....”orchards can’t exist as businesses (without being significantly undersold by foreign markets) without illegal migrants”...
Sorry...I just see it as greed on the part of the growers...I blame them. And it isn’t just ag jobs...there are many US industries that are inundated with illegals. If necessary to remain competitive, growers should take a cut in order to pay American citizens a decent wage. Americans were doing the jobs long before illegal aliens. From what I’ve read, even if the increase in ag wage were passed along to the consumer the increase would be very small.
In the old days, the farms in southern New Jersey or Pennsylvania used blacks from the south, many of whom were recently emancipated from slavery. When the blacks stopped coming, they switched to Puerto Ricans, who were easy to entice and bring over, already being US citizens. When the Ricans stopped coming, they brought in the Mexicans. Now it is increasingly Guatemalans, many of whom don't even speak Spanish.
Automation for the industry is a much more viable solution. It was the ending of the bracero program that caused the tomato growers to invest in technology. Some crops (such as grapes) may always need to be picked by hand, but the deportation of illegal labor will spur greater investment in technology to harvest the fields/orchards.
Unless you lived in a really backward part of the country, with lots of native born Americans with nothing better to do, much of the schlepp work in the more developed part of the country was always handled by immigrants, legal or illegal, to say nothing of American minorities (blacks from the south).
Clemenza’s right- the “Americans” (however one chooses to define that) doing this job before the South American migrants weren’t getting a living wage either. With the current minimum wage, unionized labor, etc., labor costs for these businesses would increase many times over. Also, remember that these are orchards we’re talking about, so full automation, large threshers, etc., aren’t an option- this has to be done by hand and all at once when the fruit is at the proper stage of ripeness. In other words, you need a huge number of people willing to do hard labor for far less than the legal minimum wage over a short period of time and then go on and find employment elsewhere. No region has an “American” work force willing to do that. And also remember we’re mainly talking about things like pears here, not staples like corn, or rice, or tomatoes. How many people do you know who would really continue to buy pears if the prices increased several times over? The American industry would simply die.
I’m not saying that sacrifices shouldn’t be made be made or that “greed” isn’t at play here- I’m just saying that there’s a difference between “I want to keep my business, industry, and town from all going under” and “I want a 300% profit instead of a 250% one”.