OK, How Many Jobs Will Americans "Not Do?

President Bush, in his stubborn support for Illegal aliens, has a lot of people convinced that there must be millions and millions of jobs that Americans refuse to do, anywhere from twelve to twenty million.

Okay, just what are these jobs? How many of Bush's supposed "guest workers" are doing them?

The number one claim by the Bush administration is that they "pick our food". They get out in the fields and harvest our crops by hand with backbreaking manual labor.

Below are some excepts from a report by The Center For Immigration Studies published in 2000. Since numbers are always helpful, here are a few:

At least 20 to 25 percent of the U.S. vegetable acreage and 40 to 45 percent of the U.S. fruit acreage is totally dependent on hand harvesting. The crops represent about 30 percent of the U.S. fruit, nut, and vegetable acreage and have an annual farm-gate value of over $13 billion.

They refer to "acreage". How much acreage is that, and how many laborers does it take to harvest the crops on those acres?

In this report, it says that ...according to the 1997 census of agriculture, a total of about 12 million acres of fruit, nut, and vegetable crops were harvested in the United States in 1997. They represented a farm-gate value of about $23 billion, which was about 25 percent of the total U.S. value of crop production. There is an instant ten billion dollar difference between reported numbers from different sources, but the report cites all sources, so the reader needs to make some form of conclusion based on the averages of the numbers cited.

The report further states that:

Hand harvesting 12 million acres annually would require at least 840 million Lh/year (1.05 million workers for 20 weeks/year.

Finally, some numbers we can get our minds around.

We are told that America is losing farmland every year in alarming quantities, perhaps enough to counteract any agricultural growth from 1997 to 2006, so let's just take those 1997 numbers to base some conclusions on.

Roughly one million workers for 20 weeks a year. Let's be extremely generous and state that we need two million workers for 26 weeks a year to harvest our crops, to do the backbreaking manual labor that "Americans will not do".

That leaves anywhere from 10 to 18 million illegal aliens here in America doing jobs that Americans WILL do, and -- in fact -- have stolen from Americans. They stole them by offering to work for less, for no benefits, for under-the-table cash only, meaning no tax liabilities for the thousands of dishonest and crooked businessmen doing the hiring.

These jobs taken by illegal aliens are lost opportuniites to ten to eighteen million law-abiding American workers, representing around 30 million American citizens, in families with real family values, values that Bush says do not stop at the border. That nice sound bite applies to American families also, not just the illegal aliens who have snuck into America and set up house.

Bush wants a "guest worker" program. Fine. Let's authorize a maximum of TW0 MILLION "guest worker" jobs, good for six months a year, requiring annual renewal. That will more than take care of all those jobs Americans "will not do".

No bringing in of families. These are to be seasonal job permits, authorizing only the worker, who will be required to return to his point of origin each and every year. It's just a job people, not a housing program.

The rest, we round up and return to their native countries, getting our lost jobs back in the process, with the added benefit of making our businees community legal and lawful... once again.