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Comment by hootbootscoot | Hacker News Reader

But that's funny, as my mother immigrated from Europe in the 50's and the naturalization process was rather straightforward.

If you are referring to national immigration quotas then I agree that yes, it was quite unfair for awhile now.

It's just a bit odd. There wasn't even a hard physical border with Mexico until the 1920's. There used to be a rather active workable "temporary farm worker visa" program that got sacrificed on the altar of pleasing xenophobic morons somewhere in the 70's or 80's I guess...

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> xenophobic morons

As a person that lived thru it, it was not xenophobia, it was NAFTA that sent everyone scrambling to survive. Our farm lost viability due to it, as did most small family farms. You either conglomerated with the emerging mega-farms if you where big enough or you died. Organic was nowhere on the horizon at that time and was the only thing that brought back the viability of small plot farming. Xenophobia is an easy answer to reach for, but the reality is people where scrambling to save their livelihoods and kicking the legs out from under the big conglomerates via removing the migrant workforce they relied on was one of the efforts. It has more to do with surviving than a disdain for other people. Also there was no love loss for the big conglomerates as they where the very entities that pushed for NAFTA, so trying to remove their workforce was fair game.

In the end I miss the family homestead but it worked out for me. I was a crappy citrus farmer (due to lack of passion) and while I appreciate my youth, I don't ever want to own a farm so I am glad my family got to reap the rewards of selling it, rather than me inheriting a farm that I would have to figure out what to do with.

NAFTA was in the 90’s. The cancelled visa program in the post you’re responding to was 10-20 years earlier.

The visas in question made it easy to legally hire foreign (mostly Mexican, I’d guess) agricultural workers. That would have reduced the cost of farming your family homestead.

Canceling the visas presumably encouraged many of those workers to accept lower wages to work farms in Mexico. The old visa program was effectively a subsidy for US farms; ending it created more competition for US farms. Arguably, it also made NAFTA more likely to happen, since it moved agricultural production from the US to Mexico, and people have to eat.

Suspending the H-1B and green card programs will have the same long term effect on the US tech industry.

Yes I understand that the finalization of NAFTA was years later but the seed of NAFTA was the immigration program the same players where lobbying for both and saw them as complementary legislation in a package of legislation they wanted passed. It did not reduce the cost of farming for my family because it was a family farm, any labor cost killed the economies of scale as we did not have the volume to compete. The reduction of return to noncompetitive levels started with the immigration visas and was completed with NAFTA, then the conglomerates turned around and picked up most of the viable land from the farmers NAFTA killed and then petitioned for more immigration reform, to reopen those combined tracts. As I said, I have no skin in the game, I did not want to be a farmer, but that is how it works and that is how it is done. You can argue that it has an overall net positive effect because it reduced the cost of goods and that is one way to look at it. But it came at the cost of consolidation a good deal of middle class land wealth into the hands of a few mega-corps.

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