patrick.net

Rick Shade is a fifth generation California avocado farmer, and he can’t find enough workers. Nearly half of U.S. farm laborers are undocumented immigrants, according to the Department of Labor, and years of inconsistent policy and recent border crackdowns are taking a toll on the already short supply. Farmers like Shade can participate in the arduous H-2A guest farm worker visa program, which allows immigrants to work up to 10 months. Besides requiring a lawyer to get through the documentation, the H-2A program is expensive: Farmers must provide workers with housing, transportation to and from their home country, and workers’ compensation insurance.

Shade needs 50 harvesters for peak season, he told CNN reporter Kristen Holmes in a June 15, 2018 article, and at the time he had just 25. Experienced harvesters at Shade’s farm make up to $400 a day, with “rookies” starting off at minimum wage and moving up to between $200 and $300 a day after just a few weeks. Looking at my salary as a journalist, I was thinking maybe I should hit Shade up for a job. In fact, every able-bodied, sound-minded, nonaddicted homeless person in the Bay Area should be doing the same. Perhaps San Francisco’s new mayor London Breed should consider a work partnership program with farmers like Shade to hire the homeless — it would be a lot simpler and less expensive for him to skip the H-2A visa gauntlet and cut his transportation costs to and from the home country by hiring Americans.

That, of course, will never happen. The far left “progressives” and “advocates” like Jennifer Friedenbach (executive director of Coalition on Homelessness, San Francisco) would cry “Inhumane!” “Don’t make them work!” “You’re violating their civil rights!” “They have a perfectly good life in those tents!” Friedenbach, you may recall, was angry about removal of homelessness encampments before the 2016 Super Bowl, the late Mayor Ed Lee’s plan to quickly make the city squeaky clean for an international audience. That plan was hampered by activists Shaun Osburn and Tara Spalty handing out new REI tents after the San Francisco Police Department and Department of Public Works confiscated the existing ones. Friedenbach and other activists also vehemently opposed Proposition Q, a measure passed by San Franciscans in 2016 prohibiting tents on public sidewalks while requiring the city to offer temporary shelter before removing the tents. In a city that spends nearly $300 million on homelessness, a cottage industry of city departments passing out contracts to myriad private organizations has popped up — but we’ve yet to see an audit of how those dollars are spent or tracked. Audits and tracking aside, it doesn’t take a SpaceX engineer to figure out whatever activists, advocates, and city officials are doing is a dismal failure.


http://www.marinatimes.com/2018/07/hardcore-homeless/