Who will pick the turnips?

Chris, thank you for this column, and for your persistent work to educate us all. I thought I’d add one other thing that the (self-interested) Tory Brit ought to be thinking of (but isn’t): even before “who’s going to wipe my bum when I get old?”, ought to be “who’s going to create the wealth that will sustain me when I can no longer work?” IIUC the dependency ratio in many Western countries is dropping dangerously, except in those that continue to accept immigrants in large numbers.

But then again, maybe the Tory Brit plan is that the entire workforce will eventually be brought in on guest visas, underpaid, and their surplus labor skimmed off to care for the aged. [record-scratch] buy ever-more luxury yachts for plutocrats.

Fourth option: (the ‘USA!USA!USA!’ plan) Continue to use the EU migrants in an illegal capacity for even cheaper labor and greater opportunities to exploit them.

My 97-year old mother still lives at home but has had a number of emergency hospitalizations followed up by rehabilitation in skilled nursing facilities. The bulk of the less skilled work, wiping bottoms, bathing and janitorial work, is done by African immigrants. Most are from Somalia.

These workers do not shy from personal contact with strangers and they do not consider the work itself demeaning. But few native born citizens would ever consider taking one of these jobs. Robots will not be taking over these tasks in any foreseeable future. If these workers didn’t exist some of the ill and elderly might be cared for by family but others don’t have any family. The economic consequences of family care would be considerable. Adult family are often still of working age and are trying to support themselves even as the social safety net continues to unravel. Anti-immigrant policies appeal to economic principles but this is just cover for policy makers exploiting racism and fear of the foreign.

Labor is a minuscule fraction of the final cost to consumers for agricultural produce. For example, increasing the cost of tomatoes picked in Florida by a penny a pound was estimated to increase the yearly income of the tomato pickers by 7,000 USD. Pass that on to consumers and they won’t even notice.

https://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/19/us/19farm.html

Above and beyond the particular numbers – your argument is identical to those typically deployed against raising the minimum wage. How do you feel about raising the minimum wage?

Dear Chris,

I have been posting here since about 2004 under this name. How I am violating your comments policy?

W.r.t. to the merits. In 2011 an agreement was reached dramatically increasing the wages of tomato pickers in the US. Consumers didn’t notice. That seems like strong evidence consumers will not notice in this similar situation. So owners will raise wages and get the workers they need.

Furthermore, nobody is talking about “employment levels across an economy”. Whenever increases in the minimum wage are proposed, people always argue that fast-food and agriculture, specifically, will somehow be decimated. But they have historically been wrong.

You are arguing that agriculture will be decimated. I doubt that for the same reason that I doubt that minimum wage increases will decimate agriculture. Also – doesn’t it bother you that you are making arguments so similar to those used to fight minimum wage increases?

Maybe in relation to the last option, a idea can be borrowed from the Soviet Union (I think it’s still used in Turkmenistan – always a good place to model your state on!) – have a mandatory period of two weeks or so where university students and other students are required to go to the country and pick produce. Quite a few of my friends from Russia had “fond memories” (or some sort of memories, in any case) of when they would be required to leave for a few weeks and work doing agricultural work. Because it was treated as part of their education, I think they didn’t even have to be paid for it, making it even cheaper than imported labor!

@Chris Bertram Maybe you are right that they’ll suddenly offer much higher wages, the workers will come and the consumers won’t notice. But I’m not convinced. [T]he vegetables have to come from somewhere, at some price.

1) I’m sure people advocating for these changes in immigration laws understand this perfectly. Driving unskilled immigrant labor out is the whole point. It would be a mistake to think that they are deluded. They have thought about it, and that is what they want, explicitly. If that means more expensive brocoli and fewer nurses, so be it, as far as they are concerned. It would be presumptuous to think that they don’t know perfectly well what are the likely consequences of their favored policies.

2) Changes I intensely desire will, if effected, heavily disrupt some sectors. Changes I vehemently oppose are changing some sectors right now in much more profound ways than changes in immigration laws ever could. That a law changes the way some sectors function, sometimes quite dramatically, is the point of a law, not in itself an argument for or against it.

3) If in a country as rich and productive as the UK, “social care, construction, hospitality and agriculture” as a matter of fact cannot survive without cheap immigrant labors (something I doubt, by the way), then that is a strong indictment of these sectors, the labor laws and the organization of the economy. Not so much a persuasive defense of immigration laws from a leftwing point of view. It seems to me that the latter should strive for a situation in which no occupation is so unpalatable that only desperate immigrants agree to take it (a corollary being that no occupation would be dependent, strictly speaking, on unskilled immigrants).

4) In the era of environmental destruction, the prices of vegetables should not be a function of supply and demand as computed on a market.

Now perhaps your whole point was to underline the fact that right-wing, free-market policies are self-contradictory, and especially so when it comes to food production or care work, in which case, well, yeah.

There’s a fourth option, which is that the UK government will decide that it’s good for business to have a pool of short-term workers whose presence is technically illegal, but tolerated in practice, precisely because those workers can then be exploited in other illegal ways with little risk of them complaining about it. Look at the pattern in the US, for example: undocumented immigrants are persecuted and periodically rounded up for deportation, but there are almost never sanctions for the employers who chose to hire these workers illegally (a list of employers that notably includes the sitting President of the country). I would guess that few EU citizens would be desperate enough to work in the UK under such conditions, but willing workers might be found from elsewhere.

It also makes sense as a long-term Tory policy to reduce the average education level of the UK resident citizen population (e.g. by hiking university fees to an unaffordable level, and/or encouraging British graduates to emigrate): a less educated electorate is likely to be more socially conservative. The Conservatives have a strong electoral coalition now, with overwhelming support among those who are ‘economically inactive’ by virtue of having reached retirement age, but they potentially face a demographic disaster in the younger cohorts; the much higher proportion of university degrees may be a factor in that. We are nearly at the point where the majority of the UK government’s electoral support comes from those who are not interested in employment because they are already pensioners. What implications will this sort of ‘democratic gerontocracy’ have for the government’s economic priorities?

@16: FWIW ‘nope@nope.com’ is such a natural choice for a syntactically correct but invalid email address that, barring the various named posters using IPs from the same geographic area or posting from a similar ideological position, I’d be very surprised if they were all the same person.

@15:

What implications will this sort of ‘democratic gerontocracy’ have for the government’s economic priorities?

I’d be surprised if government priorities change all that much. At the demographic level, the economic interests of the idle elderly are entirely congruent with the decades long, trans-national, small-c conservative ideology of asset stripping the future to pay for the present. The only difference between the economic ideology of the elderly and the ideology of Thatcher/Reagan conservatives is that the elderly demand economic rents for themselves rather than for billionaires. Similarly, the social interests of the idle elderly are already factored into in conservative policies, namely a desire to recreate the idealized fiction of their own childhoods by trying to turn back the clock to the middle of the 1900s.

My impression from talking to someone who works in agriculture in the UK is wages aren’t actually that low as is, but where the problem is is that it’s a difficult job and so will be difficult to find people as good at it as those who currently do it. Replacing experienced workers with students would lead to a considerable drop in productivity, and mechanisation for the sorts of tasks that producers need labour for is still a long way off.

I can imagine (I stress, imagine) a government that adopted stricter restrictions on immigration as part of a strategy to place pressure on employers to improve the lot of the bulk of employees, including by raising their pay (and which would then presumably adjust policy in the course of implementation, as developments indicate how best to work towards that goal of improving the lot of employees). But in this instance we’re talking about the Conservatives, right? and more specifically about Boris Johnson’s Conservative Party, right? So that’s not the natural expectation, is it? The natural expectation is that they will be almost entirely indifferent to the impact of what they’re doing on the bulk of employees and will make no adjustments in the interest of employees as events unfold. Who thinks Conservatives will be pleased with their leaders if wages do rise sharply? How would that happen, exactly?

“as a certain K. Marx pointed out over a century ago.”

Well, yes, One of the things he pointed out being that it requires the reserve army of the unemployed for it to be possible for the capitalists to keep labour wages down. In the absence of such an army then when full employment arrives (if) then the capitalists will have to compete with each other for access to those workers they wish to exploit.

Real wages rise when there’s full employment.

At least some part of Britain’s reserve army has, in recent years, been ordinarily resident in Brno, Kracow, Wroclaw. €50 flights make it easy enough to come when the labour force needs expanding, leave when it contracts. Some to many have been doing so.

I do get that CB has certain views on migration, open borders and the rest. But the economic effect of this restriction of mobility (and only the economic effect) is pretty clear. Higher low end wages in the UK.

As a purely economic observation it’s difficult – for me at least – to see what’s wrong or undesirable about that.

@Chris I think, not necessarily, as they may be driven by short-term political considerations rather than having worked out some long-term strategy

Certainly. But in that respect, they are just like everybody else. I think it is dangerous in principle and probably empirically false in the case under discussion to believe that people who want less unskilled immigrants do so because they haven’t thought through the likely consequences. Probably, they have, in just about the same proportion as others think through the likely consequences of their policies of choice. The most likely explanation for their continued support is their perception that they will overall be among the winners (according to their own criteria), not their mistaken belief that there will be only winners.

Since global inequality isn’t going away, it isn’t necessarily a bad thing if there are options in wealthier countries that are attractive to migrants but not so much for natives.

I disagree profoundly with you on that. I believe that a fundamental tenet of a just society, indeed a necessary condition for the concept of just society to endure, is that every place in this society is equally acceptable in principle for everybody. That runs directly in contradiction with the idea that some options should be unattractive to any given class as defined by arbitrary legal properties (such as being native). If a society or some sectors thereof cannot function without such fundamentally unjust schemes or if it cannot accommodate its immigrant population influx without, then this society has to change deeply, and among the necessary changes, there are not many reasons to believe that preserving the influx of immigrants is a priority, and even far fewer reasons to believe that the priority should be to preserve the endangered sectors. Same argument of course for shoes manufactured by children in Laos or for limes grown in Palestinian Occupied Territories.

Let me repeat though that I doubt that the UK is actually such a society; it seems to me clearly wealthy and productive enough to offer its unskilled immigrants a welcoming society, with decent wages and working conditions aligned on those offered to natives, while having a functional agricultural sector. Not under free-market principles, with international competitions against other countries with far lower standards, and not without dynamic redistribution mechanisms (for instance to ensure living wages to agricultural workers while maintaining affordable prices for locally grown vegetables), but that is another debate (or maybe precisely the right debate).

Your observation about global wealth inequalities indicates, under this analysis, that the global system is very far from a just society (not a big surprise). The way to build one is not destroying the preconditions of justice at a national or local level.

Ultimately, my concern is that if the debate is framed as “unskilled immigrants or no turnips”, or at a more macro level “the EU or a recession”, the some people will chose “no turnips” and “a recession”. They have, already. The problem is with the alternative. We want locally grown vegetables. We want the workers picking them paid a decent wage and offered the full protection of labor laws and the welfare state. We want this option to be an acceptable one for our own children. We want their children to go to good school. We want to be able to afford the vegetables. All of that is possible, without mutual contradiction. All of that at the same time is in stark contradiction with other political principles. These should be the ones argued against. There should the rhetorical battle be waged, not in conjuring contradictions between our legitimate desires.

The assumption that unskilled labour will be „driven out“ is completely baseless. Immigrant labour will be available as long as capitalists are asking for it. Whoever thinks that the Tory fascists will say no to the capitalists is deluded.

The difference will be that they – the immigrant workers – will be far more vulnerable, economically and legally. Which is precisely what both the capitalists and the Tory fascists want.

https://www.monbiot.com/2004/05/25/the-immigrants-the-tabloids-love/

@24:

My quip that future England-Wales will be North Korea on the Channel is based more on the rise of authoritarian, isolationist, politics and the likelihood of substantial relative decline in living standards (particularly for those under pension age), not on any serious belief that the English-Welsh economy will literally collapse to the point that people will be forced to eat grass.

(I say England-Wales here because some form of greater independence for Scotland and Northern Ireland seems increasingly likely.)

I’ve been predicting (to myself) that one of the results of Brexit will be the expulsion of most currently resident EU citizens. For example, IIRC there was a 50% denial rate on the first wave of EU citizens who applied for permission to stay. A right-wing xenophobic government which will impoverish the UK will need scapegoats, and ‘furriners’ are the easiest.

This will, of course trigger a matching expulsion of UK citizens from the EU.

Lots and lots of hatred, which right-wing governments love.

UK Japan robots, etc. The crucial difference is the ethno-historic ethos – namely the notion of inter-dependency over independence. Independence is generally regarded (without much critical examination) as a positive attribute. Interdependence is favored in more socially-conservative societies. So, yes, the drive towards robotics (not robots) for self-cleaning rooms, transportation vertically and horizontally, and automated monitoring and testing are all part of the Japanese future. The three-generation family still matters and Hidari is exactly correct in suggesting that preserving a national ethnicity (avoiding a great deal of unwanted cultural dilution) is absolutely a desired outcome.

Preserving the constructed idea of a Japanese cultural identity (or identities), colonial warts and all, incidentally preserves the liberal arts in the universities. Very recently the mandarins determined the nation would be better off with all students in STEM, but the guardians of the national culture in their various institutions, including the imperial household and national universities, wouldn’t have it – and that the liberal arts survive in Japanese universities, at least in the short term.

A very large number of people I know, neighbours etc., consider caring for their own elderly a genuine joy, as well as a duty and an honour. Modern ‘liberalism’ with its unchallenged notion that independence trumps interdependence leaves very little room for duty to parents and for honouring the elderly, who it seems can only be blamed for the bad in the world. What good does exist appears only to lie in self-loathing, guilt, and a desire to atone for the ‘crimes’ of those who came before.

Nobody wants to be forced to pick turnips, nor is the work much fun. The fact that so many believe that ‘caring for the elderly’ should be out-sourced to strangers might be seen as a mark of selfishness,ingratitude, and stunning myopia. None of us will live forever, and being cared for by our children and grandchildren in home we have built seems a great deal more attractive to me, than lying in a care facility waiting to die surrounded by strangers, many of whom may well be caring professionals, but strangers all the same.

Quality of life is something we can improve without doing much more than engaging in some serious reflection and introspection. The world is a bridge and all we have is on loan – everything. The importance of our relationships with our elderly is superseded only by the importance of our relationships with our children. Sadly, we seem unable to manage or even remember the value of either today. The reward for all is in the labor, not in shopping, writing a great novel, or getting published in a top journal.

CB 32: „Well, linking to a 16-year-old article from George Monbiot definitely makes your point ….“

Yes it does, doesn’t it?

‘I mean, you can drive your economy into a recession to keep things stable, and that’s what fascists usually do’.

Er no they absolutely do not do that.

Chris Bertram 02.22.20 at 8:25 am

” At the point where there was an 85-page form to complete to secure “permanent residence” there were a lot of refusals because any “mistake” got pounced on by Home Office officials with a culture of refusal. There are far fewer under the “settled status” scheme. Not that things are perfect with the new scheme, but they are much much better.”

‘Culture of refusal’ is a great phrase to describe my thinking. 3 million people have been moved to a situation where they have a great burden of proof against a hostile bureaucracy to continue living their lives where they have been, in some cases for many decades.

CB@26: if I have understood you correctly on this and previous threads, one of your fundamental beliefs is that it is entirely wrong for the government of a state to differentiate between the welfare of its citizens and the welfare of non-citizens.

Well, that’s interesting. If you believe it is true, then of course it is wrong for a government to deport non-citizens, or to restrict entry into the state of some non-citizens.

But I think there may be some counter-examples. Citizens giving aid and comfort to an enemy of the state in wartime have been charged with treason: non-citizens, not. John Amery, a British fascist, was hanged for treason for his pro-Nazi actions in WWII: a non-UK citizen, for the same actions, could not have been.

Conversely, the present UK international aid scheme delivers a rather large amount of money to non-UK citizens, and it is to be hoped they benefit from it. At the same time, UK citizens receive less welfare, in that they pay more taxes or receive less Government funding, than they would otherwise have done.

Both of these seem to me to be cases of the Government differentiating between the welfare of its own citizens, and that of non-citizens, to the benefit of the latter.

I’m not at all saying that either of these policies are mistaken. But how do they square with what I think is one of your fundamental beliefs? Have I misunderstood you?

nope should also note that when Georgia increased the severity of their immigration laws, crops rotted in the fields because even higher wages (which the untrained locals were unqualified for) could not make the back breaking work more attractive

https://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2012/05/17/the-law-of-unintended-consequences-georgias-immigration-law-backfires/#9c12190492aa

@48
How do you know this?

As I mentioned, AMLO won the presidency, in part, on his plan to solve the mass emigration problem that started with NAFTA. Emigrants are forced to abandom their families and communities that have then been taken over by drug cartels. Emigrants, mostly young men, are the healthiest sector of the population when they leave. After two years in the US, they are the unhealthiest, due to bad diets, overwork, loneliness, and drugs. In Mexico, AIDS is most prevalent among agricultural workers and in rural areas.

I know much about emigration, and so do most Mexicans, by talking with many of them and through journalistic and academic studies of the phenomenon, but I will mention only this: it is a tragedy and it is not the future of any nation. Surely you must know that there are two sides to this coin?

Hidari, Simon Jenkins knows all those things, he just doesn’t care. Jenkins was an HIV denialist for years, and the fact that he is still able to show his face in public is an indictment of the British media.

Lupita’s comment at 52 is a good example of the dangerous lies and misdirections that bedevil the “class first” analysts on this site. “AIDS” (he/she means HIV I presume) is not “most prevalent among agricultural workers and in rural areas”, it is most prevalent among sexual minorities, in particular men who have sex with men and transgender people. It has a very very low prevalence in the general heterosexual population, and in Mexico as in much of the world it is a disease of discrimination and stigmatization, not economic inequality. But for the Lupitas of the left it is not possible to consider a politics based on sexual identity or stigmatized behavior, everything has to reduce to class, so the people actually affected by the disease have to be ignored in favour of an incredibly tiny number of farmers who almost certainly got it because they were engaging in those stigmatized behaviors.

I keep saying this on this website, and I know I’m going to have to say it again, but this is an academic website and it really really helps if you get basic facts right before you give your “analysis”. Facts may not care about your feelings, but you should really make an effort to care about getting the facts right before you bother to have opinions.

The argument about low paid agricultural migrants is surely *not* about raising wages. It’s about choking off a segment of the labour supply. Perhaps in the long term things can adjust, but in the short term there will be substantial friction required to create a new workforce from the native population. It actually takes skill to pick turnips, and specific physical attributes to manage it for a long period.

People who imagine that higher wages will solve the issue might want to ask themselves how much pay would entice they themselves to give up their current job for a life of turnip picking, and how many turnips they might expect to pick per day. And how they will find work in the off season. Consider how that penny per pound = $7000 per year is dependent on the pickers picking 3.2 metric tons of tomatoes per day, every day, for the 100 day growing season. What proportion of the UK/US non-agricultural workforce is able and willing to do that? I don’t think an additional $7000 is enough.

This argument is in a sense the *opposite* of the argument about the minimum wage – the illustration in that case is the lack of elasticity of minimum wage labour. Raising the low end wages, we saw, had little effect on the labour market. So if you want to fix your fresh produce labour supply issue with a wage change – you are going to have to raise those wages by a heck of a lot. And hope that the supply chain smoothly “pass on” the costs to consumers, instead of just opting to import instead.

Barry, maybe I’ll make the time to write something when I’m not busy making up stories about Bangladeshi space-ship merchants. A lot of the evidence comes from reading news over many years or from watching how my own migrant life has changed – for example, I have my “foreigner registration card” pinned to my wall as a memory, because now I have a residence card (and when I first came here 14 years ago I had an “alien registration card”, but they changed the name after foreigners complained). Some of that information is inside knowledge from working in health policy, but here for example is a report in English about the program for bringing nurses, which demonstrates the importance of the language problem, here is a report on the new law requiring prefectures to teach Japanese to all foreign residents, and here is a report from the (conservative, I think) Mainichi Shinbun on plans to reform immigration (including upgrading the bureau to an agency). I hope those three articles make it clear that the Japanese government is not planning to use robots to replace foreigners.

You hear a lot of this stuff, incidentally, if you hang around kickboxers, because a lot of them are in mid-level management positions that are really feeling the pinch of the low birth rate. My kickboxing buddy who works in civil engineering complains that they can’t find any mid-career engineers, and have to try and grab people from university and train them up; other guys I train with who work in construction companies tell me all their basic labourers are Chinese. This is called “san k” (three k) work, meaning dangerous, dirty and difficult, and it’s super hard to find Japanese to do it in an economy with such a low unemployment rate. A lot of these jobs are not easily automated and actually require quite specialized skills – you haven’t lived until you’ve seen a Japanese removal company at work, and when you realize what they’re paid you’ll probably die – and the Japanese economy is so huge they bring in all manner of weird jobs. When I lived in Beppu I knew a Thai student who was paid to translate between two Thai elephant wranglers and their Japanese colleagues in a local zoo, which had brought them over to train the Japanese dudes.

People think of Japan as a massive industrial economy, which it is, but there is an enormous service industry supporting that industrial economy, and a lot of the service jobs cannot be automated. Japan is welcoming a growing number of foreigners as a result, and it’s super frustrating to see people who know nothing about the country making assumptions about it based on 30 year out-of-date information.

I agree that Faustnotes comments on migration to Japan are useful and interesting, but of course it’s worth noting that the % foreign-born population of Japan – now at the highest in a very long time, if not ever – is only about 2.3%, and of those, only about 28% have permanent residence. Contrast this w/ Australia, which is about 29% foreign born, or the US, which is about 13.6% foreign born, and the perspective changes at least a little bit. We should be glad that Japan is opening up, and it does seem to be doing so more and more, but it has a long way to go before being an immigrant society, and was starting from an absurdly low base. (Japan is also really bad at granting asylum, even though the number of cases are very low. The most recent number I could find is that 42 cases are approved out of about 10,400 applications in 2018, with another 97 granted permission to stay on other grounds. Contrast this with about a 40% grant rate, with massively higher applicant numbers, in Germany. Japan does donate a lot of money to help refugees in other countries, and that’s not nothing, but it’s a bad country on actually granting asylum.)

I don’t know what inference should be drawn from it but having grown up in the country I did a lot more than 2 weeks of farm work during uni vacations and do have generally positive memories of it. Also when I was younger a lot of people used to pick their own strawberries, raspberries, etc (you paid by weight when you left the farm).