Whether it qualifies as 'an honest day's work' these days - or a cruel and punishing existence - I'll leave for you to decide.
[0] https://youtu.be/41vETgarh_8?si=S0dBolFjv04SSprh&t=497
[1] https://www.npr.org/2023/09/25/1201524399/child-labor-perdue...
In the years I was doing it we all just lined up on one end of the field and walked the length of it pulling the tassles from the top of every stalk of corn. We started before dawn, soaked in the dew of the fields and freezing cold. And we ended early afternoon, soaked in sweat.
Pretty messed up in hindsight, though I can't say I've spent too much time thinking about it over the years. The only real lasting impact it's had on me is a crippling fear of grasshoppers, after being swarmed by them a few times in the fields.
> Because of immigration these jobs are not really available for citizens anymore. I haven't heard of any teenagers taking this work in some time
I don't think immigration was what killed those jobs for citizen teens. I think it was more like rising prosperity such that they didn't want to do those jobs anymore. I can recall teens regularly canvassing the neighborhood in the 90s asking if we wanted our lawn mowed. But that stopped by around 2000. It's unheard of now. Immigration didn't stop them from doing that, it was more of a cultural shift that caused them not to desire to do that kind of work anymore.
[and sure, immigrants have taken over the lawn maintenance field, but their prices aren't cheap - most of them charge a few $hundred just to start service which is generally in the $200/month range now where I'm at. Teens could undercut these prices easily and still do well, but they don't seem interested]
Teens would be much more likely to mow lawns if the lawn care market had more money in it.
85F / 90% humidity is probably more taxing than 100F / 30% RH.
Yeah, I got my first job working on a family dairy when I turned 14. It was tough work, especially having to wake up at 3:30am on the weekends to go work outside in negative temperatures over the winters. It did help me purchase my first car and other things that my friends either couldn't afford or had to have their parents buy for them.
But the rest of the reaction seems a little out of place. Maybe it's a major culture difference: we're mostly cosmopolitan white collars with luxury time & luxury salaries, and they're our rural countrymen working with their hands and having to make ends meet.
Is it our place to judge them so harshly?
Well, turned out a lot of the young generation didn't like the hours or the pay, and if they dud show up on time they worked at a fraction of the speed of the usual "imported" workers.
Was quite a bit of ruckus in the news about this, as farmers failed to get their crops harvested.
Not that I would have done much better, it's fairly brutal, monotonous work.
We weren't lacking teenagers. We were lacking a dirt cheap seasonal exploitable massive workforce. There are not enough teens even if we conscripted them all. And if you don't, teens don't like doing work. Most teens don't live in the sticks anymore. And (for teens) we care about these stupid things like safety, a minimum wage, and labor laws.
It's not 1950 anymore. The world has changed. The reason we need migrant workers is WalMart. Their demand for ever lower prices creates the need for the lowest priced highest supply scalable labor due to a global supply chain and pricing pressure. You can't put the genie back in the bottle. Want cheap shit? Then you hire migrant workers. Or give up on farms and buy from overseas. Or make robots that can pick fruit. There's no free lunch.
Through 1864, roughly half of the ag states used slave labour.
California, nominally a free state, had developed (under Spanish and Mexican rule) using what was effectively slave native labour. Following statehood, ag labour was largely imported: from China in the 19th century, from Mexico and Japan in the 20th, with the Bracero programme (established in WWII), and of course Oakies during the dustbowl as immortalised in Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath, all of whom were at best severely politically marginalised. Conditions in the antebellum former Confederacy long disadvantaged labour as well.
The US National Labour Relations Act (NLRA, 1935) explicitly excluded farm labor from its protections (wages, hours, conditions, unions). California eventually pased the Agricultural Labour Relations Act (ALRA) forty years later, which provided for the right to unionise (Cesar Chavez and the National Farm Workers Association features strongly in promoting this), and ... even it is fairly weak sauce despite being the only significant ag labour law in the US.
Farming itself is a marginal business, and farm labour gets the short side of that stick. The underlying economic reasons are complex, and not readily solved. It's not that the present situation is fair to farm workers at all, but a sudden shift would likely be catastrophic across the board. I'd like to see a far fairer system, but it would take significant governance and management to roll out smoothly.
Per the OP, the US needed migrant workers in the 1960s and before that - the OP is about a failed experiment in replacing migrant workers.
(I'm not certain of the exact timing of the farm labor program in China.)
Pretty much any summer job would pay more, and in the end less and less teens decided to pick strawberries. Farmers complained, and then started flying inn south-east Asian rice farmers to pick berries instead. Relative to their pay back home, picking berries in Norway was a pretty sweet deal. Many still go there annually to pick during berry season.
They live cramped in a cottage, and work all day. If it's a good season, they make good money. If it's a bad season, they break even. Unfortunately there are some pretty scummy farmers that will exploit the situation. Here's a short docu following Thai pickers in Sweden: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vW1QWG3xSNg
[1] - https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/ag-and-food-statistic...
Also a weird thing is happening with automation, it’s getting a lot cheaper, bespoke tooling and machines are going through a substantial revolution. And that is not including any AI stuff. The price of small batch electronics and machines are dropping fast.
That's where they're intending to start (deporting those convicted of, possibly charged with, other crimes). Neither he nor his representatives have said that that's where they'll stop.
The same one Trump promised would be "the largest deportation program in American history"?
We've already had years of the Trumposphere emitting contradictory bullshit, and whenever you are considering an entity that that does not care about truth or honesty or ethics, it's sensible to assume that the outcome will be less than good.
If your business needs illegal labour, then it's not a viable business, and it should die. If your pay is so low that no one wants to do your work, why should you be able to break the law with impunity because your business can't compete? Innovate, or die.
https://www.axios.com/2024/11/19/undocumented-workers-immigr...
This is why Bernie opposed rampant illegal immigration before he sold out.
https://www.businessinsider.com/men-not-working-unemployment...
Sorry, just trying to summon libertarians.
Besides, child slaves do the jobs Americans don't want to do! You're socially immoral if you don't support it.
The economic cost is the goal. The racial cleansing is just how that cost is initially justified to the base.
Once the economy really starts heading south, blame Democrats and other phantom enemies. It's much harder to jail the opposition and overturn democracy when things are going well. The blueprints are Venezuela and Argentina.
That seems less likely to me than either simple racism or a poor understanding of economics.
Here are two other Russian proxies achieving totalitarianism. Economically, they're not doing it by racking up pats on the back:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crisis_in_Venezuela
https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/PPPPC@WEO/VEN
https://apnews.com/article/argentina-economy-crisis-javier-m...
