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Robots To Replace Migrant Fruit Pickers
Vicissidude sends us to Wired for a look at a fruit-harvesting robot being developed in California. Its development has been funded entirely by agricultural associations, concerned by the uncertainty surrounding migrant immigrant labor. Quoting: "As if the debate over immigration and guest worker programs wasn't complicated enough, now a couple of robots are rolling into the middle of it. Vision Robotics, a San Diego company, is working on a pair of robots that would trundle through orchards plucking oranges, apples or other fruit from the trees. In a few years, troops of these machines could perform the tedious and labor-intensive task of fruit picking that currently employs thousands of migrant workers each season."
Really? How much exactly do these robots cost?
Is it more than about $3 an hour, including maintenance?
And do they reproduce themselves?
Cuz, you've got some strong competition there.
I've been wondering why this hasn't happened yet for years. The answer, of course, is that the ag industry could rely on incredibly cheap labor, so it wasn't worth developing a technological replacement. But if anything is proof that the debate about illegal immigration has turned a corner, this is it.
Once you've seen the back-breaking labor involved in the California agriculture industry, it's impossible not to applaud the development of technology that will make it obsolete. Nobody says after years of work in the strawberry fields, "Gee, I'm sure glad I got the opportunity to explore my full human potential in that career!"
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
We already have fruit f*cker robots, why not fruit pluckers too.
f ruit+fucker
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/search?keyword=
Dirt doesn't need luck.
The ag lobby has been claiming that we need "guest workers" (or illegals, or others) to pick these crops.
This is not unlike the H1B scandal. If you pay enough, you'll find people to do almost any job. The "need" isn't for workers per se, but people who will work a brief job for roughly minimum wage and then move on as a rootless nomad.
We should view this as cruel. We shouldn't maintain an underclass which picks fruit or maintains gardens. Machines can do this work without becoming tired, bored, getting disabling injuries, suffering reactions to ag chemicals, or any of the other hazards of human labor in orchards and fields. Machines can be built as needed and scrapped when they become unusable or obsolete.
If a machine is stored in a leaky barn, it's the farmer's problem. It's not cruel to ask a machine to work in high temperatures or without toilet breaks. A machine doesn't need compensation if drought or frost or fungus ruins the crop and there's nothing for it to do one year.
The taxpayer ought to have a say too. A machine isn't going to bring in a family which immediately qualifies for food stamps and Medicaid. A machine isn't going to overwhelm schools with ESL students. A machine isn't going to add to traffic congestion or law-enforcement expenses.
People who build and maintain machines have pretty good lives. People who do the sort of jobs replaced by machines often don't. Designing and debugging and improving machines means paychecks for geeks like us.
Instead of asking anyone to do jobs we won't do ourselves, or pay enough to attract folks like us, let's make machines to do them. Anything less is hypocritical.
Sustainability and energy independence essay
Low cost, low value added labor is a loser. So is importing millions of people to form a permanent slave class.
This argument was what Southern Slave owners used with Cotton.
Funny, how that chore of cotton picking got automated.
Machines don't get tired. They don't die. They don't need medical care or costly medical plans. They can be made over and over again, and always get cheaper when you make enough of them. The whole advance of human existence has been to make more and better machines, that do more to leverage people's labor.
Hello that is WHY you are reading Slashdot.
Machines replaced slave and later tenant farmer/serf labor in the South. Machines replaced lots of deadly hand labor in coal mines (not entirely but a lot). Machines replaced a line full of low skilled labor on the auto assembly lines with a few high skilled positions.
But hey, for some people having a subservient near-slave class is a plus. Not the kind of society I'd want to live in, but some folks only feel better when they have helots to lord it over I guess.
Tomaron nuestros trabajos!
1. Do you think the migrant workers are going to be hapy to be out of jobs?
2. What will you say when automation renders YOUR occupation redundant?
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
This one is worth a few "Funny" points, if not something else for the thought behind the sarcasm.
I doubt it. I read it as a stereotype parody of anyone who is against illegal immigration. See, if you are not for completely open borders, you are automatically a racist, xenophobe, bigot, red-neck...whatever. He refuses to consider that maybe illegals have no rights, no protection under the law (as far as they know), and they are taken advantage of and abused on a regular basis because they are illegal and are afraid to seek their rights. It makes his side a clear winner when he doesn't mention that people who want a secure border aren't against immigration. We just want a name and simple background check. We are not bigots. Hell, for that matter, I feel the immigration quota should be raised to the number of estimated illegals in the country. What is it, 12,000,000. The number of legal immigrants is capped at 250,000. That's a joke! NO wonder there are so many illegals!
Anyway, this machinery is the modern day equivalent of the cotton gin. Only, instead of helping to end the oppression of blacks, it will end the oppression of Hispanics.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
It amazes me that Horticulturists can come up with thousands of varieties of flowers, fruits, & vegetables, Engineers can come up with robots that circle a tree numerous times to clean it of any fruit, but the two can't work together to make a tree that's easier to harvest from.
Maybe they will now.
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
Expect massive Luddite revolts. I'm serious. You have no idea how many MILLIONS of Mexican migrant workers there are.
This wont be pretty. Perhaps we should ask England is advice concerning textile machines?
Developing technology is extremely expensive. And while there is no pressure to change, usually driven by shortages in supply (whether labour or raw materials), the status quo is maintained.
It took more than one gas crisis for the American car manufacturers to design fuel efficient engines. Because while gas was cheap, there were no incentives to invest in technology. And while labour was (and still is) cheap, robotics cannot compete. I am sure that the technology for those robots has been available for at least a decade, but it wasn't cost effective in comparison to migrant workers.
But this is the way our society SHOULD have developed. So many manufacturing processes could be automated, if not for the initial investment.
Actually genius the cotton gin prolonged the oppression of blacks.
You see picking cotton just wasn't as profitable as growing other things, until the cotton gin made it more profitable.
Sure it saved some work, but it created much more.
The only reason why people do jobs like this is that it is better than the alternative. If we eliminate the class of jobs (which I agree we should do) then the net effect to migrants is bad. The net effect to those that they are supporting is disasterous to the population being supported by said industry. Even if the industry is horrible the alternative may be worse. So if we do this automation, do we simply eliminate the class and let the chaos fall where it may? Note that a similar thing happened in NOLA - there were large manual labor industries that were displaced (and probably won't return). The elimination of this class of "barely survival" jobs has yielded a set of people without the skills to survive in any facet. Retraining (at least according to the social worker I discussed it with) is not feasible, as most have somewhere between a third and a sixth grade education. Many of them are second/third/nth generation of low grade manual laborers. Like it or lump it the cost of automation goes far beyond the price of machines. It's retraining costs for citizens, it's economic aid to countries who are affected by the elimination of a cash inflow (or deciding to turn our backs on them - quite possibly the right thing to do). It's paying the social costs of a higher crime rate when people who can't do something else realize they must still eat.
www.voiceofthehive.com - Beekeeping and Honeybees for those who don't.
I dont think they come here to pick fruit per se,
they come here because economic conditions are better,
and there are jobs that pay more. So, if the
ag jobs go away, I would not expect immigration
to stop or reverse. It might find a new equilibrium,
and slow a bit.
"Think of it as evolution in action". A reader of
"Oath of Fealty", perhaps?
emt 377 emt 4
I remember when this subject first came up back in the 80's in California. There was a loud protest by the U.C. students against this type of research. So much so, that it was definitely a politically unacceptable subject, and the research seemed to be moved to the back burner.
You see, students were concerned about the impact on the Farm Workers back then, and didn't want to jeoparize their jobs. It might be a little hard to fathom now, but it was a different time back then. The grape boycott by the Farm Workers Union was still a fresh topic, and people were more radical about liberal causes then.
Plus, believe it or not, at least some Farm Workers considered themselves Middle Class. I once saw this statement in a local newspaper, because the Farm Worker being interviewed could actually own a home.
Oh yes, I was one of those students that shared that belief, though I wasn't vocal about it.
Today is a completely different world. The number of illegal workers in this country have pretty much destroyed any hope of being "Middle Class" for the farm workers. And a good number of students from then have had to shift their job asperations (or are thinking about it), due to the unmitigated number of H1-B's that are flooding the market. That's if they actually have a job (and I know many in this age group who either don't, or are underemployed).
In theory we could have a civilization where people only work if they want to. Isaac Asimov and Roger MacBride Allen explored one possible society in the Caliban trilogy.
We could have robots making our fast food, doing the gardening, mining metal, making robots, maintaining robots.
Not to take this story for more than what it is but this gives me an opportunity to share a vision of the future that has made me think quite hard. What if robots could do every menial and every physical job that needed doing? Imagine robots as dexterous and with visual recognition as good as your average skilled craftsman.
Would each person own a robot and collect a check from home or would the more likely scenario be that a few large companies would run huge armies of these robots? How might all those people who never heard of 'knowledge work' make a living? I'm thinking that the current scheme for distribution of wealth based on labor might not work in that scenario. Finally, I wonder what system, short of some socialist or communist nightmare, would.
I'm interested to hear what people think. Discussion or not, we'll only find out when it happens so bring those cotton-pickin' robots on!
"Tree shakers" have been used since the 1960s. A big net in two section is clamped around the tree, a big arm reaches out and grabs the tree trunk, and a vibrator shakes the tree while the fruit falls off. Some early versions damaged trees, but that was fixed. (Linear shaking good, orbital shaking bad.)
Tomato harvesting was partly mechanized back in the 1960s. A tougher tomato plus appropriate machinery did the job. This was controversial at the time. Today, it's established technology. Check out the Pik-Rite 190 Tomato Harvester. 30 tons of tomatoes an hour. And that's the small model. This still doesn't work all that well for the softer varieties of tomatoes intended for sale whole, but Roma and cherry tomatoes are routinely picked by machine now.
Picking machines are getting smarter. The newer ones have cameras, computers, and air jets to sort produce by size and color.
The problem is that America is letting illegals come here to pick. Instead, had reagan not done his infamous forgivness, then we would have been forced to deal with this. All in all, we would already be highly mechaniczed. What is needed is to automate the low end jobs of agriculture, construction, manufactuering and low-end service jobs. These robots will not only be useful here, but also in any attempt to move off planet. Once we go to either the moon or mars we will need HEAVY automation to survive. And for America, and the west such as Japan and Europe, we need it due to our greying population. That is going to haunt us soon.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
There will be the typical outcry that it's being proposed to either stop Mexicans from migrating, deprive Latinos work and money (vast chunks of central America and Mexico are now completely dependent on migrant labor money that is sent home) And there will of course be comments from what is typical of ignorant people that call themselves liberal (and aren't).
The fact is immigration reform that removes illegal migrants and eliminates even agricultural migrant's will be good for America in every way. The US economy has moved to a very strong dependence on what can only be called slave labor. Illegal migrants are frequently put in job's that pay less than US minimum wage standards and don't meet US minimum safety standards. There can be no argument that the continual immigration of people to the US helps the American economy, even illegal migration helps, the question is does it help more than controlled immigration does. But the fact is, how illegal workers are treated in this country is akin to the sharecrop system of virtual slavery that developed in the south after the civil war. It's also a fact that eliminating the cheap slave labor will force technological solutions that in the end will generate a significant number of high paying tech jobs.
As citizens we have to decide if we believe in the values we enshrine. If the wholesale exploitation of people to keep fruit and veggy prices low fits with our values. Sure, the migrants will tell you that they love living in America and that they do the hard work so their children have a chance that they wouldn't have in their home countries. Again, we have to ask ourselves, wouldn't it be better to allow REAL immigration instead of speaking out about illegal migration while we turn a blind eye to the illegal migration (US policy for the last 20 years).
How many people do you know that have turned in the local small businesses that are employing illegal migrants and in the process pricing out everyone else that is playing by the rules ?(Construction is by far the worst for this)? Illegal migration artificially deflates labor prices, it's the reason the republican's have used to keep the minimum wage from changing and it's also the reason that some jobs have such low labor rates that no one but illegal migrants can afford the job, thereby providing an excuse to right wing policy makers that the migrants are only taking jobs that American's won't. Without illegal migrants in the equation labor rates would be forced by supply and demand to provide a real living wage.
Picking a fruit without damaging the fruit or the tree seems like a pretty complicated task from a robotics standpoint. I'm sure Honda or a couple of CMU grad students could demo something that can pick an orange from a tree--but picking a million oranges from thousands of trees in a real orchard is a different type of task entirely.
Not saying it won't happen, but I'll believe it when I see it.
Until then, this kind of looks like an R&D firm "picking the low hanging fruits" of funding from the immigration debate...
Immigration issues are nothing new. I think California's first immigrant labor crisis (post Mexican era) was in the 1950's. New York has had issues as well ("West Side Story"). I met a prof circa 1994 who claimed to have worked on a fruit picking machine. Apparently oranges are somewhat difficult...the picker needs to have a "feel" for the orange as the wrist is used to twist and pull the fruit. You don't want a stem left and you don't want a chunk of the protective rind to be pulled free. It took awhile to make the machine...when the machine was demo'd, no one was too interested. It was like paraphrasing Mao...why use technology when you have a comparatively free workforce clamoring for a job, any job? Point being this controversy is ongoing from decades, if not centuries past. Hopefully the robos are getting cheaper. They weren't in the 1980's.
I have often stated that agricultural technology stagnates as long as there is cheap labor to do the work. When you can have some guy from Mexico come in, and pay him under the table illegally at wages well below state and federal minimums, there is no incentive to invest in technology.
... As for Mexico, they have all the education, tools and resources necessary to be a prosperous nation. They don't need to immigrate to the US and work for slave wages to feed their children. The real obstacles are the corrupt government and corrupt businesses that exploit the people. You leave Mexico because you're being exploited to work in the US where you are also exploited, but just to a lesser degree. That's a bogus argument for ignoring illegal immigration.
But when you wish to produce more crops with lower labor costs, in a world with rising labor costs, you end up having to invest in technology to take on the role of human beings. This is the wonder of agriculture in the industrialized world. Even something as simple as a combine harvester has had a dramatic impact on our society. It is inventions like that that enabled an industrial revolution to occur. As you no longer need as many people on the farm, that provides more people to work in industry and dramatically increases the number of people who become professional workers or skilled tradesmen.
A poor third-world nation suffers greatly because it cannot scale its agriculture the same way as the industrialized nations. Everyone is working their tail off trying to do subsistence farming. they have no time to work at a trade that adds to their nations GDP/GNP. If a poor nation could increase agricultural output while decreasing the labor involved, you can reassign those people to producing things. the don't even have to be costly goods, it could be sewing clothing and footballs. But it's hard to industrialize when people are starving(a leading cause of disease in the third world) or working constantly to produce food (an insufficient amount of food).
You should either treat people as equals and protect them from exploitation, or you do not let them in. And guess who the primary victims of Latino gangs are? new illegal immigrants. Without control of the borders the ex-cons and thugs spill into the country and take over the Hispanic ghettos, victimizing the illegal immigrants. I don't know about you, but I think knowing who comes into your country and not letting in people without proper document is the opposite of racist/bigot, I think it's the compassionate choice.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
It will never work - those robots are huge, they will never make it across the border undetected.
ccalam - acoustic versions of new songs.
Mod me down for defending Marx, but I feel like he's pretty misunderstood, and far more insightful than people give him credit for, and his views relate directly to the topic.
Apologies for the long post, and if it's not very readable, well, it's friday night and I'm a bit drunk... But it can be summed up as "Robot society as you describe it is communism, and that's a good thing":
Well, setting aside issues like Peak Oil and more general limitations on the energy to power all these robots, which make me wonder if this is a realistic future scenario...
If what you're describing comes true, you are basically describing the technological conditions for "end-stage communism." I don't mean the Communist Party violently overthrows capitalism to create a worker's paradise - I mean what Marx was actually predicting; a great deal of his theory has been "creatively modified" by people like Lenin and Mao.
Marx was basically just arguing (revolutionary and unique at the time, not really that unique now, after people have been discussing it for 1.5 centuries) that technology shaped society. Far from saying capitalism needed to be destroyed post-haste, he was arguing that capitalism as an economic and social system was simply a structure on top of industrialism as a technological system - a way of organizing resources and people, and justifying the downsides, of industrial factories, etc. Marx was pretty clear that he admired the ingenuity and resourcefulness of capitalists, he just disapproved of the way that the people at the top ignored the downsides of their own methods.
Capitalism is good, Marx said, because it stimulates the development of production technology that alleviates and overcomes the great problem of scarcity. The profit motive
causes business owners to reinvest in their business, automate it, produce more at lower cost, drive costs lower, etc., etc. This makes more stuff, which is good, because people have generally not had enough to survive, or at least to survive comfortably.
But as capitalism develops, Marx argued, it faces some "internal contradictions". As automation becomes more and more prevalent (thanks to the profit motive), there is less and less work for people to do. When you're out of work and run out of savings, you can't buy stuff, no matter how cheap it is. So there will be a growing class of hungry, pissed-off people; at the same time, there will be greater material abundance thanks to automation.
Eventually, this situation will have to change, if for no other reason than that the unemployed masses will simply start taking things, because it's that or starve to death. At that point, the society will naturally convert to socialism - that is, the workers will just start running things themselves, first by democratic government, then without any government at all. As the situation stabilizes, individuals can pretty much do their own thing, as long as the means of making necessities (automated factories) don't come under any individual's or any particular group's control.
Now, you can stave off this situation, and keep the basic structure of capitalism in a few ways. We see the US, for example, doing all of these in the twentieth century. More specifically, if you've studied the history of these things, you'll notice that consumerism, New Deal, dramatic increase in neocolonialism, welfare, etc. all either start or dramatically increase - a quantum leap - around the 1920s-30s in the US. The Great Depression basically is the contradiction Marx described coming to fruition (remember, it was part of a global depression in all advanced nations), but it got "band-aids" to alleviate the problem, and then WW2 and the Cold War began generating a lot of jobs:
1) Develop new industries that take on the unemployed workers. Eventually these tend to be automated themselves.
2) Develop/enlarge new markets by:
A) "Strongly encouraging" developing countries to buy your stuff instead of making it themselves - in essence, shifting the unemplo
Your inclusion of the American Civil War alongside Greek and Roman histories regarding slavery denotes the sad lack of education too many Americans have regarding this issues.
Once and for all the American Cvil War was NOT about slavery. It was about the economic leverage slave owners tried to weld against the indentured servant labor force of the north
And now, for a brief history lesson.
(Disclaimer: I am speaking abstractly of the slave trade and of the historical fact regarding it. While this may seem cold and even racist, by no means should my assessment of the slave trade itself be construed to imply some approval or condoning of the ownership and/or trade in human beings. I am merely trying to relay facts about what was, not what should have been.)
What most people do not realize is that only about 2% of the entire African slave trade reached American shores. The US outlawed the importation of slaves in 1808, over half a century before the Civil War. Thus, what slave trade existed in the US was an internal and self-sustaining one.
Slaves were listed as assets on slave owners books in much the same way as any other asset. In fact, in Georgia, the expected lifetime output of a slave was factored into the Return on Investment (ROI) of his/her purchase, and leveraged accordingly in any bank loan or finance maneuver on the part of the slave owner seeking to expand his operation.
This became more prominent as the 19th century wore on and northern states relied on cheap immigrant labor or an indentured servant to fuel industrialization while the south continued its reliance on the internal slave trade. The fact slaves reproduced at far lower rates than imported indentured servants led to a premium on the slave him/herself. Supply and demand created a workforce shortage for the south and surplus for the north.
This, in turn, lead the politicians of the north to turn the moral issue of slavery into a political one in order to enforce an economic advantage, such as when they did the same against the Mormons in the Utah territories.
What resulted was the retaliation of southern slave owners to protect what they viewed as legitimate assets, leveraged against mortgages they had taken out from northern banks in order to compete with European textile mills, from which the northern states had been importing from more than the southern states.
The American Civil War wasn't about slavery or even states' rights. It was about economics. The northern states had the lion's share of the GDP of the young US and, thus, had a greater attention from the Federal government. Factor in the hot-button moral issue of slavery and the northern states had a sure-fire win from a political standpoint.
The true shame is that all this resulted in actual warfare, with the southern states refusing to budge on the obvious moral bankruptcy of the internal slave-trade and insisting, blindly, that the issue was about states' rights.
There's an old joke that goes something like this:
...So many "hard-working people" take the easy way out, and come illegally into the US, and send money home. To the country they don't want to live in, because of the government THEY elected and leave in power. Are these the people we want in the US? Are these people we want to extend citizenship to? What sorts of people do you think they'll elect to office, given the chance?.... If "Aztlan Pride" means being a cowering hypocrite, let them wave their flags in the civic cesspools they have made for themselves.
A Mexican and a Cowboy are drinking in a bar right on the border. The cowboy says "Why are you Mexican people always so mad at us? What'd we wever do to you?"
The Mexican turns to him and says "You stole half our country! And worse than that, you took the half with all the paved roads!"
Then the cowboy says "Yea but when we took that land, nobody lived there, and the roads weren't paved."
---------
First off.... the US does not at all need illegal immigrants, particularly those from central and S. American countries.
These people tend to leave their own countries because of lousy economic conditions--but it never seems to sink in that the governments in those countries plays a big part in the lousy economic conditions. Mexico's gov't has a few people who seem to be earnestly trying to do the decent thing, but fact is most of it sucks for corruption, and has for a long time. The Mexican electorate can't seem to figure out how NOT to vote brutes and grifters into office.
Mexican people are not dumb, and are not lazy. Mexico has decent amounts of natural resources, industry (other than the border maquiladoras) and educational institutions. There is nothing wrong with the country except for the people who tend to get elected to run it--and Mexicans need to stay home and figure out how to fix that themselves.
Second of all--the reason that immigrants come to the US is that they know they can get jobs, and the reason for that is that the agricultural business lobby has always tried to minimize the EMPLOYER's penalties for hiring illegals. The key to not attracting so many illegals is not to try to fine the illegals, they wired all their extra money home. The key here is making the BUSINESSES caught employing them pay--dearly. Like, say,,, $1000 per day of known employment. When the farm lobby sees that it's cheaper to hire legal citizens, they'll raise wages and probably be able to hire legals. They won't LIKE that, because those legals will have full job rights under US law--something that illegals do not have now. But if McDonald's and Wal-Mart knew they could get away with hiring near-100% illegals and pay them $3 an hour, do you think they'd do it too? And do you think they'd be happy to see an end put to it?
US companies that hire illegals need to pay through the nose, and that money needs to be spent on deporting the illegals caught. It's for their own good. (while we're at it, we need to rescind "birthright citizenship". All the blacks who were slaves are already citizens now, and that was the entire point of the law)
Thirdly--Whatever Mexico thinks of US immigrant policy is meaningless; the trite US police abuse that Mexico calls "an outrage" is mild compared to what Mexican police do regularly to people entering their own country illegally at the southern border.
~
I say "open up the doors to foreigners and keep them open".
I'm 50 years old and my Social Security depends on them.
What does this have to do with immigration? The robots are replacing EVERY worker, not just migrant workers. There is no difference between replacing migrant worker, illegal workers, and legal workers.
Regardless of immigration status, the robots are replacing workers. Period. The robots don't decide who they want to replace, The farmers that grow the fruit just want to replace all of the workers so they can minimize costs (the whole point of robotics in the first place), and the companies that develop the robots could give a damn about the immigration status of the workers they are replacing because it has no influence on robotics in the first place.
What the heel is this article about? Is it about robots becoming more widespread in industry, or is it an "Immigration Politics/Policies" op-ed?
Robotics has nothing to do with immigration status, and immigration status has nothing to do with robotics.
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
I agree with you 100%. The US is a nation of immigrants, and it's insanely hypocritical to keep the immigration caps as low as they are, especially with the costs of domestic labor skyrocketing through the roof.
People of any nationality should be given a legal and reasonable path of immigration to the US, as long as they are willing to work, and attempt to integrate into the society. Considering the poor (by American standards) conditions that most illegals put up with to live and work in the US, it's pretty clear that there are a TON of people who WANT to be part of our society. Denying them that right is nothing short of inhumane. Considering that most illegals are already able to find employment that pays enough for them to subsist, it's not exactly like the US is going to turn into a refugee camp, and, if anything, will help the US economy by preventing the outsourcing of manufacturing and agriculture to other countries. It's also not exactly like the US is overcrowded -- we have more good land down south, and out west than we know what to do with.
The problem is, that, unlike yourself, many many Americans ARE bigots towards Latin Americans (and overwhelmingly so). The current immigration restrictions are more likely than not a result of this sort of person.
My local newspaper's website offers a comments section, much like most blogs offer. Whenever a story about immigration is posted, it is immediately flooded with some of the most potent and passionate bigotry I've ever seen (outside of documentaries on the civil rights movement). The newspaper now disables comments for these stories. It dealt a serious blow to my faith in humanity.
The locale of this newspaper? New Jersey. I would say that it's not unreasonable to peg over 50% of Jersey's population as being direct decendants of Ellis Island immigrants from the 19th and 20th centuries.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
I believe that robots are here to help... to release people to do non-robotic tasks. For those worried about robots replacing humans here is an article that addresses those questions: http://marshallbrain.com/robotic-freedom.htm If you want to contribute to this effort by coding open-source here are some links: http://miarn.sf.net/ and http://playerstage.sf.net./
The United States is actually NOT a 'nation of immigrants.' Immigrants are people who migrate to a modern country and try to fit into it's economy. The early settlers of what became the United States were settlers, not immigrants. It's a completely different thing. Settlers were largely self-reliant and made what they had with their own labor. Immigrants showed up later and wanted a piece of the pie.
Many immigrants have honorable intents and are not inherently bad. But this is NOT a 'nation of immigrants' and people who sneak in to squirt out an anchor baby so they can stay are a far cry from the settlers of this country and the earlier immigrants.
Yes, the GP is a bit misguided, or maybe just dissembling. I know a number of legal immigrants (my fiancee is one of them.) She was required spend years jumping through the requisite hoops, assimilating into our culture and proving to us that she is a worthy member of our society, a person that we want here because she understands what it means to be an American. In fact, she is as much an American as anyone who was born here. Maybe more, I'd say, because she understands the value of our traditional ideals much more than most "real" Americans, having lived without them for much of her life. When she finally took the test and was formally granted citizenship it was a BIG THING. And when she reads about various plans to grant "amnesty" or "citizenship" to people that just walked across the border, well ... frankly, that just torques her into a pretzel. Rightfully so, because she had to prove herself and they don't.
...") with the added benefit of cheap labor. If Mexico weren't bordering on the U.S., enjoying substantial political influence here, if our corporate masters weren't hooked on what amounts to near-slave labor, there'd be no question whatsoever about defending that border. I mean, if China (or France, or Germany, or any other country) began to send millions of its people here on boats we'd do something about it. At least, I would hope that we would, nor would be be bigots for doing so. We would be defending ourselves and our way of life, and we certainly wouldn't grant them amnesty or make them citizens just "because". "Because" is about the only answer that Congress and the Bush Administration give when asked why they want to throw out a couple centuries of immigration law and open our borders to all comers
See, people that ramble on about "bigotry" and "racism" and all the other excuses they use to justify illegal immigration on a massive scale do so to obscure this fact: allowing foreign people into your country (whatever country that may be) and possibly naturalizing said people isn't about helping them. It's just not, and anyone that says so is full of hooey. It's about choosing people that that will be good citizens and will be of long-term benefit to your country. That, by the way, is a process, one that takes time and is not fulfilled by simply arriving here in the back of a semitrailer! National governments have the right and the obligation to be selective about those to whom they grant citizenship, because their primary responsibility is to the citizens of their own country. Period. Regarding legal immigration, as the parent poster pointed out America is already pretty damn generous.
So that's what immigration is supposed to be about: it's not about handing out free jobs as yet another disguised form of foreign aid (and speaking of "more than the entire rest of the world combined
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
...can't wait to live off the fruits of robotic labor.
Tom Caudron
http://tom.digitalelite.com/
-Tom
Actually, it is a nation of immigrants. You don't get to divide immigrants up into before- and after- lines. The ones who came in before this date were "settlers", after that, but before this date they were "early immigrants" and the ones coming in now are "bad immigrants"... it doesn't work that way. An immigrant by definition is someone who leaves one country to settle in another. There's no "modern" about it, and there's no reference to fitting in to an economy. This is technically a nation of immigrants, because the immigrants far outnumber the people who were here pre-historically.
And as for the comment that many immigrants have honorable intents and are not inherently bad, well, that could be said of the entire population. Yes, some immigrants suck. Because they are _people_, not because they're immigrants. Some people suck, but then again many of them have honorable intent and are not inherently bad. I'm sure that some of the early settlers were pretty horrible, too, so lets not wax all nostalgic about heroic forbears.
My family lines came from Germany in the 1800s and Norway in the early 1900s. Relatively recent, as it goes, but still immigrants. We're all naturalized now, but that doesn't change the fact that we immigrated here.
~ Leilah
I, for one, welcome the coming robot economy. However, we need to be aware of the potential benefits as well as the potential economic dislocation.
Marshall Brain, the founder of http://howstuffworks.com/, has written a fictional account of what a future of advanced robots might look like.
http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
He also maintains a blog to keep track of developments related to a future robotic society.
http://roboticnation.blogspot.com/
"It could be good and it could be bad, but I don't know for sure" - Husker Du
An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come. - Victor Hugo
Funny. There's more people here who speak European languages than North American languages. Odd how the Constitution isn't written in Iroquois.
In Repressive Burma, it's not just your connection that dies. slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=314547&cid=20819199
While i think you have an interesting point of view, especially because of where you've been brought up, i don't think you can compare the cultural similarities and differences between canada Vs. US and US Vs Mexico.
/. is going to be out of work mowing lawns, working taco trucks, singing Mariachi tunes in restaurants, working "fast food" joints, working at the car wash. If anything, we should be trying to give these peoples more jobs because they'll do it, try to do it well and hopefully "motivate" locals who don't do the jobs back because they can't get hired for anything more skilled and aren't willing to take less pay now.
"Mexifornia" as you said, is the first time i've ever heard that word. Unlike any canadian territory where french nor english was the native language, "Spanish" - the american variation of Spain's official language, was already present in California and many other "western states" long before the US moved west.
The reason why there are so many "latin americans" in the southwest of the us is not because of the millions and millions of illegal immigrants, it's because of the millions of people who lived/settled on the lands before it became US territory. Although i will agree that the millions who keep coming in illegally help increase/sustain the number of latin americans. (Hey, someone said there's a difference between immigrants and settlers, right?)
What are people so afraid of? Surely no one on
You know, i've personally never have heard of an illegal alien getting welfare, foodstamps or some other sort of non-humane benefit. I've never heard of one apply for a tax refund either. I'm sure they've gotten emergency room treatment for free at the expense of legal aliens, but standing in line to get money? They must have paid a lot of $ to get a good SSN and ID.
What I have seen is a LOT of unfortunate people living together in amounts/places that locals would not tolerate themselves. If illegals have nice houses in Wisconsin, or Michigan, it's probably because the standard of living is a lot less there than in California. I worked at a site recently where one of the Mexican workers (born in the US) said, "... and i told them i'm mexican mexican" so i asked, "what is a 'Mexican 'Mexican'" and she answered, "you know, mexicans who live in a 1 room apartment with 2-3 families." She wasn't ghetto, and had no accent. But this is what she joked about being mexican.
While i'm sure that many miss the real point of what's going on here, the US always has been a point of inspiration and hope for the entire world. Maybe a little less now since about 2000, but still maintains that appeal. People from all over the world believe that there are streets "paved with gold." They think what they see in the movies is how it is. They want to be able to come here, and live like they "imagine" they can. So when everyone who thinks "they MUST assimilate but don't..." they are wrong. No one who comes here sets up show like vietnam, thailan, japan, russia, pakistan or any other place. They can try to "live like they did at home" but that doesn't mean buying a property, tearing it down, and the building the same crappy structure they had back home.
You don't see Los Angeles being a copy of Mexico. And besides, like i've told everyone after having worked in TJ for a little bit, "the only difference i saw between TJ and California is that California has Cal Trans."
Anyhow, it's time for leftovers from "Beto's." Man those dudes can make some mean fajitas. I sure am glad the illegals haven't integrated into our society as some wish they had... because we wouldn't have fajitas, tacos, tostadas, flautas or even nachos! Even though nachos was a mexican-american invention.
My abilities are only limited by my imagination
I don't think the first generation of any wave of immigrants is ever particularly successful at assimilating into a foreign culture, nor should it be expected to (within reason). Go to Brooklyn, NY and take a look at the various neighborhoods there -- up until only a few years ago, the city was divided into very distinct sections often based off of ethnicity. As time went on, and new generations were born, assimilation gradually took place. (As a byproduct, it also became (and has remained) the pizza capitol of the world, proving that assimilation can be mutually beneficial, but I digress...)
Of course, if the country's economy is structured in such a way that there is little social mobility or class-to-class interaction, then, no -- there won't be any assimilation, and we'll have numerous huge problems on our hands. Fortunately, I'm told that America is the land of opportunity. Right?
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose