| pokoko said: It's kind of funny. I used to work in a community that was absolutely pro-Trump. Why is that amusing? It was a big farming community. Tobacco, cotton, peanut, and soybean farms all over the place. Who worked in those farms? Yeah, illegal immigrants. They used to come into the store in truckloads. They'd use the sinks to drink without buying anything and they lived jammed together in old houses during farming season. The tricky bit is finding who to blame, though. When I was a growing up, farmers would hire teenagers to work in the fields when it was time to harvest. But most teenagers don't work at all now. Heck, most of them would probably outright die if they had to work in tobacco in 95 degree heat. Cropping tobacco is bloody hard work and very few Americans will do it for low pay. |
From a Canadian farming community with lots of offshore workers. They come legally, some flee to the city and stay, but its a minor problem here. Most people in our area slightly favored Trump, not by much, but they just assumed Hillary would win do to her political experience.
Many of the same things are grown here, and when my parents were kids, and even when I was a young kid, teenagers and adults would work all summer on farms, and it was normal. It paid about the same as any other job, the difference was that if you and your crew decided to kick it up a notch at certain times of the season, you could be done work by 2pm and have all afternoon to do what you want, and get paid in full regardless. It was worth it.
Well who and what to blame is pretty simple, how the percentage of the problem is broken up is the question. If you look at certain sectors, you find the farmers income has increased well below inflation and cost of living for the last 10-20 years. Some of this is due to GMO and higher yields, some is due to the large open markets that exist, which forces the farmer to sell the crop for whatever the market says its worth at that time, and some of it is do to first world people expecting the highest quality product, for the cheapest price. The fact that the companies that produce/sell chemicals and fertilizers, and process/sell food, can all adjust their price acordingly to their needs, yet many farmers can't, just adds to the problem.
This leads to farmers doing what they can to cut costs in many ways, but one of the first things they did was cut back on wages. That eventually led to farmers now paying minumum wage, and no first world person is going to phyically work their butt off for that kind of money, when they can find work that is less phyically demanding, and less hours, for the same or more money. The next option was to bring people in who would do the work for those low wages, which led to immigrants or offshore workers coming into the Country to do the work. This leads to some of those immigrants staying in the Country, and trying to live the "American Dream".
The BIG problem is that people have been taught that making money, and not steadily, but exponentially, is a good thing. This is true from a single person/families perspective, but its not a good thing for "the people". Considering most wealthy people don't go pouring that money back into creating more jobs, and instead create less work, for less money, and also leads to higher and higher prices of the luxury goods they buy. The problem is in fact "The American Dream", or what its been turned into today anyway, by the celebrities and billionaires.
