On Thursday, The Wall Street Journal produced Got Workers? Dairy Farms Run Low on Labor By MIRIAM JORDAN July 30 2009.

This is essentially yet another advertisement for high-net worth businessmen, in the case big dairy operators, complaining about obstructions in the way of their swamping their neighborhoods with illiterate Mexican workers, dumping the social costs on the taxpayers, and wrecking the prospects for improved living standards for their Blue-collar compatriots.

Miriam Jordan, to whom Joe Guzzardi awarded VDARE.com’s 2008 Worst Immigration Reporter Award seems to specialize in stories celebrating the damaging of American workers by mass immigration. As I remarked in May in WSJ Crows: ”Refugees” get scarce jobs ahead of Americans.

I see she was educated at Stanford and Columbia and speaks several languages including Hebrew…can she speak - or feel - American?

A significant remark appeared in this article’s comment thread by one Benjamin Ersing:

We are a nation of immigrants, but we suffer from dimentia and are too nearsighted in order to remember our ancestors and see that our future lies in welcoming and integrating this next influx of immigrants…if I may be so presumptious about some of my countrymen, this is a serious issue to many because of an unspoken fear of genetic dilution. Yes, it is mainly about race.

Of course, as Kevin MacDonald has pointed out, this argument cuts both ways: all this enthusiasm for ravaging the living standards of American workers could equally well be driven by ethnic animosity towards and disdain for them.

Hat tip The Audacious Epigone who has chosen to focus on the economics of the article in an excellent essay on Friday:

Dairy industry demonstrates how cheap, pliable labor and technological innovation are at odds

A couple of paragraphs from a WSJ article on the putative labor shortage (which should actually be thought of as a shortage at the desired wage rates of producers) the US dairy industry faces caught my attention:

Dairy farmers in Europe have begun to use robotic milkers to reduce dependence on manual labor. But due to the high capital investment required, adoption in the U.S. is likely to be slow, Mr. Maloney says. Phil Martin, an agricultural economist at the University of California, Davis, believes if labor gets much more expensive in the dairy sector, those higher wages could spur investment in technology

TAE continues:

...it is clear that if the monetary standard of living is presumed to increase in the US going forward, this is not sustainable without greater mechanization. Yet the availability of cheap labor inhibits this from being adopted… Low wages and first world status do not mesh. According to a study led by the Heritage Foundation's Robert Rector, low-skilled households created an average net fiscal deficit of more than $22,000 in 2004. Nine percent of natives are classified as low-skilled, as are 25% of legal immigrants and 50% of illegal immigrants… Why subsidize the labor costs of dairy farmers if doing so will retard long-term increases in domestic productivity? I do not see why our immigration policy should encourage the perpetual search for an ever larger, cheaper labor pool at the expense of per capita productivity increases.

The essay then concludes with an extract from a Steve Sailer piece.

VDARE.com has long been interested in the agricultural mechanization answer. It is deeply ironic that this country, which originated so many machines — such as the Harvester - because historically American labor was scarce and expensive, should now swing onto a labor-intensive path.

Higher wages, greater productivity, no addiction to cheap labor — the economic answer is and has long been obvious.

The problem is political. As Benjamin Ersing says:

…it is mainly about race.

At least Miriam Jordan did mention the mechanization possibility. Congratulate her.