I missed this nugget at the end of a Politico interview last week with Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack:
When I asked him about the “100 percent border security” that some people dream about to keep illegal immigrants out of the country, Vilsack said: “Somewhere between 50 to 60 percent of the food you eat has been touched by immigrant hands, and it is fair to say some of them are not here as they should be here.
“But if you didn’t have these folks, you would be spending a lot more — three, four or five times more — for food, or we would have to import food and have all the food security risks. Neither is what Americans want. What they want is what we have. Which is why we need comprehensive immigration reform.”
Rubbish. First of all, illegal labor is concentrated in the harvest of fresh fruits and vegetables — the cultivation of the rest of our food supply is heavily mechanized. Second, what does “if you didn’t have these folks” mean? Are they all going to magically disappear tomorrow? In the real world, consistent immigration enforcement would translate into a shrinkage over time in the illegal-alien workforce. Adam Smith explained to me that this would translate to increased wages and benefits, plus increased mechanization.
Philip Martin — an agricultural economist at UC-Davis who actually knows something about agriculture, unlike the secretary of agriculture — has calculated the likely effect on produce prices of immigration enforcement:
If farm wages rose, would apples and oranges become luxuries or would the processing tomato experience be repeated, with mechanization leading to more production and lower costs? There are machines available to harvest most of the fresh fruits and vegetables produced in the United States, but with people better than machines at picking apples and oranges, mechanization is spreading slowly. Many engineers predict that, if farm worker earnings were to rise from about half the average for manufacturing workers to the $17 average, there would be widespread mechanization.
Suppose effective enforcement slowed the influx of immigrant workers, and current farm workers continued to get out of seasonal farm jobs within a decade. As the labor supply tightened, wages would be expected to rise. Instead of doubling to the average earnings of manufacturing workers, what would happen if farm worker earnings rose 40 percent, as in mid-1960s UFW contracts?
Farmers reported average field worker earnings of $8.69 an hour in 2005, so a 40 percent wage increase would raise their average earnings to $12.17. Even if there was no mechanization in response to these higher wages, so that the entire 40 percent wage increase was passed on to consumers, consumers would hardly notice. Since farmers receive only 18 cents of the average retail dollar spent on fresh produce, and farm workers receive only six cents of a dollar spent on a pound of apples or a head of lettuce, a 40 percent wage increase fully passed on to consumers would raise the price of a one dollar item by 2.4 cents, or from $1 to $1.02.
For a typical consumer unit, a 40 percent increase in farm wages would raise spending on fresh fruits and vegetables by $8 a year, from $357 to $366 — about the cost of a movie ticket. However, for a seasonal farm worker, annual earnings would rise from $9,000 for 1,000 hours of work to $12,600, from below the federal poverty line for an individual to above it.
That’s $8 a year — eight dollars. I’m no mathematician, but I think that’s less than Vilsack’s claim that immigration control would triple, quadruple, quintuple food prices.