March 29, 2024

Is Immigration at Its Limit? Not for Employers

“The idea that legal immigrants are taking jobs away from residents of the U.S. is just not reality,” said John Kunkel, the founder and chief executive of 50 Eggs, which also operates Yardbird locations in Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Dallas and Singapore. “That’s the armchair view of somebody who doesn’t run a business.”

Seasonal industries, like agriculture and resorts, are particularly dependent on migrant workers. Several Trump Organization properties have obtained temporary visas to employ dozens of foreign-born workers.

This past tomato season, DiMare Fresh, a family-owned distributor with farms in Florida and California, had scores of unfilled jobs.

At its main packing house in Homestead, about an hour south of Miami, the company was able to fill only 165 of the 280 open jobs. Another center in Ruskin, near Tampa, lost many of its workers when Amazon opened a fulfillment center a few minutes away.

“Amazon has sucked up all the labor,” said Paul DiMare, the chief executive. He said his business could not afford to offer year-round employment or benefits.

The company is experimenting with new technology — a machine to automatically stack 25-pound boxes of tomatoes on pallets, and sensors to sort tomatoes by size and color when there aren’t enough graders, usually older Haitian women at this site, to eyeball the produce as it loops along conveyor belts.

Automation, rather than higher wages, is often the response to labor shortages. When immigration restrictions in the mid-1960s dried up the pool of Mexican farm laborers, California growers started using mechanical harvesters to pick tomatoes.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/22/business/economy/trump-immigration-employers.html?emc=rss&partner=rss

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