There is currently a diary on the wreck list mocking Georgia for voting for a "Tough on Aliens" local regime that shipped out the migrant workers, and now Georgia farmers are faced with worker shortages. The diary claims that the farmers "got what they deserved." I'm not so sure.
The diarist is right that you can't predicate an economy on cheap labor, remove the labor, and expect the gap to be filled-in smoothly. But I heartily doubt that farmers who rely on migrant labor are the ones who voted in the leadership that sent the labor away.
If the farmers are industrial Ag giants, they are right-wing corporatists who like their labor niiiiice and exploitable. That's what they get in unauthorized labor. They're not going to send it away, unless they're angling for a fresh and more-afraid crew. The only reason they'd vote for a "tough on aliens" regime is if migrant workers were getting "uppity" enough to want, oh, say, decent work conditions, decent pay, access to social services or the right to vote. They want workers scared into silence and invisibility. They want the slave class they lost in back in 1865.
If the farmers are small or middle-sized, unless they occupy an "organic local" niche, they can't afford to hire citizen labor even if they want to, and still compete against Big Ag. They're between a rock and a hard place.
So who voted in the "tough on aliens" crew? The right-wing populists.
Right wing populists are having trouble finding work because big employers vastly prefer to hire migrants they can threaten, sexually harass, endanger and underpay. Thanks to the racist rhetoric they hear 24/7, right wing populists blame the migrant workers for this problem, rather than the employers who are breaking the law.
Plenty of us dirty hippies fought for union rights and decent pay for work, which is precisely why the farmers turned to foreign labor to reap quicker profits and to evade what labor actually costs in this country.
Informed left-wingers don't believe in "tiers" of labor, where you treat some workers differently based on nation-of-origin or authorization status. A truly progressive position would demand that labor cost an employer the same regardless of its origin, so that workers across borders can effectively organize and demand decent pay and decent conditions. Whatever an employer would save by not paying Workmans' Comp or Social Security or Unemployment Insurance for an unauthorized worker, they should have to pay an insourced-labor tax, to cover the legitimate public services and infrastructure that guest workers use, and to make up for spending taken out of the job-producing communities when migrants send remittances back home. Most of all, cost to employers should be equalized to prevent a "cheap labor niche" that makes organizing impossible.
So I'll say it again. Cheap labor is 100% a right wing scheme, whether it's offshoring or onshoring, insourcing or outsourcing. And it's about destroying 100 years of labor gains for which American workers fought, suffered and died.
The Georgia scene? It isn't about racist farmers and enlightened hippies. It's about big right wing corporatists who want to keep their cheap labor scared, smaller farmers who can't compete against big guys who won't play by the rules, and right wing populists who are being choked out of jobs unless they're willing to work under conditions that are as cheap to the employer as are unauthorized workers. Because a citizen automatically costs more to hire because employers have to pay for safe working conditions, overtime, Workman's Comp, social security, unemployment insurance, payroll taxes, medicare, etc, then a citizen has to accept a significantly SMALLER take-home wage than an unauthorized worker in order to be as cost-effective.
This is a systemic clusterfuck, and the un-clusterfucking has to be systemic as well. In a healthy and regulated labor economy, an employer has to raise compensation until it attracts sufficient labor. But for that to work, the rules have to be the same everywhere, and employers who are hiring noncitizens, or who are offshoring, have to have their costs brought into line with "insourcing" fees and "offshoring" tariffs. We also need a middle class that can afford to pay higher prices, which we will only get when we have lower citizen unemployment and higher wages.
Where I live, we know our farmers, and we suck it up and pay what organic food farmed by US citizens costs, and we have a lot less to spend on garbage food and booze. But at least we have employed local farmers. (A lot of them are children of immigrants who speak only Spanish or Hmong.)
In the transition that needs to happen, if we took all of the public money we spend patrolling the border and rounding up workers and paying Big Ag to dump grain on Mexican markets (which in turn ruins their farmers), and we helped small local farmers to pay decent wages under good working conditions, the "desperation cycle" that draws so much foreign labor will abate. And we won't have to persecute or harass anyone.
Viva la diversidad. Si, se puede.