As an eastern European I think the British should pick their own fruit and pay the appropriate price if they like it so much, otherwise the market is artificially inflated.
Germany has the exact same problem with asparagus.
We can't be everywhere with our low wage expectations.
I think that probably that would make you and your countryfolk worse off.
To try to illustrate, I'll switch the analogy to my own country, which is Canada, where we fly in Mexican labour to pick crops.
If we didn't fly in migrant labour, we'd have to pay Canadians, who are generally a spoiled, lazy, picky bunch (at least compared to the sort of Mexicans who fly here to work, who obviously are not lazy nor excessively picky). This would drive up the cost of fruit, which is perhaps fine. It would also drive up the cost of unskilled labour in other areas, perhaps construction or retail, because there would be less competition for those jobs. That's good news for the unskilled workforce in the rich country. Great.
Of course, not only do prices go up, but actually just less food will get produced. You could argue that that's good, or bad. Fine.
However, now all those Mexican labourers don't have foreign work, so they compete for work at home. That drives down the price of unskilled labour in Mexico, and if there's a minimum wage then it drives up unemployment. The industrious folks who were savvy enough to get the Canadian jobs will take the next-best jobs, displacing slightly-less-hard-working Mexicans from their jobs, and so on. Of course, this is also foreign cash that is no longer coming into the country, so it has effects on the balance of trade, i.e. on the ability of Mexico collectively to import nice things that they aren't making internally. That's probably bad news on a decade-long timescale, but it might eventually lead to a more robust manufacturing economy, I don't know.
So, in summary, suppose Canada stops using Mexican farm labour (or Britain stops using eastern European farm labour). What are the consequences:
All Canadians get more expensive food.
Unskilled Canadians get more pay, probably offsetting the more expensive food for those people.
Less food gets grown in Canada overall, probably, or at least less luxury food.
Unskilled Mexicans are fucked over hard, especially those who are most vulnerable.
Rich Mexicans can hire poor mexicans at even more exploitative rates.
In the medium to long term, Mexico might have a worse balance of trade, but then again maybe that results in positive industrialization in the long term.
I worked one summer doing migrant labor in agriculture harvesting blueberries in Maine. I migrated with my sister from elsewhere in the US. We were doing it because we wanted money and we were curious about the experience. Alongside us were poor people from Maine -- Native Americans and poor European Americans -- and migrant laborers from south of the border. There was a solidarity among all the groups, and strangely, between all these groups and our overseers against the land owners and Wyman Foods, our ostensible employers. One thing I saw was that the Hispanic laborers were in a lot better shape and in better practice than the other groups. Another thing I saw was that the people who got ahead disregarded the rules we were set. There was a particular technique in raking the berries we were to employ which would maximize profits for the landowners and minimize waste but which was much less efficient per hour. There was another technique, called sweeping, which would maximize the amount we harvested per hour at the cost of many more berries dropped on the ground, so less profit per acre. An advantage the migrant groups had on top of their greater fitness and experience was that they felt less solidarity with the landowners, so they were more willing to break the rules for their own gain. The overseers were cool with this, generally. My point is that this may be a pattern repeated across the globe. It isn't just that the migrants are cheaper and you can cheat them with less consequence. It's also that various parties in the arrangement can shift the burden of harvesting to their preference under the table. I'm not saying that anyone is wrong -- though my preference is that there be less waste -- but that there's something people prefer in having labor from away with different alliances. I'm not certain this is true, but in my particular experience it certainly was. To elaborate still further, I'm not saying this is necessarily wrong. The landowners still made out well, and they were earning profit without labor. The spilled berries went to the birds and insects. I'm just saying there was a non-obvious incentive for the overseers to hire people from away.
> 11) Actions at the sharp end resolve all ambiguity. Organizations are ambiguous, often intentionally, about the relationship between production targets, efficient use of resources, economy and costs of operations, and acceptable risks of low and high consequence accidents. All ambiguity is resolved by actions of practitioners at the sharp end of the system. After an accident, practitioner actions may be regarded as ‘errors’ or ‘violations’ but these evaluations are heavily biased by hindsight and ignore the other driving forces, especially production pressure.
I think there's one thing missing in your picture:
Those workers aren't necessarily unskilled. Those who come from my country(Poland) at least are often college graduates.
How do they end up there? Well, the pay is obviously better - especially for a seasonal worker. After all, the GDP per capita difference between the UK and Poland is close to 3x.
The unemployment rate here is(or was before the virus) considerably lower than the EU average, so had they not gone there those people would've found jobs and contributed to the local economy.
Instead we have this weird brain-drain in which the brains aren't utilized to their full potential.
Ironically I'm currently a "seasonal worker" myself, only I work as a software engineer, not fruit picker, or any low-skilled labourer.
Aside from that the coronavirus showed that this approach you present is unsustainable. Like I said before, currently there is so much demand for workers from eastern Europe (Poland, Ukraine, Belarus) that there's simply not enough people to fill all the positions.
Also we have our own fields with fruit to pick - all that is going to go to waste. That's definitely "less food produced" - just somewhere you don't see it.
> After all, the GDP per capita difference between the UK and Poland is close to 3x.
That's a shame it is still the case, as the promise of entering the EU was for wages to normalise across the Union. I guess it will take further integration for that to happen.
You are missing the market here. If you pay Canadians high wages and you set high prices for fruits you cannot sell them in poor countries. And this means that the profits for that Canadian corporation will be cut in half. And the rich people at the top will suffer.
In the mean time poor countries will start planting their own trees with their own people and appropriate prices for their country. And Mexico will have their own corporation making money.
Germany has the exact same problem with asparagus.
We can't be everywhere with our low wage expectations.