Do you like to eat?

If you enjoy eating - and by that I don't mean being a foodie, I mean being able to afford edible substances with calories - you''ll love this:

Georgia’s farm-labor crisis playing out as planned

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...

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...

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...

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.

Forget "major disadvantages"; it is not possible to implement laws like this state by state if you want to eat. Competition isn't the only reason. Another is the federal welfare state. Americans won't do this work until they absolutely have to, not even with 10% unemployment and 2,000 applications for every job as a jizz-mopper in a porno booth. I'm not sure doubling the price would work as long as American citizens can collect a check in any other way whatsoever.

Arizona has been able to get by with this because the bubble left it overcapitalized, and because it's not an agricultural producer. Eventually when Arizonans need to build things again to attract new business, their law will go by the wayside too. Or they'll become the new Mississippi.

My maternal grandmother farmed cotton as a child. She was a tough lady, who dropped out of school to help on her parents' farm and did permanent damage to her back. I have no doubt you could get *some* American citizens into the fields to do that kind of work at $16 an hour, if their alternative is immediate starvation, though I have no idea whether there would be enough. But whereas for Mexican immigrants that work is a step forward on what they can hope is a road to something better, for the American lower class it would be a step backwards into the same poverty trap my grandmother eventually clawed out of.

In place of a brown lower class that irritates the gentility by driving drunk and clogging the highways (such are the complaints I hear) you'd have a white and Black one. And it will be a much lower lower class, because higher food prices are regressive; they hit the lower class (including those who grow food) the hardest.

To be honest, though, I don't think that would happen. I think that America produces much of what it produces purely because of the combination of being a rich country that combines cheap labor with high farm subsidies. What will really happen if anti-immigrant policy is federalized is that we'll get more of the farm subsidies. Until we can't borrow any more money to pay for them. But don't worry, that should be years... months... away.

And yet the people who want this insist that having more Mexicans here will produce more socialism. Just as they insist, with the outrage of house serfs who discover there's something wrong with feudalism the first time a field serf is invited to share their fire, that I'm a neofeudalist. Kill me.