The Jobs Americans Farmed Out

Right-wingers have to be fuming over this: instead of hiring Mexican labor, some American companies are just outsourcing their operations to Mexico, as the AP reports:

"Employers can't find legal workers to replace this huge number of illegal workers," said James Holt, an agricultural labor economist and independent consultant based in Washington. "Their only option is to go where the workers are."

Many of the growers, once based in California's Salinas Valley, are also heading south to escape high land prices and water shortages. Mexico is closer to eastern U.S. markets than California, they say. Shipping times to Atlanta are a day shorter from Mexico's central Guanajuato state.

In all fairness, U.S. manufacturers have done this for years, using maquiladoras for low-cost assembly work. We've even done it with television: Fox once used a couple of Mexican border stations to broadcast back into the U.S. (It still does with XETV in Tijuana, but it's moving the affiliation to a San Diego station.)

So why should farming be different? Unless you want to make outsourcing illegal, too.

UPDATE: Now we're outsourcing TV newscasts too. And this time it's a Spanish broadcaster making the move!