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Do Unemployed American Workers Really Want Those Farm and Restaurant Jobs?

It’s tiring to hear the repetitious ongoing immigration debate, which is fraught with misinformation. The typical conversation goes like this: illegal aliens…

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It’s tiring to hear the repetitious ongoing immigration debate, which is fraught with misinformation. The typical conversation goes like this: illegal aliens are taking away jobs from decent, hardworking, unemployed Americans who would jump at these jobs if only we could get rid of these intruders--all of them. The U.S. government needs to wake up and do its job-- deport all 11 million of them. If ICE did that all unemployment in the U.S. would vanish forever, making us a very happy country indeed.

There’s a big problem with this analysis: it’s not true and comedian Stephen Colbert is using his comedic skills to point this out. He’s teamed up with The United Farm Workers, challenging unemployed Americans to “Come on, take our jobs”, to apply for the thousands of agricultural jobs that our country cannot fill. In fact, according to the Department of Labor, over half of the nation’s farm workers are (shockingly) illegal immigrants. Arturo Rodriguez, President of the United Farm Workers, says his members are fed up with being blamed for taking American jobs and welcomes Colbert’s intervention. The problem is that there are no takers. Who wants to pick fruits and vegetables in the 102 degree heat that we’ve had in the Delaware Valley this past week? Quite frankly, living without air conditioning seems punishment enough to most of us.

Even the thought of planting and harvesting mushrooms in climate controlled environments does not appeal to most Americans. Do you know anyone who is willing to wake up at 2:00 every morning, crawl in a tiny, dark space filled with damp, smelly fertilizer and cut mushrooms with a sharp knife? Are your kids willing to take this as even a summer job? I know that mine aren’t.

My very own hard-working, highly motivated 17 year old daughter is the prime example. Desperate for a summer job in order to assure that she had spending money as she enters college this fall, she scoured the malls and on-line ads. Unfortunately, no one was hiring adorable 17 year olds with impressive high school transcripts but no true job skills. Still, she knew that she had to start somewhere. She was thrilled when she found a job with a local pizza parlor. After all, how hard could it be to work in a restaurant and take pizza orders over the phone? Very hard, she’s learned. The first day, a customer from California yelled at her because she had forgotten his order of fries. Although her first impulse was to tell him that he was overweight enough and didn’t really need them, she recognized that such response did not appear in the employee handbook that she had memorized and hence could not be given. Now well versed in remembering to add orders of fries, she has progressed to other more important jobs: she cleans bathrooms, tables, and salt and pepper shakers and fills little plastic cups with salad dressing (she apparently did it wrong last week). As she goes about her daily tasks, she hears the guys in the back, snickering and laughing in Spanish at how slow and inept she is. They don’t know that she understands them because she hasn’t wanted to share that fact with them. Instead, each night she returns home near tears, berating herself for being so slow and so stupid, all the while vowing to try harder and improve the next day. If she were not so desperate to earn her own money, albeit at minimum wage (with constant cuts in hours because business is slow), so concerned about proving herself, she’d already have quit. In fact, if she were the typical American worker she would have been out the door on day 2. Instead, she remains, awed at the fact that the Spanish speaking workers in the back are organized, fast and still pleasant to customers as they stand sweating over a hot stove and oven. She, like the kitchen staff but for different reasons, is determined to prove that she can succeed in a demanding, tough and often unrewarding business, where servers and cooks are often invisible servants.

When my daughter and the other high school kids leave for school come fall, their jobs will be open. So far, no one’s stepped in to ask for them (which is why the restaurant hired these summer kids in the first place, figuring that any legal worker, even on a short term basis, was better than none at all). Perhaps Stephen Colbert should add these jobs to his agricultural campaign, making sure that the header reads: “Undesirable, backbreaking restaurant jobs in desperate need of being filled.  If picking fruit in the hot California sun is not your thing, hurry up and apply within”.

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