May 31st, 2007 at 12:58 pm
BusinessWeek has an article from Spiegel Online with an interesting case study of government intervention. Up to 15% of asparagus may be left to rot in the fields because Germany has restricted the flow of workers from Poland and Romania.
“We are missing up to a third of our seasonal laborers,” Dietrich Paul, president of the association of asparagus farmers in Lower Saxony, told the Sunday tabloid Bild am Sonntag. “If it continues like this, fruit and vegetable farming in Germany is in trouble.”
The problem, say German farmers, is a law pushed through in 2006 which sought to limit the use of seasonal workers from abroad and to increase the number of unemployed Germans working in German fields. Before the law, up to 90 percent of those bringing in the harvest in German fields came from Poland, Romania and other countries in Eastern Europe; the new regulation said the proportion of foreign field laborers should be scaled back to 80 percent.
There is no statutory minimum wage in Germany, and there doesn’t need to be. Germans can negotiate whatever price they are willing to get to earn to harvest asparagus, and they should. Asparagus prices will go up, and no one is to blame but German lawmakers.
(No Ratings Yet)
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May 31st, 2007 at 4:23 pm
I happen to agree with the German lawmakers on this one.
Maybe they’ve learned something from our example about how uncontrolled immigration turns into uncontrollable illegal immigration, and all the problems that causes.
And I suspect the rules of supply and demand, in a relatively open market, given time to work without constant government intervention, will work to some equitable solution for the harvesting of asparagus.
June 1st, 2007 at 10:01 am
I lived in Germany for three years. The atmosphere was rather harsh concerning immigrants. I would frequently see “Auslander raus!” (Foreigners out!) spray painted on walls. Hopefully we will learn from the Germans what happens when you make a law that cuts off your only reliable workforce, especially when the native residents are unable or unwilling to fill in the gap.
June 1st, 2007 at 11:04 am
Good point Emily. The difference between German “Foreigners out” and American “Illegal Immigrants out”, isn’t an equal comparison.
But I disagree with the larger premise, which assumes that native residents won’t reliably do the jobs that foreigners will. The problem with this assumption is in overlooking the issue of compensation. With regard to the U.S., we can’t compare a legal resident that pays a significant amount of income taxes and lives comfortably off the economy, with illegal aliens (or foreigners) that effectively don’t pay taxes and are willing to live at well below poverty level for what would otherwise be considered slave wages.
So, it’s really not that nationals won’t do the jobs foreigners will do. It’s that nationals won’t/can’t do the jobs for slave wages, while the foreigners can and will.
We do our immigrants absolutely no service by allowing them to immigrate here and then allowing (if not forcing) them to live in squalor when we refuse to enforce our work/employment rules and immigration laws.
As we can see, the problem isn’t just about illegals, but also the people willing to hire them at less than equitable wages. Add on the government allowing us to do so, by selective border enforcement, effectively translates into the U.S. importing what is effectively becoming the trafficking of a neo-slave class of people.
The only solution is to close the borders and enforce immigration and existing guest worker laws. If businesses lose their access to this illegal neo-slave culture, they will be forced to hire legal citizens (at a fair wage) to get the work done.
The solution I outline here is exactly what the German government is trying to do, and is what we here in the U.S. should also be trying to do.
June 1st, 2007 at 11:51 am
When we talk about jobs X won’t do, we really should be talking about jobs X won’t do at a certain price.
What we can conclusively say is that 9% (or whatever that employment figure is) will not harvest asparagus at the price being paid the Polish. There will be a new equilibrium price set as farmers lure Germans to the fields with higher wages.
Lawrence (correct me if I’m wrong) seems to be looking at it from a national security perspective. I would think that if the Germans were, they would reduce the number of workers from 90% not to 80% but to 0%. This seems to be an effort to get Germans off of unemployment. That’s not a bad idea, except later in the article they are telling the farmers to seek government support to handle this. They should get the money to pay these folks from higher prices, not from the government dole.
June 3rd, 2007 at 4:58 pm
Thanks Dan. I think I’m looking at it from both perspectives. National security is a big problem. But the basic economics of hiring illegals at below equitable compensation is also significant.
Consider why anyone would work at a difficult low-skill job at below-subsistence wages that are lower than unemployment benefits?
Illegals will often work for such low wages only because they can’t get unemployment benefits. And as our current social culture reflects, with the huge number of skilled working people on welfare, once people become eligible for welfare they often stop working.
This leaves a huge vacuum of jobs that Americans seemingly will no longer do. We fill those jobs with more illegal immigrants, and the cycle continues to worsen.
Germany’s problem is different, but yet similar with respect to their own self-destructive social welfare programs.