Denver Metro Young Republicans

Looks like there’s some movement on the traditional American solution to the sort of labor shortages which are driving part of the immigration debate: Farms Fund Robots to Replace Migrant Fruit Pickers

One reason the industrial revolution caught on so early and so strongly in the northern states was that mechanization alleviated the chronic labor shortages they faced. I was not aware that Cesar Chavez had fought against mechanization in the 1970s, but that doesn’t surprise me one bit — if machines can be built which reduce the amount of human labor in the fields, it’s a direct threat to the power base of the UFW and other farm labor unions. Never mind that it eliminates backbreaking and repetetive work — machines doing the work that humans shouldn’t have to do, you might say — and frees up that labor for other uses where human faculties are more useful.