Crackdown on illegal immigrants leads to a shortage of farm workers:
What do you know? The crackdown on illegal immigration has led to a shortage of produce pickers this year.
The tightening of the border with Mexico, begun more than a decade ago but reinforced since May with the deployment of 6,000 National Guard troops, has forced California growers to acknowledge that most of their workers are illegal Mexican migrants. The U.F.W. estimates that more than 90 percent of the state’s farm workers are illegal.
Whaddaya think? Will we see a sudden surge in domestic/native-born workers to fill those jobs?
The bottomline seems to be: do you want to let the stuff rot in the fields or on the shelves?
If we were to somehow get everything picked but at the wages demanded by native-born workers, the prices would be too high for many to buy anything. So it might end up making more sense to leave them to compost rather than dump them in the waste stream.