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Farming Like It’s 1699 | National Review

The Farm Workforce Modernization Act is going to a vote on Wednesday.

National Review

Even though a lot of this is brain-dead and racist it manages to make one (1) good coherent point which makes it the “best” NRO article I’ve read lately (my reading habits are occasionally masochistic and Google News feeds me a ton of these, don’t @ me). I guess in their search for talking points against this bill that don’t consist solely of frothing at the mouth about “illegals” they accidentally landed on this, which, you know what they say about broken clocks.

The House is expected to vote Wednesday on the hilariously misnamed Farm Workforce Modernization Act, which would “modernize” agricultural labor right back to the 17th century.

At the core of the bill are several indentured-labor schemes intended to tie current illegal aliens and future “temporary” workers to farm jobs for four to ten years before giving them green cards. The reason for the indenture system is that farmers know from experience that once the illegal aliens or visa workers get green cards, almost all will flee the medieval labor system that prevails in much of fresh fruit and vegetable agriculture. […]

To prevent the newly legalized illegals from running off to take construction or service jobs in town, the bill gives them a new “Certified Agricultural Worker” visa, which they need to keep for a period of time before becoming free workers. For those who’d already worked illegally in farming for at least ten years, the period of indenture would be four years; eight years for those who’d been working in farming for less than ten years. Only after putting in their time would the amnestied illegals be able to upgrade to get green cards and leave plantation labor behind. A separate ten-year period of indenture for a green card is established for legal workers on the existing (numerically unlimited) H-2A farmworker visa — that’s where future indentured will come from after today’s illegals all get their green cards and hightail it out of the fields. […]

The bill, H.R. 5038, is co-sponsored by 28 Democrats and 25 Republicans, and was okayed by the House Judiciary Committee last month, without any hearings. […]

So long as American agri-business can rely on a continually replenished supply for foreign labor, it has little incentive to invest in automation. Neil Munro over at Breitbart juxtaposed of a series of tweets by the United Farmworkers, showing hard-working farm laborers, with machines (mostly developed abroad) that doing the same jobs immeasurably faster. Perhaps most striking was a UFW tweet showing a woman, literally kneeling in the dirt, picking radishes with remarkable speed and dexterity, contrasted with a Japanese radish-harvesting machine that was orders of magnitude more productive.

One is left to assume that the solution to this problem is to Build The Wall, as if what has objectively not worked in the past will work in the future, and without regards to the fact that it’s precisely the illegalisation of migrants (rather than just their existence) that keeps that labor so cheap and disciplined in the first place. If what you really wanted to do was drive mechanisation instead of driving internment camps there are much easier and more obvious ways to do it. But always trust conservatives to overlook the obvious.

Ah so it won’t be prisoners, but “illegal aliens”… I was wondering if something like this would happen after all the reports of food rotting on the vine because migrant workers were too scared to come back