Putting the myth that migrants are taking the jobs Americans need to bed

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That willingness, he finds, is basically nonexistent. Every year from 1998 to 2012, at least 130,000 North Carolinians were unemployed. Of those, the number who asked to be referred to NCGA was never above 268 (and that number was only reached in 2011, when 489,095 North Carolinians were unemployed). The share of unemployed asking for referrals never breached 0.09 percent. When native unemployed people are referred to NCGA, they're almost without exception hired; between 1998 and 2011, 97 percent of referred applicants were hired. But they don't tend to last. In 2011, 245 people were hired out of 268 referred, but only 163 (66.5 percent) of the hired applicants actually showed up to the first day of work. Worse, only seven lasted to the end of the growing season:

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And Mexican workers are far likelier to stick through the season than native-born workers. About 90 percent were still working five months along, compared to less than 10 percent of native-born workers:

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or one thing, the share of workers completing the growing season didn't increase during the recession, during which wages for NCGA jobs grew relative to other wages in the economy. "The increase in unemployment mirrors a loss of wages generally in the economy — decreased availability of jobs everywhere else in the economy should be reflected in an increased interest in the NCGA farm jobs because people’s ability to earn income across the broader economy is more limited, making these jobs more valuable in comparison," Clemens explains. That suggests that similar in scale wage increases wouldn't spur increased demand for these jobs on the part of native workers either. Further, if wages increased too much, these businesses wouldn't be profitable and all the jobs would disappear. Clemens notes that this appears to be the case for cucumber farming. "If wages were doubled, raising the hourly wage for collecting cucumbers from $9.70 to $19.40, it would be impossible for farmers to grow cucumbers profitably – the farmers’ labor cost per acre per year would be too high," he writes.

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