This post originally published on JasonPye.com
It’s spring… A time when many of us decide to get to work on our lawns. But thanks to Georgia’s immigration law, HB 87 (2011), the price tag for pine straw just went up thanks to a shortage of workers:
Brace yourself for some sticker shock next time you order pine straw for your landscape.
And it’s not because there’s a shortage of pine straw falling on Georgia’s more than 20-million acres of forest land. Landscapers blame their price increases on a shortage of immigrant workers to rake and bale their product.
“I’m having to get some of my stock from Florida because there’s not enough labor in south Georgia,” said Jim Satterfield of Four Seasons Pine Straw.
He believes Georgia’s new immigration law has scared the workers away. It’s the same complaint heard from vegetable farmers during their harvest.
“We probably have 5,000 bales on order that we cannot fill right now,” he said.
This isn’t the first time that the law has impacted Georgians negatively. Last year, the state’s agriculture industry lost up to $1 billion due to lost crops after not being able to find enough workers to pick them. The end result will, of course, be higher prices in stores. Restaurants in the state also complained of labor shortages. And even though the law specifically targeted illegal immigrants, workers that came to the United States legally felt threatened by the law.
One has to wonder, since immigration is effectively at a net-zero, why conservatives still target immigrants. They say it’s not about race and deny that they are restrictionists, but they continue to go on these crusades against immigrants, who, despite their claims, are a net-positive to our economy and they don’t have the negative impact on crime and the labor market that restrictionists claim.
