Meanwhile, jobs go begging: in Alabama, which passed the nation’s harshest anti-immigrant law; in Georgia, where the governor suggested using convicts to work in the fields after 11,000 jobs went unfilled; and in the orchards of Washington, where the flow to the far north has diminished mainly because of the recession.
Well then, why not hire only people with full citizenship? One farmer in Colorado, John Harold, tried doing just that, hoping to fill harvest positions with jobless locals looking for extra cash. But as my colleague Kirk Johnson reported, many of those locals did not last even a full day; they complained of the hard work in the onion fields of Colorado.
The problem, through good times and bad, is that there are millions of jobs that Americans will not do.
(Source: The New York Times)