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California farmers say they don’t have enough workers – but it’s not because of Trump
Sacramento Bee ^ | September 1, 2017 | By Stephen Magagnini

Posted on 09/01/2017 1:48:19 PM PDT by Oldeconomybuyer

As temperatures plunged from 94 degrees into the 60s on a recent August evening, Lodi grower Brad Goehring dispatched his crew of Mexican workers into a field to pick Pinot Gris. The grapes were finally sweet enough, and the 2017 wine harvest had begun.

Despite President Donald Trump’s pledge to step up deportations of undocumented immigrants, there’s little evidence of field workers being rounded up in California this year.

“We haven’t heard of a single ICE raid in California fields,” said Goehring.

An estimated 70 percent of California’s roughly 600,000 farm workers are undocumented, according to United Farm Workers Vice President Armando Elenes.

Part of the drop in new arrivals is attributable to tougher border enforcement in recent years, but other factors are in play as well.

“Mexico’s lower birth rate and growing manufacturing sector, along with tighter U.S. enforcement, have led to acute labor shortages.

The slowdown of illegal workers coming from Mexico has transformed California agriculture, resulting in higher wages and mechanization, said UC Davis agricultural economist Philip Martin.

(Excerpt) Read more at sacbee.com ...


TOPICS: Business/Economy; Foreign Affairs; Mexico; News/Current Events; US: California
KEYWORDS: agriculture; biglabor; border; grapes; helpwanted; illegalaliens; illegals; invasion; laborers; migrants; trumpmexico; ufw; unions

1 posted on 09/01/2017 1:48:19 PM PDT by Oldeconomybuyer
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To: Oldeconomybuyer

I thought they had grape picking machines nowadays................


2 posted on 09/01/2017 1:56:33 PM PDT by Red Badger (Road Rage lasts 5 minutes. Road Rash lasts 5 months!.....................)
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To: Oldeconomybuyer

Only 4% of illegal immigrants are employed in agriculture. You can do wonderful things with numbers. They aren’t here to pick lettuce.


3 posted on 09/01/2017 1:57:27 PM PDT by samadams2000 (Someone important make......The Call!)
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To: Oldeconomybuyer
An estimated 70 percent of California’s roughly 600,000 farm workers are undocumented, according to United Farm Workers Vice President Armando Elenes.

Nah! We don't need no voter ID. Nah! 420,000 votes we can cast any old way we choose.

4 posted on 09/01/2017 1:57:48 PM PDT by Don Corleone (.leave the gun, take the canolis, take it to the mattress.)
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To: Oldeconomybuyer

Mexico has a lower birth rate because they all come over here to give birth.


5 posted on 09/01/2017 1:59:22 PM PDT by Rusty0604
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To: Oldeconomybuyer

How many able to work welfare recipients are there in califonia? I’m betting more then enough.


6 posted on 09/01/2017 2:00:17 PM PDT by JoSixChip (Repeal and replace the gopE.)
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To: Oldeconomybuyer

So Mexicans don’t want to do the jobs they used to do, I guess we have to import more illegals from other countries.../s


7 posted on 09/01/2017 2:05:03 PM PDT by Lurkinanloomin (Natural Born Citizen Means Born Here Of Citizen Parents - Know Islam, No Peace -No Islam, Know Peace)
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To: Oldeconomybuyer

Do Nancy Pelosi’s vineyard workers fall into the “Undocumented” category?


8 posted on 09/01/2017 2:05:18 PM PDT by tired&retired (Blessings)
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To: Oldeconomybuyer

Grape pickers should get $15/hour!


9 posted on 09/01/2017 2:07:24 PM PDT by <1/1,000,000th%
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To: Oldeconomybuyer

Nancy Pelosi’s vineyard makes her fourth-richest Californian in Congress

http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-pol-ca-richest-nancy-pelosi-vineyard-story.html


10 posted on 09/01/2017 2:10:03 PM PDT by tired&retired (Blessings)
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To: Oldeconomybuyer

A 2006 piece at American Thinker stated:

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2006/11/pelosis_illegal_alien_employee.html

As Peter Schweizer notes in his best-selling expose of liberal hypocrisy, “Do As I Say (Not As I Do),” part of the fortune of this defender of the working man is a Napa Valley vineyard worth $25 million that she owns with her husband.

The vineyard produces expensive grapes for high-end wines. Napa grapes bring up to $4,000 a ton compared with $300 a ton for, say, San Joaquin grapes.

Loraine Stewart, a farmworker advocate with Napa Valley Community Housing, in a 2004 San Francisco Chronicle article estimated that half of the migrant labor force in the valley consisted of undocumented workers, without whom “not one bottle of wine would get made here.”

But Pelosi, winner of the 2003 Cesar Chavez award from the United Farm Workers, hires only nonunion workers and sells these grapes to nonunion wineries. ...

Which makes Pelosi’s steadfast opposition to any attempts to enhance border security and stem the flow of illegal immigration into the U.S. all the more interesting since she seems to be among those rich employers who financially benefit from a steady supply of cheap foreign labor. ...

The source book, Do As I Say (Not As I Do), also has this quote on pages 150-151:

The Pelosis own a large stake in an exclusive, fifty-room hotel and resort in Napa, California. Auberge du Soleil features a world-class French restaurant, a luxury spa, and beautiful rooms with cottages, all in the ambience of Provence...The hotel resort has more than fifty rooms and boasts more than 250 employees - but it is a strictly nonunion shop. The dishwashers, maid staff, busboys, and bellboys (many of them Hispanic immigrants) might be targeted in membership drives by HERE (note: an AFL-CIO union), but at Auberge they will have to face management alone.

[snip]

... the Pelosis are also partners in a restaurant chain called Piatti. ... The chain boasts sixteen restaurants in five states and has more than nine hundred employees. ... But work there ... and you can’t get a union card. As with Auberge du Soleil, at Piatti the Pelosis’ commitment to organized labor ends at the front door.


11 posted on 09/01/2017 2:20:06 PM PDT by tired&retired (Blessings)
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To: Oldeconomybuyer

Is it 50 million working age Americans who are out of the labor force? Or is the figure higher?


12 posted on 09/01/2017 2:30:34 PM PDT by PGR88
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To: Oldeconomybuyer

Recall just a few weeks ago, the news that California was by 2018, California will have issued one million drivers licenses to illegal aliens. These people must have a means of support and there presence in the unskilled labor market does distort the economics of hiring farm workers.

http://dailycaller.com/2017/07/26/1-million-illegal-immigrants-to-have-california-drivers-license-by-2018/


13 posted on 09/01/2017 2:45:16 PM PDT by theBuckwheat
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To: Rusty0604

That’s why the anchor baby loophole must go and be made retroactive from the last 20 years. Okay, maybe that’s a little difficult, last 19 years.


14 posted on 09/01/2017 2:55:28 PM PDT by Boomer (Have RINO republican pols been radicalized somehow?)
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To: Oldeconomybuyer
Part of the drop in new arrivals is attributable to tougher border enforcement

Gee, what a concept~ Go Trump!

15 posted on 09/01/2017 3:56:05 PM PDT by dragnet2 (Diversion and evasion are tools of deceit)
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To: <1/1,000,000th%
After all the punitive taxes in CA, that 15. per hour comes to about 7 bucks...☺
16 posted on 09/01/2017 3:57:20 PM PDT by dragnet2 (Diversion and evasion are tools of deceit)
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To: Boomer

It should be. That was meant for children of slaves. Not for women coming here in labor. Some border towns actually have to send ambulances to pick up women standing at the border in labor.


17 posted on 09/01/2017 4:10:31 PM PDT by Rusty0604
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To: dragnet2

I think you’re right.


18 posted on 09/01/2017 4:54:27 PM PDT by <1/1,000,000th%
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