Back to the farm? (or why immigrants are not taking farm jobs from Americans)

By Scott Sumner.

"At one time, most Americans were farmers.  By late 20th century, the vast majority of farmers had moved to the city for jobs in manufacturing and services.  More recently, China is going through the same sort of transformation, as hundreds of millions of people move from the countryside to the city.  This has contributed to an astounding increase in Chinese productivity.

A recent article in the Financial Times discussed the effects of deporting undocumented workers:

According to a survey carried out by the National Council of Agricultural Employers in 2020, just 337 US-born workers applied for the 97,691 season agricultural jobs advertised between March and May that year.

Critics of immigration often suggest that the so-called “shortage” of workers is a myth, and that if firms paid more there would be plenty of Americans willing to take these jobs.  But how much more?  Suppose you raised wages enough to double the number of US-born workers applying for jobs, that would still represent less than 1% of the required workforce.  Now suppose you raised wages enough to increase the number of US-born workers 10-fold.  You’d still only be meeting about 3% of the demand for agricultural workers.

To be clear, I’m not denying that there is some wage that would be high enough to produce 97,691 US-born applicants.  But that wage is likely to be far too high to allow for the profitable production of most labor intensive crops.  Fruit and vegetable fields might be replaced with wheat fields.

You might argue that farmers could raise food prices to cover the extra labor costs.  But that would lead to American produce being replaced by imports from other countries.

You might argue that we could raise food prices and put tariffs on imported food.

I don’t doubt that it would be possible to produce some mix of policies that resulted in lots of US-born workers leaving their factory jobs in big cities and moving back to the countryside, where they’d start picking fruits and vegetables.  There is some policy mix that would reverse the tides of history and begin to move us back toward our agrarian past.  But while we are doing that, I’d expect the Chinese to continue moving millions of people from the farm to the city.  Ask yourself this question: Has a country ever become a great power by encouraging its population to move from the city to the countryside?

Here’s a prediction:  The mass deportation that everyone is talking about will never happen:

“If there is a significant enforcement event on a big farm or meatpacking plant that happens to be in a red state, you will have business owners in that state saying — this is not what we had in mind,” said Muzaffar Chishti, senior fellow at the non-partisan Migration Policy Institute."