Sorry, I edited the parent comment for brevity and changed it a bit. But my question is still who would pay for those wage raises? The people who buy the products? How do you think they'd react if fruit/vegetables were twice the price overnight? Would they say "yeah, that seems fair" or "fuck it, let's allow immigration"? Do they even earn enough money themselves to have the liberty to make that decision, if food was a lot more expensive?
> But my question is still who would pay for those wage raises? The people who buy the products?
Yes, exactly.
> How do you think they'd react if fruit/vegetables were twice the price overnight?
If you weren't artificially suppressing wages through illegal immigration, the working class would have more money, the labour market would be at a better equilibrium and everyone would have money to buy food even at the slightly higher prices. Who knows, maybe landowning farmers would even find some way to produce more efficiently, with a little incentive.
Slightly higher prices? Care to add some support to that, even if just your imagination and assumptions? My guess is more like "$20 lettuce," at the very least.
Well, the unemployment rate isn't zero. It's hard to say exactly how elastic the labour market is, but my guess is labour costs wouldn't actually double. They'd probably go up by 20-50%, worst case. If the market can't take a 50% price increase, the farmers will either sell for less margin and accept a cut in profits, or they'll find efficiency through automation.
But as I pointed out, nothing happens in a vacuum. Rising 'cost' of labour means rising wages, consumers have more money. What's the better equilibrium?
Keep in mind, in most parts of the world, we pay much, much more for food than Americans. Somehow we survive, and live pretty damn well too.
Edit - I should also add, I buy organic lettuce produced in a greenhouse in Canada. It doesn't cost $20. We're somewhat less tolerant of illegal labour than the US as well.
I think, much like when the ACA was implemented in the US, there's no real way to quantify beforehand how significant the changes will be (that's not saying we should do it and wait for the fallout). Yes, lettuce might go up to $20 a head--we'll eat less lettuce and it's no longer assumed to come free on burgers and people move to something else. We can offset that by offering farmer's more subsidies, importing more lettuce from somewhere else, or incentivize loans for better farm equipment/irrigation.
We'd need to decide to stop exploiting workers and work on finding solutions from there (I don't actually see that first part happening).
>How do you think they'd react if fruit/vegetables were twice the price overnight?
I don't mean to sound cheeky, and you make some good points, but perhaps US consumers would react to higher prices by not throwing away huge portions of produce. I've seen figures that the US throws away ~50% of our produce.
