At first, perhaps. Just as prices first rise when environmental regulations are imposed perhaps prices will rise as we "transition" to mechanization. But if Gunnar and Buttigeig get to assume that such new laws will accelerate invention and technological advancement, than why can't I? And your point doesn't answer the question of what the American people did before 1962 when we first adopted policies that fostered a tidal wave of illegal immigration. How were the apples picked or the drywall hung back then? Did your grandparents live in a house and eat apple pie? Or did all your excellent Washington state apples just rot on the vine before 1962?
Ajax, why are you asking me these questions when the answers are literally at your fingertips?
My grandparents weren't orchardists. One was a wheat farmer. The other raised sheep and ran a grain elevator. In Canada. I'm one of those anchor babies you despise. Except that I"m white, so maybe you don't.
Both grandparents lived in the same tiny town in southern Alberta -- one of three either founded or heavily populated by Mormon immigrants from the U.S.: Cardston, McGrath and Raymond. Didn't you ever wonder why one of the earliest LDS temples was built out on the windswept prairies of nowhere Alberta? It's a fascinating little bit of history, should you take the time to read up on it. But it's more complicated than that: my father's father was born in Smoot, Wyoming -- a small rural town in Star Valley. When he was just an infant, his family emigrated to Canada. So, that's two successive generation of immigrants -- once to Canada, once to the U.S.
Here's what you don't seem to grasp: people go where the work is. In a free market system, the market depends on workers being able to go where they are needed. It's one of the most fundamental and powerful forces in a capitalist economy. The market doesn't give a crap about national borders. If governments try to stop the free flow of labor, the market will create enormous incentives for workers to move across the border anyway. And they will.
Wheat farming was mechanized in 1962. It was planted by machine and harvested by machine. My maternal grandfather would go out to "the ranch" to plant in the spring and then to harvest in the fall. I never went there, as it didn't have running water or, at least when I was younger, electricity. Because it was mechanized, the need for seasonal labor wasn't nearly as large as that for raising apples.
The only apples that are native to Washington are crabapples. Apples came to North American from Europe. The first apples were believed to have been planted in Washington in 1826. They were grown on small family farms in Western Washington and were consumed mainly by the people who raised them.
Commercial production of apples began in Washington in the late 1890s. By then, orchardists had discovered that the climate in the river valleys just east of the Cascade range was an ideal place to grow apples -- they just needed water and a seasonal work force. Rural coops were formed to create the irrigation infrastructure needed to grow the apples. Seasonal labor could, early on, be provided by otherwise unemployed women and children. People my age who grew up in those areas had two weeks off from school in the fall for "apples."
Very early in commercial production, the number of apples produced vastly exceeded the local demand. Once railroads were completed, orchardists had a way to export apples to major markets to the east. By the late 1920s, less than 40 years after planting of the first commercial orchards, Washington was the leading producer of apples in the U.S., exporting them to all major U.S. markets and some overseas markets.
Getting apples from trees in Washington to Chicago or New York without bruising the hell out of them required a huge amount of manual labor in large bursts over relatively short period of time. As the industry grew, the locals could not provide all of that labor. So, the industry had to rely on migrant labor -- generally immigrants. The nationality of the immigrants who provided the labor depended on whatever migration patterns were happening in the U.S. generally: northern Europeans, then southern Europeans, then Japanese and Filipinos, then Mexicans and other hispanic folks from Latin America.
So, now, lay the history of immigration and, more importantly, immigration law on top of that. In 1790, the U.S first enacted legislation that restricted naturalization of immigrants. "Free white people" of "good moral character" could become citizens after residing here for two years. The residence period changed over the years, but the "free white people" part stayed in place until 1870, when Black africans and their descendants became eligible for citizenship. In 1798, Congress enacted the Aliens Friends Act and the Alien Enemies Act. The former allowed the President to deport dangerous people. The latter allowed deportation of immigrants from hostile nations during times of way.
The U.S began to enact restrictions on immigration in 1875. They were targeted at "undesirable people" -- banning criminals, people with contagious diseases, polygamists, anarchists, beggars and importers of prostitutes. Race-based bans were also put in place, first on Chinese immigrants and then more generally on Asian immigrants.
The arrival of a huge wave of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe between 1860 and 1890 sparked increased regulation of immigration. In 1890, the percentage of foreign born U.S. residents peaked at almost 15%. Also, more immigrants came to work in the U.S. but then returned to their home countries. So, as the apple industry in Washington grew to become the leading source of apples, there was plenty of migrant immigrant labor available to meet its highly seasonal labor demands.
In 1921, the U.S. enacted its first immigration caps in the The Emergency Quota Act of 1921, which applied to migration from the eastern hemisphere. The limits did not apply to migration from Mexico or other nations in the Western Hemisphere. This was a substantial change in immigration law. Before this law, immigration was regulated by excluding certain categories of people -- anyone not excluded could legally migrate. This law began the shift to requiring all immigrants to first obtain the federal government's permission to immigrate to the U.S.
In 1924, the Emergency Quota Act was followed by the National Origins Act, which refined the quota system. It also created the first immigration categories: quota immigrants, non-quota immigrants (spouses and unmarried children of quota immigrants), and temporary immigrants (those who came to work and then return to their country or origin). Again, the law applied only to immigrants from the eastern hemisphere. The southern border was open to immigration from Mexico and other Latin American countries.
The National Origins Act also imposed the first visa requirements -- immigrants for the first time had to apply to embassies in their countries of origin before they entered the U.S. and the Border Patrol was created both to inderdict alcohol smuggling (prohibition began in 1920 and ended in 1933) and to enforce the new immigration requirements.
Although the 1924 act resulted in a dramatic fall in immigration from Europe, it also resulted in a spike in immigration from Canada. As I said at the beginning, market forces don't care about political boundaries. Although immigrants that entered from the southern border were supposed to pay a head tax and obtain a visa, seasonal employers in agriculture helped their work force evade those requirements. The allowed the U.S. government to enforce the border only as economically needed. During the dust bowl years, when there was substantial internal migration from the great plains to the west coast, the U.S. forcibly deported about a million Mexicans and U.S citizens of Mexican ancestry because they couldn't prove their legal status, even though the Visa requirement had been in place for only 20 years. The impact of this "repatriation" was increased unemployment of U.S citizens.
There was also a significant debate about how the immigration laws applied to hispanic immigrants. Naturalization was still restricted to "free white people" and African blacks and their descendants. And the immigration laws were changed to allow immigration only to people eligible to naturalize. The Supreme Court resolved the issue by declaring that Mexicans were "white."
World War II created a labor shortage in the U.S. as men left the work force to fight in the war at the same time the economy was ramping back up from the depression. Some of the needed labor was supplied by women. But that was not enough. During World War I, the U.S. had created a program in cooperation with the government of Mexico to bring temporary workers from Mexico to fill the demand for labor. During WW II, it created the Mexico Labor Program, commonly known as the Bracero program. It not only allowed Mexican nationals to work in the U.S, it also provided a minimum wage and housing standards. It helped relieve the labor shortage during the war, but enforcement of the provisions that benefitted the workers were not enforced. Many U.S. employers resisted the plan as government interference in the private market, and so hired Mexican workers who did not participate in the program and did not comply with Visa requirements.
This combination of requiring Mexicans who entered the U.S. to obtain visas and restricting temporary workers to a defined program is really the start of today's dysfunctional immigration policy. Employers had powerful economic incentives to help Mexican nationals evade the law and and work for them without obtaining permission from the U.S. government. And economic circumstances provided a strong financial incentive for workers to avoid the Bracero program. The result was low wages and abusive working conditions for these "illegal aliens." That's another thing to remember about markets. Markets don't care about workers' standard of living. Wages are set by the supply of and demand for labor. As long as the standard of living is sufficient to allow the workers to do the work, the market doesn't care whether they live in crowded hovels or mansions.
When the Bracero program was halted in 1947, illegal immigration soared. The program was reinstituted and expanded over the years. In 1954 Operation Wetback forcibly removed 2 million Mexican workers who were not in the Bracero program. Many of those were simply enrolled in the expanded program. When the program was canceled in 1964, nothing was done to address the fundamental market forces that were powering migration across the southern border. As a result, canceling the Bracero program did nothing to address the need for temporary, seasonal labor -- it simply criminalized it.
In the meantime, after the war in 1954, Congress enacted the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, which extended immigration quotas to all countries. It also created preference categories, including needed skills and spouses, parents and children of citizens. In addition it created our first system of non-immigrant visas.
I don't know what you think happened in 1962, but the next major change in immigration law happened in 1965 with the Immigration and Nationality Act. It replaced the quota system with a preference system designed and intended to favor immigration from Northern European Countries. It included preferences for family members based on the mistaken assumption that there were a large number of northern European family members who were just waiting to migrate to the U.S. In reality, there was a large number of Mexican family members who were just waiting to migrate to the U.S.
So, the answer to your question about apples is that from the beginning of the commercial apple industry, there has been sufficient migrant immigrant labor available to fill the highly seasonal demand for workers. The industry's problems have not so much involved a shortage of seasonal labor, but over production that reduces the market price of apples. That resulted in ever expanding exports and development of cold and more recently frozen storage of apples for export. Had my grandparents been orchardists, they would have relied on migrant, child, and housewife seasonal labor to harvest, store, and pack apples for export, with migrant labor becoming an increasing part of that force over time. Entry of women into the regular labor market combined with legal protections to prevent exploitation of child workers made those workers unavailable for seasonal work.
The major problem with our immigration laws from the start was racist motivation. Politicians spent decades trying to force a return to the original migration pattern of immigrants from northern Europe. Nativist racism and the eugenics movement resulted in immigration policy based on keeping out people who didn't look like Northern Europeans. But that simply can't work if a country also wants a capitalist free market economy. When it comes to labor, the market doesn't care where the labor comes from. Artificial restrictions on the flow of labor that run counter to the demand for labor are nearly impossible to maintain, especially given today's global economy. Just as with prohibition and the war on drugs, passing laws that are in direct opposition to market forces inevitably results in an underground economy that circumvents the restrictions. The net result is to criminalize the behavior of people responding to market forces, magnified by additional opportunities for crime that an illegal economy creates. That's exactly how we ended up congratulating ourselves about being the land of the free while having the highest rate of incarceration in the world.
So, if you're serious about things like improving the working and living conditions of workers, you can't get there by turning the people who want to do the work into criminals. That has the opposite effect, as our immigration laws and policies to date have clearly shown. You're going to have to abandon your current shotgun list of things that piss you off and figure out how to use market forces to get the result you want instead of trying to fight agains them. Or give up on capitalism and move somewhere with a government run command economy. When you skip from grievance to grievance as you do, you just end up taking wildly inconsistent and even contradictory positions without even seeing it. That's not what serious people do when they want to solve problems.
Some helpful sources on immigration and apples:
https://www.cato.org/policy-analysis/br ... resent-day
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads ... h-history/
https://immigrationhistory.org/timeline/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_o ... ted_States
http://www.agribusiness-mgmt.wsu.edu/ag ... ersion.pdf
https://www.historylink.org/File/21288
Something you should also learn about is the relationship between unemployment and inflation. The difficulty you've had in finding your friend a job is not evidence that there aren't enough jobs. Besides, what happened to all that sweet, sweet easy disability money from Uncle Sugar that you've been complaining about for years. Why isn't your friend living on the beach in Florida?
