You and I share something, which I’ll keep a secret :-)

I think you’re right on about peasants moving on to the cities, with little in the way of prospects. Typically, trade models assume away the possibility of even short-term unemployment. And, indeed, international labor flows are much more restrictive than goods and especially capital. Honestly, though, I don’t believe N.A.F.T.A. has much to do with this.

I should have defined my use of “skills.” Typically, economists look to formal educational creds in this definition. Immigrants are far disproportionately high school dropouts, though they are also over-represented somewhat among those with advanced degrees. If this work is being performed by this cohort, then we would likely label them “unskilled.”

I’m still curious, though, why is so much labor needed to produce organic food? Mechanization doesn’t necessarily imply synthetic produce, or am I missing something here?

And Mexican consumers who “rationally” chose to consume cheaper corn have now “freed” up Mexican farmers to abandon their farms to move to Mexico’s already overburdened cities, but not to America (because NAFTA made free trade of capital possible, and ignored the need for free movement of people).

Regardless, elf-sufficient, local economies are a good thing. And buying local and organic foods help us communicate that skilled farm work is valuable and worth the extra costs–

As opposed to environmentally damaging, unskilled, industrial ways of farming–

It’s sad that knowing how to care for crops without using pesticides is considered unskilled, while driving various mortaged Caterpillar tractors across a field year after year, growing the same crop again and again, losing more and more topsoil, is considered skilled.

-> in my previous post, instead of “organic or fairtrade” it should have been “local or fairtrade” .

I’d suggest that without immigration from Mexico (whether illegal or not), little to no organic produce would be grown in the United States. This fact would turn on how capital-intensive organic agriculture is relative to other sectors that employ similar workers. Without so many unskilled workers, organic farms would have a strong incentive to mechanize production toward the average farm. What is it about organic food that attracts labor, relative to synthetic food, or other industries? Is there a technical aspect of production that prevents mechanization? That is, either a) hire lots of unskilled workers or b) don’t produce organic.

On N.A.F.T.A., remember, though, that there are two sides to every transaction. If subsidized corn is sold in Mexico at below its shadow price (its price were it not subsidized), producers are hurt but consumers may gain more, thus raising overall welfare. Also, 1.5 million jobs lost over a decade is a tiny fraction of all jobs lost in an economy as large as Mexico’s.