GA anti-immigrant law "working."

[EpyonXero]

http://blogs.ajc.com/jay-bookman-blo...ut-as-planned/

Ga’s farm-labor crisis playing out as planned
7:22 am June 17, 2011, by Jay

NOTE: This post includes substantial material published earlier on this blog. It is published here as the electronic version of today’s AJC column.

After enacting House Bill 87, a law designed to drive illegal immigrants out of Georgia, state officials appear shocked to discover that HB 87 is, well, driving a lot of illegal immigrants out of Georgia.

It might be funny if it wasn’t so sad.

Thanks to the resulting labor shortage, Georgia farmers have been forced to leave millions of dollars’ worth of blueberries, onions, melons and other crops unharvested and rotting in the fields. It has also put state officials into something of a panic at the damage they’ve done to Georgia’s largest industry.

Barely a month ago, you might recall, Gov. Nathan Deal welcomed the TV cameras into his office as he proudly signed HB 87 into law. Two weeks later, with farmers howling, a scrambling Deal ordered a hasty investigation into the impact of the law he had just signed, as if all this had come as quite a surprise to him.

The results of that investigation have now been released. According to survey of 230 Georgia farmers conducted by Agriculture Commissioner Gary Black, farmers expect to need more than 11,000 workers at some point over the rest of the season, a number that probably underestimates the real need, since not every farmer in the state responded to the survey.

In response, Deal proposes that farmers try to hire the 2,000 unemployed criminal probationers estimated to live in southwest Georgia. Somehow, I suspect that would not be a partnership made in heaven for either party.

As an editorial in the Valdosta Daily Times notes, “Maybe this should have been prepared for, with farmers’ input. Maybe the state should have discussed the ramifications with those directly affected. Maybe the immigration issue is not as easy as ’send them home,’ but is a far more complex one in that maybe Georgia needs them, relies on them, and cannot successfully support the state’s No. 1 economic engine without them.”

According to the survey, more than 6,300 of the unclaimed jobs pay an hourly wage of just $7.25 to $8.99, or an average of roughly $8 an hour. Over a 40-hour work week in the South Georgia sun, that’s $320 a week, before taxes, although most workers probably put in considerably longer hours. Another 3,200 jobs pay $9 to $11 an hour. And while our agriculture commissioner has been quoted as saying Georgia farms provide “$12, $13, $14, $16, $18-an-hour jobs,” the survey reported just 169 openings out of more than 11,000 that pay $16 or more.

In addition, few of the jobs include benefits — only 7.7 percent offer health insurance, and barely a third are even covered by workers compensation. And the truth is that even if all 2,000 probationers in the region agreed to work at those rates and stuck it out — a highly unlikely event, to put it mildly — it wouldn’t fix the problem.

Given all that, Deal’s pledge to find “viable and law-abiding solutions” to the problem that he helped create seems naively far-fetched. Again, if such solutions existed, they should have been put in place before the bill ever became law, because this impact was entirely predictable and in fact intended.

It’s hard to envision a way out of this. Georgia farmers could try to solve the manpower shortage by offering higher wages, but that would create an entirely different set of problems. If they raise wages by a third to a half, which is probably what it would take, they would drive up their operating costs and put themselves at a severe price disadvantage against competitors in states without such tough immigration laws. That’s one of the major disadvantages of trying to implement immigration reform state by state, rather than all at once.

The pain this is causing is real. People are going to lose their crops, and in some cases their farms. The small-town businesses that supply those farms with goods and services are going to suffer as well. For economically embattled rural Georgia, this could be a major blow.

In fact, with a federal court challenge filed last week, you have to wonder whether state officials aren’t secretly hoping to be rescued from this mess by the intervention of a judge. But given how the Georgia law is drafted and how the Supreme Court ruled in a recent case out of Arizona, I don’t think that’s likely.

We’re going to reap what we have sown, even if the farmers can’t.

[OneSickPsycho]

GA has at LEAST 5x the number of needed laborers, incarcerated on non-violent crimes currently. Problem solved... and it's even CHEAPER. I don't understand why someone hasn't implemented a plan like this.

[pauldun170]

lulz

So awesome....
Reality FTW!!!

[askmrjesus]

Originally Posted by OneSickPsycho

GA has at LEAST 5x the number of needed laborers, incarcerated on non-violent crimes currently. Problem solved... and it's even CHEAPER. I don't understand why someone hasn't implemented a plan like this.

They did, but everyone called them Nazis.

JC

[tommymac]

Originally Posted by pauldun170

lulz

So awesome....
Reality FTW!!!

they do that here the landscrapers and contractors will shit themselves

[OneSickPsycho]

Originally Posted by askmrjesus

They did, but everyone called them Nazis.

JC

Lame... I think the part where people were forcibly incarcerated for no other reason than being a Jew and the you know, the whole genocide thing.

Fuck it. Go to jail, go to work...

[defector]

Shit, we still have chain gangs out here, picking up trash on the highways. Complete with striped uniforms, and an armed guard watching them. I take it that won't fly in the south?

[askmrjesus]

Originally Posted by OneSickPsycho

Lame... I think the part where people were forcibly incarcerated for no other reason than being a Jew and the you know, the whole genocide thing.

Fuck it. Go to jail, go to work...

You obliviously have not put much, in any, thought into this plan of yours.

First of all, criminals are inherently lazy. That's why they became criminals in the first place. Lazy people make shitty farm workers.

Second, how do you propose to deliver these criminals to jobs all over the state, and then back to jails at night?

By the time you factor in the costs of transportation, and the additional manpower needed to guard convicts in big open fields, any savings gained from such a program will have evaporated.

Your shit don't add up.

JC

[OneSickPsycho]

Originally Posted by askmrjesus

You obliviously have not put much, in any, thought into this plan of yours.

First of all, criminals are inherently lazy. That's why they became criminals in the first place. Lazy people make shitty farm workers.

Second, how do you propose to deliver these criminals to jobs all over the state, and then back to jails at night?

By the time you factor in the costs of transportation, and the additional manpower needed to guard convicts in big open fields, any savings gained from such a program will have evaporated.

Your shit don't add up.

JC

Wrong.

Yes they are lazy, but even if it takes TWICE as many of them to do the same amount of work, I venture to say it's still cheaper.

Obama wants to create jobs... there you go. Jobs guarding these fucks while they work and jobs transporting them. More jobs maintaining the buses and shit too.

Farmer pays $3/hr for each one of them... They get a ridiculously low rate of $0.25/hr as they would for working in the prison laundry or whatever... Pay 1 guard to watch 10 inmates... say $15/hr... part time bus drivers... fuck, I figure they'd probably just about break even at $3/hr AND save the farmers money.

[Avatard]

Originally Posted by pauldun170

lulz

So awesome....
Reality FTW!!!

I love all the conservative blowhards who bitch and moan about this shit, with no fucking clue of what they're in for.

Politicians take note: It's easy to whip the stupid into a fury with hate speak against "furners". It's not so easy to stop and think about the consequences of biting your nose to spite your face.

Classic!