Can you afford apples and cherries that Americans pick?

Let’s do a little thought experiment. Imagine that you are a farmer. You dad was a farmer and his dad was a farmer. Your family has had this land going back for generations and now it’s your turn to run the orchard.

You have 2,000 acres in Central Washington with cherry trees and apple trees. Just in case you’re not fluent in acres, that’s about 3.1 square miles of trees.

A version of this setup was described today by The Seattle Times.

So when the cherries are ripe, you have to get them picked and off to the stores or you don’t get paid. If you don’t get paid, you’ll miss all your obligations, and you lose the family orchard.

It’s time to hire some labor. So you fire up your computer and type out a help wanted ad online.

“Wanted: People to pick cherries. Labor needed immediately. $12 per hour. Work day starts at 5am and ends when it’s too hot to continue.

Job responsibilities include climbing up and down a ladder, picking cherries off trees, and carrying heavy loads of fruit back to the truck.

This is a contract job and ends when the harvest is over. No 401(k) or health benefits.

800 people needed ASAP, so bring your friends.”

Minimum wage in Washington state is $11 per hour, so you figure throwing in that extra $1 per hour should really bring in the applicants. Only one problem is nobody shows up.

So you keep raising your wage until you reach $18 per hour. Now people start to arrive, except 40 percent of them are undocumented migrant workers.

Now what do you do? The cherries are ready to be picked. You know you’ll be breaking the law by hiring undocumented workers, but they are the only people that showed up to work.

You can’t raise the hourly rate much higher or nobody will buy your cherries. And it seems like it doesn’t matter what you offer to pay, the locals do not seem interested in picking fruit.

Now expand this dilemma to the apple business, to the landscaping business, to the drywall business, to the paint business, to the meat packing business, to the restaurant business, and on and on.

Unless you can afford a $25 basket of cherries and a $7 apple, it’s time to have a logical plan for migrant labor in the United States. Except, of course, if you’d like to work from 5 a.m. until it gets too hot to pick fruit for $18 an hour. Anyone?