finding employees? Answer: “I pay higher wages then one might think and or any of my competitors…, double digit hourly wages, the word speads through employee referrals and I get what I pay for…, I get a great deal of walk ins who are, by their own admission ILLEGAL ALIEN, JOB SEEKERS, whom I turn away consistantly”
Why I asked? “I remember back during the time when my children, living in Los Angeles, CA at the time, could not find a minimum wage job at the local hamburger shacks because they couldn’t SPEAK SPANISH!” In America, I asked? “Yes, he replied, hard to believe I thought at the time but from a business perspective, I understood the dynamics of living and working in Southern California and it incensed me greatly.”
Bottom line: If more and more employers would do, as this gentleman did, we would have no need for and totally eliminate the presence of Illegal aliens in our country. Jobs are the draw, and money is the feul that feeds the invasion. As long as we allow the paving of the way for ‘criminals’ to break our laws with impunity this wound will never heal.