I worked for a meat conglomerate here in belgium and plenty of the farmers they dealt with didn't …

> Why tho do you feel the need to defend big agri businesses skirting employment law and pressuring wages downward by bringing in illegal people? Not sure if they (no matter if big business or small farm) could find enough American citizens to do those jobs, even if they were better paid...

> Just the paperwork to run a competitive farm was/would have been impossible to deal with for many of these people and it was so clearly made up by people who never had to deal with the consequences directly. You are assuming this is an unintended effect, but it is very much the intended effect of bureaucratic rules and the reason large companies and conglomerates constantly lobby for them: they can afford the overhead costs (until the inevitable external disruptor comes around and totally eats their lunch, see europe) and smaller players cannot. These rules are moats built by big companies. Doubly so for subsidies tied to complex filing and reporting requirements: large companies easily do this (they have department(s) just for handling these larger than whatever department in the government is handling the paperwork), small players can't and miss out.

They said immigrant. Why do you feel the need to equate that term to illegals? They are not the same thing.

> Why tho do you feel the need to defend big agri businesses skirting employment law and pressuring wages downward by bringing in illegal people? It is interesting that you immediately jumped to "illegal people". When I read it, I thought about the US H-2A via for temp farm hands. This page: https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/chart-gallery/chart-d... ... says 385,000 visa holders in 2024. That is a lot! Since you are based in Belgium, how many native-born Belgians are still performing low-skill manual labour on a farm? Probably very few. Most of them are probably from the poorest parts of EU or some kind of temp farm hand visa. Specifically: Fruits and vegetables require lots of low-skill manual labor for harvest and packing. > At the same time gov requirements make it almost impossible to run an smaller independent farm Call me cynical, but I am not nostalgic for the "smaller i…

>Why tho do you feel the need to defend big agri businesses skirting employment law and pressuring wages downward by bringing in illegal people? I find it a bit weird looking at the US how they seem to kneejerk into different camps depending on what the other side does with some old outliers like bernie who retain their line. Margins are tight for produce, I don't think it's that immigrants are depressing the wages its more so consumer preference and competition. Yes, if it was more punishing for companies caught hiring people without verification it would increase wages, but it would also increase the price of food, something which has been wildy unpopular with the voter base >Just the paperwork to run a competitive farm was/would have been impossible to deal with for many of these people and it was so clearly made up by people who never had to deal with the consequences directly. This …