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Comment by aaronbaugher | Hacker News Reader

How many minutes do you think it takes to pick an apple?

The claim is always made that if Americans have to do the work, food prices will skyrocket, but it's just not true. Labor is a portion of the wholescale cost of food, which is a portion of the retail cost. A lot goes to shipping, packaging, processing, marketing, etc. If all migrant workers were replaced by Americans being paid a competitive wage, food prices would go up a little, but you wouldn't pay double for apples, let alone several times more. Highly-processed foods like cereal and pasta wouldn't change noticeably.

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> The claim is always made that if Americans have to do the work, food prices will skyrocket, but it's just not true

My claim isn't that "if Americans have to do the work", my claim is that "Americans don't want to do the work", even at $30-40/hour most Americans still don't want to pick apples, and that is already an unreasonable price.

It might be that (barring automation) we simply don't grow/pick apples in the USA anymore, for the same reason that other industries/jobs have become obsolete because the economics simply don't make sense anymore. Farmers will grow something else that is more economical to deal with given the labor costs they have to deal with, they simply won't grow apples anymore if it no longer makes sense.

> My claim isn't that "if Americans have to do the work", my claim is that "Americans don't want to do the work", even at $30-40/hour most Americans still don't want to pick apples, and that is already an unreasonable price.

There is no evidence that this is actually true. Decades of illegal immigrant labor has suppressed wages and supplanted American citizens, so you have no way of knowing that’s the case.

There are plenty of food and things that have gone out of production because the economics don’t make sense anymore, even with illegal immigration. Apples aren’t going to be different. Demand isn’t somehow magically going to be present at any price.

HN hive mind…minimum wage for fast food workers should be $40 an hour.

Also HN hive mind…if we can’t import illegal immigrants working for subsistence wages, who will pick our crops?

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