Former Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff thinks we need to keep exploiting immigrant labor.
To comment on Donald Trump’s naming retired Marine Gen. John Kelly as his Department of Homeland Security secretary, NPR‘s Morning Edition (12/9/16) brought on George W. Bush’s Homeland Security chief, Michael Chertoff.
A more independent observer might have brought up Kelly’s oversight of the US’s Guantánamo internment camp, where he has defended the force-feeding of hunger-strikers, a procedure condemned by human rights groups as torture.
But Chertoff didn’t even mention Guantánamo, focusing instead on the need to keep allowing immigrant workers into the United States because you can pay them less:
I think the reality is, if you look at a large number of jobs being done by people who come across illegally, they’re doing jobs no one else wants to do. I guess you could pay, you know, $15 or $20 an hour. But then an apple would cost, you know, $16. And that’s not going to work economically.
That makes sense—if you think it takes roughly an hour to pick one apple. As FAIR alum Peter Hart noted on Twitter (12/9/16), “Is this #fakenews or just stupid?”
This would not be hundreds of dollars worth of apples, even if you paid farmworkers a living wage. (cc photo: Jim Naureckas)
A more serious look at the costs of paying a living wage to farmworkers, immigrant or otherwise, appeared in the New York Times a few years back—and happened to use apples as an example. UC/Davis labor economist Philip Martin (9/30/11) wrote:
If pressure to verify employees’ legal status resulted in a…40 percent wage increase, average hourly earnings would rise to $14.10. If this were passed on to consumers, the 10 cent farm labor cost of a pound of apples would rise to 14 cents, and the $1 retail price would rise to $1.04.
For a $15 wage, the math isn’t hard; it would mean apples would cost a nickel more a pound. A pound is roughly 2–4 apples, depending on their size—so Chertoff is exaggerating the price increase involved in paying farmworkers a living wage by roughly 600 to 1,200 times.
Not every NPR source needs to be an expert on agricultural economics, of course—but it would be nice if Morning Edition could get someone to discuss Trump’s Homeland Security pick who didn’t believe exploiting immigrants was necessary for Americans to be able to afford food.
Jim Naureckas is the editor of FAIR.org. He can be followed on Twitter: @JNaureckas.
You can contact NPR ombud Elizabeth Jensen via NPR‘s contact form or via Twitter: @ejensenNYC. Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective.
In the Philip Martin quote there seems to be a slippage of the decimal point: a 40% raise in wages becomes 4% in additional retail cost. If the labor cost goes from 10 cents to 14, shouldn’t the retail price raised at the same rate go from $1 to $1.40, instead of $1.04?
No, because only the labor portion of the cost goes up by that percentage.
That would only happen if labor was the sole cost in bringing an apple from bud to table.
“NPR Guest Warns Against Living Wages With Fantasies of $16 Apples”
Personally, I’d welcome an Apple (iphone or computer) for (just) $16.
In fact, I’d buy a whole bushel (maybe several) and set up a street stand to resell them.
Doncha just love the fake news from fake news sites like NPR?
At least we have learned one useful thing from NPR’s interview of Chertoff: why the Bush administrations “terror color warning system” seemed so nonsensical/random.
Will no one in the new administration propose doing away with the redundant “Department of Homeland Security?” We never needed this new bureaucracy on top of the FBI, ICE, CIA, NSA and the other 14 agencies already in place on 9/11, that individually and collectively, missed the threat that resulted in the attacks of that day. It was only under the stress and duress of the aftermath of the attacks and the political Kabuki Theater that followed, that allowed this anti-democratic monstrosity and its hideous progeny, including the Patriot Act, to come into existence, in the first place.
Do people not see that, under Bush, Obama and now Trump, we are already living in a police state?
Just another compelling reason to give to public radio during the winter pledge drive …
Well, since NPR is no longer public radio (even the NPR execs say NPR stands for nothing) I assume you are referring to true public radio like Pacifica/Democracy Now stations.
I agree, give to REAL public radio, NOT the FAKE kind (NPR).
What’s so far fetched about that? My grandpa told me he used to buy a weeks worth of food for a dollar, and a box of shotgun shells for 25 cents. Now a weeks worth of food is around 100 dollars, and those shotgun shells cost almost 20 dollars a box. All minimum wage increases will do is cause hyperinflation. But from an investment standpoint, I support a minimum wage increase because it will drive inflation, and I’m well off in that scenario.
That argument would work better if the minimum wage had at least kept pace with current inflation, which it hasn’t.
I never did like that Chertoff asshole.
This phrase erupts in summary; “How do you like them apples?”
This is nothing but a neoliberal lie designed to keep the system working just as it is– terrible wages and social benefits for workers who are often without documentation and thus without legal support. The tax revenue from income disappears, contributions to so-called entitlements like social security and medicare don’t happen, and the workers have no recourse in dispute with their employers, regardless of whether they are legal hires or not.
These fakes news sites are really audacious nowadays, aren’t they?