{"id":1845,"date":"2011-06-27T09:25:43","date_gmt":"2011-06-27T13:25:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/2011\/06\/the-atlantic-dissects-georgias-anti-immigrant-law.html"},"modified":"2011-06-27T09:25:43","modified_gmt":"2011-06-27T13:25:43","slug":"the-atlantic-dissects-georgias-anti-immigrant-law","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/2011\/06\/the-atlantic-dissects-georgias-anti-immigrant-law.html","title":{"rendered":"The Atlantic dissects Georgia’s anti-immigrant law"},"content":{"rendered":"The VDT’s pan of HB 87 gets national notice.\nWhy we don’t need a law that puts south Georgia farmers out of business\nwhile profiting private prison company CCA at taxpayer expense.\n

\nMegan McArdle wrote in the Atlantic 21 June 2011,\n\nGeorgia’s Harsh Immigration Law Costs Millions in Unharvested Crops<\/a>.\nShe started by quoting Jay Bookman<\/a>,\nwho quoted the VDT.\nShe then goes into the economics:\n

\n\n<\/a>\nThe economics here aren’t particularly complicated, and I’m sure they\nwon’t be new to the sophisticated readers of the Atlantic, but they are\nuseful to look at and consider explicitly when thinking about issues\nlike this.\n

\nIt goes like this. If you’re not going to let illegal immigrants do the\njobs they are currently being hired to do, then farmers will have to\nraise wages to replace them. Since farmers are taking a risk in hiring\nimmigrant workers, you can bet they were getting a significant deal\non wage costs relative to “market wages”. I put market wages here in\nquotations, because it’s quite possible that the wages required to get\nworkers to do the job are so high that it’s no longer profitable for\nfarmers to plant the crops in the first place.\n<\/blockquote>\nYes, that would be the problem.\nA law that benefits private prison company CCA at the expense of\nGeorgia taxpayers while putting Georgia farmers out of business.\n

\nShe concludes:\n\n\n

\nAll of this is to say if you’re going to stop illegal immigrants from\ndoing a job you should be prepared for the job, and perhaps even the\nbusiness itself, to go away. You may think this is worth it, but you\nshould at least be acknowledging the risks and weigh them against what,\nif anything, you think is being gained.\n<\/blockquote>\nWe don’t need HB 87.\nAnd we don’t need a private prison in south Georgia,\nprofiting CCA at the expense of Georgia farmers and taxpayers.\nSpend those tax dollars on rehabilitation and education instead.\n

\n-jsq\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The VDT’s pan of HB 87 gets national notice. Why we don’t need a law that puts south Georgia farmers out of business while profiting private prison company CCA at taxpayer expense. Megan McArdle wrote in the Atlantic 21 June 2011, Georgia’s Harsh Immigration Law Costs Millions in Unharvested Crops. She started by quoting Jay […]","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[97,202,1113,48,40,14,15,49,321,2,1381,72,21,22,133,178],"tags":[8750,1011,8817,4093,8701,2002,8830,8730,8710,7,46,929,215,6,8742,8749],"class_list":["post-1845","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-activism","category-agriculture","category-cca","category-code-enforcement","category-community","category-economy","category-education","category-elections","category-food-and-drink","category-government","category-immigration","category-incarceration","category-planning","category-politics","category-vdt","category-vlcia","tag-agriculture","tag-ajc","tag-cca","tag-farm","tag-georgia","tag-hb-87","tag-immigration","tag-incarceration","tag-law","tag-lowndes-county","tag-nathan-deal","tag-republicans","tag-south-georgia","tag-valdosta","tag-vdt","tag-vlcia"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p585fK-tL","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1845","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1845"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1845\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1845"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1845"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.l-a-k-e.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1845"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}