Friday, October 12, 2007

Immigration and Your Lunch


The New York Times has a couple interesting articles recently (with recently being broadly defined) highlighting the close connection between immigration and agriculture.


In August, Lisa W. Foderaro highlighted the possible shortage of immigrant apple pickers in New York. Her article discussed the Bush administration efforts to crack down on employers of illegal immigrants. Ms. Foderaro reports that up to 70% of farm workers are illegal immigrants.
Today, Steven Greenhouse reported, also in the Times, on the fallout after last November's immigration raid on Smithfield Food's slaughterhouse in Tar Heel, North Carolina. The article raises a host of complicated and complementary issues -- including race relations, union organizing, and the plain hard work of slaughtering animals.
These articles --especially the Greenhouse piece -- highlight the human cost of our current state of food production.

1 Comments:

Blogger Moby Dick said...

You always hear that if the illegal immigrants were tossed out, then the price of vegetables would quadruple.

Well, I hardly ever eat vegetables, but I have to deal with the illegal aliens all the time. Most of them are nice and humble folks, but there are a lot of them that hate America and every penny they make here goes to their home country.

10/15/2007 12:17 AM  

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