On Thursday, June 10, 2021 at 11:48:47 AM UTC-7, sms wrote:
On 6/10/2021 7:55 AM, Radey Shouman wrote:
I'm not ready to advocate open borders, but I do object to the idea that
they are literally unthinkable. Most of the world had them not all that
long ago.
There are unintended side effects of the combination of strict border
control and the lack of guest worker programs.

I recently experienced this in Utah. We were in a tourist town near Zion
and the Grand Canyon. Most of the restaurants were closed. The fast food
restaurants opened their drive-thrus only and had long lines. It wasn't
related to Covid-19. I finally asked a cashier in a supermarket what was
going on and she explained that there were not enough local residents to
fill the restaurant jobs and there was no longer enough migrant labor to
hire.

The shortage of foreign workers has also hit farms very hard, especially
dairy farms that need year-round workers:
https://spectrumlocalnews.com/nys/capital-region/news/2019/02/23/dairy-farmers-struggle-with-labor-shortage--trade-issues.

We need the reintroduction of a guest worker program, like we had under
Reagan but many congressional Republicans have opposed this
https://thehill.com/homenews/house/498842-conservative-lawmakers-press-trump-to-suspend-guest-worker-programs-for-a-year.
OTOH, even Republicans from states that depend on agricultural workers
favor a guest worker program. Sane Republicans (yes, there still are
some of those!) are being attacked by hard-line crazy Republicans over
support for guest worker programs
https://abcnews.go.com/ABC_Univision/Politics/texas-gop-congressman-supports-guest-worker-program/story?id=18001159.
The hilarious part about all of this is that Scharf doesn't know that all of the migrant workers are being paid what amounts to unemployment in cities.