Changing Face of Labor

Changing Face of Labor

David Sparks Ph.D.
David Sparks Ph.D.
Maoyong Fan, an economics professor at Ball State University recently talked to me about factors that are influencing the migrant worker force. “After September 11, attitudes towards illegal immigrants in the United States have changed. That increases the chance of being caught and deported for those illegal immigrants so they are less likely to migrate. Let's talk about Mexico. The economy in Mexico has been rising in the past 15 years after the NAFTA agreement and the economy looks good. That means young people are less likely to come to the United States and work in the agricultural fields like there parents or grandparents did. There's another reason that I didn't have concrete data to support but due to social media networks, even though the young workers from Mexico come to the United States, but they don't use agriculture, farm jobs as a stepping stone anymore. They go straight to the cities. So the whole agriculture labor supply chain is collapsing. This, in the past 10 to 20 years. The total number of agricultural workers has almost been the same, very stable, but due to the fact that the current agricultural workers are less likely to migrate, meaning move from farm to farm, in order to pick up temporary jobs because this kind of migration rate dropped, farmers feel that they have a hard time hiring enough workers during the harvesting time so they are claiming a labor shortage.
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