No. of Recommendations: 7
Don't worry, the needed labor will come from US citizens. Just kidding, we are all too spoiled to take on those jobs.
This is a real problem. It's hard work and low wages. When there have been labor shortages in the agricultural sector, USians have not been there to fill the gap. Thus undocumented workers.
We don't even need to cast aspersions on US workers, like calling them spoiled. It actually makes good economic sense. Nearly every US person is literate, and nearly all of us graduate high school. It doesn't make a lot of sense to have workers with that level of education doing untrained, unskilled manual labor (like field workers). That's not the most productive way to deploy them.
In a world with global trade flows, an efficient economy will try to source food production that requires field workers to economies that have lots of uneducated workers, and other production to economies that don't. But that's a problem, because unlike most other types of capital, land can't move. Ag land can't go to where the workers are - the workers would have to come to the land. If the workers can't come to the land, then you end up at an equilibrium where you have suboptimal use of ag land, but most food production is in economies with "next best" land and poorly educated workers working as field hands. Unlike land, food can trade. So if you don't "import" field workers, then you'll end up importing food as your food production shifts overseas - domestic land can't compete with overseas food production costs using domestic workers.
We don't want that, of course. Partially because there's a lot of non-field worker jobs that are associated with ag production that we'd like to keep, but mostly because food security is part of national security. You want to be at least independent on food, and there are advantages to being a food exporter.
Which is why our current system arose as a kludge. We can't produce certain types of food at current costs using domestic workers, because it's not cost effective. So we "import" low-education workers that will work at below-market wages to make the economics work, and that way our food production doesn't move overseas.
Trump is now about to break that kludge - or at least try to. It will be interesting (and not in a good way) to see what happens to American agricultural production in products that require large amounts of unskilled labor.
[BTW, the same thing applies to any land-based services - jobs that don't require a high-school education that are tied to a specific location - such as cleaning and housekeeping, landscaping, construction, and other types of food services. The service is 'non-tradable' (can't be imported or exported), so the labor has to come to the land.
