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Comment by bob_theslob646 | Hacker News Reader

Reminds of what happened in Alabama. Vice did a documentary on it. It was definitely eye opening. The only thing that scares me for this type of labor is the sheer amount of automation being done in farming.( They have these crazy lettuce cutting machines as well as sorting machines.)

>Alabama’s Failed Anti-Immigration Law The state's experiment in "self-deportation" reveals what might happen if the US sent 11 million undocumented workers home.

[https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/8gk7nx/what-alabamas-fail...]

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The southern agricultural economy suffered greatly after slavery ended. I think America will adjust to this some how, without starving.

What kind of argument is this? Any policy that doesn't completely destroy America is good policy?

They're not slaves proper so it wouldn't be nearly as destructive. More like a healthy correction in the market.

Lettuce be honest. The end of slavery in the South was immediately replaced by slavery-like exploitation of second-class workers without enforceable rights. When a massive nationwide movement for equal civil rights finally made that non-viable a hundred years later, the farmers just did a global search-and-replace in their business plans from "black" to "foreign" and continued as usual.

Having zero abusable second-class workers would be more destructive. 150 years of dragging ass on modernizing their farming operations will come back and bite them all at once. But they probably won't learn their lesson and just use robots. They will beg and squeal for prisoner labor first. And then the cops will be ginning up bogus traffic offenses right before harvest time, so the people who can't pay the fines will have to pick vegetables instead.

> Vice did a documentary on it. It was definitely eye opening.

Come on. Vice documentaries are entertainment at best. I've enjoyed a couple of them myself but I would never use them to prop up my political arguments.

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