This is a really bizarre claim to make. Are you claiming that the United States is, idk, forgetting how to farm and so we have to do mass immigration to bring in people who remember how? It also flies in the face of historical facts, like how the United States gained its status as an industrial powerhouse when immigration was at its lowest point in its history.

It’s not about knowledge. It’s about having people willing to use their strong backs.

Very few agricultural products are harvestable without the use of hands at the current prices. And when states have cracked down on illegal immigrants, farmers cry bloody murder that native-born Americans can’t last 1-2 days doing that work. American living standards are FAR higher than those of the people who are willing to work agricultural fields.

Okay. Then build robots to do it. Have you thought for a second about why these robots don't already exist? Perhaps it has something to do with available cheap labor. Really really strange to see a pro-immigration argument that amounts to "Big Ag needs their slave labor".

There wasn't even a single, popular vacuum robot with less then 7% one star ratings (complaints with valid utter failure). How naïve must one be to expect decent robots for farming. And those very soon? Do you believe in Santa? Or Tesla FSD?

A little difficult to parse your comment, but I think you're calling me naïve for asking the tech community on a message board for the incubator that has backed and does back the some of the most successful tech startups ever to think a little more deeply about how to solve these kinds of problems with technology. Wherein I posit that one of the reasons this tech community seemingly lacks interest - and surely the difficulty of the problem is also one of those reasons - is the availability of cheap labor, resulting in a weak argument for funding this kind of venture.

Interesting.

I'm not against automation. I'm against the interruption of the food supply chain. I don't won't the US to see a lot of pitchfork in use -- and that wouldn't be for farming.

I agree that (slave like) misuse of cheap labor is a problem.

We have a similar issue here. (Bad cleaning, by badly payed, overworked cleaners).

I'm a bit angry because I looked into fixing it by (partially) automating it, but the supply chains are rather bad. The currently available mainstream robots (Dreame, Roborock) are not up to the task (no proper support in Europe). The only interesting option seems to be cleanfix from Switzerland.

To make things short: that anger shouldn't have targeted you, because it boils down to my own current incompetence to fix a real problem. Sorry!

Wages are too low to incentivize investment in automating these jobs, precisely because of illegal immigration.

The jobs that don't require a delicate hand are to a large degree already automated. But the robots are not up to the delicate stuff.

>But the robots are not up to the delicate stuff.

Robots did my dad's knee replacement surgery. I don't think this argument holds water anymore. Maybe if you make your claim more precise: delicate + scale. But, if that's the case, the scale problem is solved with money.

Lots of teleoperated stuff in the medical world. That's not the same as robots. There's still a skilled hand at the controls making the medical decisions.

Robots? Or a human doctor that controlled it?

What? China has dark factories now. Did their wages pass ours without anyone noticing?

Please show your homework because the underlying logic seems exactly opposite of the facts.

Chinese dark factories aren’t harvesting bruisable fruits and veggies. Dark factories are specifically selected for tasks that are easily automated with extremely high precision. Most of agriculture isn’t.

In some places Chinese labor is at price parity. However the reasons why China has dark factories is government investment and an abundance of mechatronics engineers.

People build factories in China because all the other factories are in China just down the road.

None of this contradicts my previous comment though. We don't invest in automation because we have cheap labor. China is an aging society with a shrinking workforce. Here we have cheap labor and offload the cost to the taxpayer. Illegal immigration is just another part of corporate welfare which is why socialists like Bernie sanders used to be against it.

Your counter argument clearly cuts against your initial argument. Low wages isn’t preventing automation. It’s lack of an ecosystem of similar suppliers, lack of highly trained talent and lack of government and market investment.

Liberals aren’t against immigration because it is corporate welfare but because of the strain it places on the social safety net and effects on jobs but both of those could be overcome with a rational policy on special economic zones.