Think immigrants are taking our jobs? Try picking strawberries for a day

[customerserviceguy]

47. When I was a teenager, back in the 1970's

in the Pacific Northwest, kids used to pick berries in the summer. I never did, as I had two paper routes (year round) but a good number of my classmates did. We weren't from the poor side of town, but those who worked in the fields for a few weeks during harvest season learned about the value of work.

Today, little Tod and Muffy are spared from having to work by doting parents who pay for their adolescence way after 20 years of age. Maybe the kids from the neighborhood where I lived would have wanted too much to get out and pick berries, or maybe the farmers of the 1970's wouldn't think of hiring labor that wasn't 100% legal, but clearly, things have changed.

125 years ago, you needed horses to farm, today, if any farm families have a horse or two, chances are, they're just expensive pets. If we had no undocumented farm workers, then wages for picking produce would go up to the point where it would be feasible to make a machine to do it. Anybody here think that commercial crops will be harvested by stoop labor 125 years from now? The soft slavery of a docile underpaid workforce is the only thing in the way of that future.