Why do groceries cost more now?
Recently, a federal court upheld portions of the immigration laws recently enacted by the state of Alabama (en los estados unidos). The portions upheld regarded, in part, the states capacity to review the immigration status of students in public education systems and, to some degree, allow some people to be detained if they are undocumented or have an unclear status. This is my understanding of the situation.
Similar laws were enacted in Georgia, a state adjacent to Alabama. In rapid response to this ruling, many people have left some of the areas in Alabama and moved to areas yet to be defined. Some are concentrating in areas of north west Georgia, very near my home.
How has this ruling effected the overall area?
First, since this is an agricultural area, undocumented workers (they were called illegal immigrants until recently) did not report to work to harvest crops planted in the Spring of this year. This has resulted in fruits and vegetables being lost in the fields, since an adequate number of workers can not be found. Georgia has tried using prison workers, but, as one farmer said "they don't work as well as the immigrants". Besides, how would you like a bus load of prisoners to show up at your family farm to harvest your crops? This situation has resulted (or will result) in wasted produce left unharvested and, finally, higher prices at the market for fruits and vegetables. As one farmer said to a legislator in a public forum "If you were going to do this, why didn't you do it in January before we put all this (plants) in the ground?".
Second, children are being taken out of public education. This has resulted in dwindling enrollments, thus diminishing state funds available for schools.
Third, since this is a transient population, their money goes with them. Banks observe cash withdrawals at a time when cash should be important, and local businesses lose the revenue they would gain from purchases by immigrants.
I can't express my entire feelings about this subject on the forum, but I will say this entire matter could have been avoided. I believe disconnected politicians passed laws out of fear and ignorance rather than compassion and reason.
I work with immigrants at the church and the clinic several times every week. They are my friends. They are a compassionate, hard-working group of people.
There are no winners here.
9 Answers
Last Wednesday, the day after the judge upheld parts of the new AL law, there were all kinds of Latino/Hispanic people across the state MIA. When my wife went to her English class at a local community college, there were only two of the regular 10 in her class. In the lower level classes, almost all of those immigrants were missing. In high schools and elementary schools across the state, where immigrants are a large part of classes, attendance was down 60% in some places.
I agree with the person who said, "Why couldn't they wait until January?" How will they make any money off this harvest?
The problem is, there are so many uneducated people in the U.S. who think that immigrants are only here to take jobs and get free social services. I wish I was in a position to tell all of those people that they are simply ignorant about the true value of illegal immigrants in the U.S. They take the jobs that citizens do not want, at a pay rate they aren't willing to accept. Also, they do live here, which means that they have to buy stuff here, which means that they do pay taxes. (8% sales tax in AL.)
To be honest, I'm ashamed that I live in AL. Not only is AL consistently at the bottom of all kinds of rankings (e.g., education, literacy, etc.), they have now passed a law that could quite possibly come back to haunt them. (Not like this is the first time, though.)
Not to mention, AL has a very long history of being a very racist place toward non-whites.
For more reading on this kind of thinking, read this link about how you can be a patriot by hiring an illegal alien.
It's not just inflation.
Regarding the laws that the OP mentioned,
I live in South Georgia. One of my farming clients lost $450,000 in peppers that were left in the field because the farm workers disappeared. They literally burned up in the field because there was no one to harvest them. On another farm there would typically be 250 or so Mexican workers at any given time. I was so amazed to see hundreds of acres of tomatoes burn up in the field because the workers left. I don't see anybody running out into the fields trying to 'reclaim' their jobs that 'the Mexicans stole' from them either. Our idiot governor said that he was going to put convicts on parole out in the fields to harvest the crops. That's just what all of the farmers here wanted, convicts on their property. Their work ethic was questionable to begin with, which probably had a lot to do with their ending up in prison.
A lot of farmers in our area are planting only crops that can be machine harvested, so that's going to further have an effect on prices of fresh produce. Agriculture is a huge part of Georgia's economy. We've passed an idiotic law and our representatives are wondering, 'what happened'. Here's an article reporting some of this (rather benignly), reality is a lot harsher than the article. Our state agricultural commissioner wrote a public letter to the governor strongly criticizing him, but to no avail.
But don't get me started.....
One answer really - GREED. Forget economics! Yes there are inflationary pressures which drive prices upwards, however these factors are all magnified by the avarice of a few. Look at the World around us and you will see the inequalities that are largely derived by a lack of compassion and caring. Somehow capitalism hasn't exactly worked the way it should.
Almost all of the people currently living in the US are descended from immigrants, the vast majority of whom came here in a manner that would now classify them as illegal immigrants.
When it comes to higher prices, there is also the systematic change in the definition of inflation used to report the official figures that goes back decades. The rate of price increases over the last 10 years has been greater than in the 70's, but the official inflation rate has remained low and the Fed continues to warn of deflation as justification for its disasterous monetary policy.
The consumer price index in the US is defined in such a way as to render it meaningless. It excludes energy because it is "volatile" (and they prefer an index that's "stable" and better reveals long-term trends). Lately, I think, it excludes housing (again, because it's lately been regarded as "volatile"). Soon , everything will be volatile because of the speculation in the futures markets. Will the consumer price index soon reflect only the cost of a tiny fraction of what I spend to live?
Reading into it, all the political and corporate powers love under-reporting this index, because they can boost my salary annually by an amount that seems to try to keep pace with inflation, but in fact lowers costs and raises profits for the corporations. Most of those profits are spent to boost CEO compensation by 40% per year, year after year, regardless of the company performance or the larger economy.
It's no wonder there are demonstrations, and possibly soon, riots, in many urban centers around the USA for weeks now. The media took their time to begin covering this, possibly because the media is yet another big business that would prefer the inequities of the status quo.
But don't get me started...
There's yet another gimmick employed by the government accounting rules.
They factor in the effect of people economizing when prices go up.
For example, I usually shop at a mid-quality level store for my clothes. When prices increase sharply, I shift my buying to deep-discount stores. Same thing for food shopping, non-prescription healthcare purchases, cars, etc. So, according to the government, some prices didn't go up, because I paid the same thing, even though I was getting inferior product.
The gimmick in this is that I can only make this shift one time. It's not sustainable. But the government policies in computing the price indexes assume this effect as a constant. According to the government, I should be eating dog food this year, and who-knows-what by next year.
Dogwood said:
I work with immigrants at the church and the clinic several times every week. They are my friends. They are a compassionate, hard-working group of people.
There are no winners here.
Just looking at this from a purely humanitarian aspect, I think if many of our politicians would spend a few weeks in a developing country or two, especially in Latin America, perhaps a few of them would have a change in heart and policy. When you are literally on the ground and working with some of these beautiful but desperate people, your whole perspective changes.
After seeing the way that people live in different parts of the world, my heart goes out to them. I don't know if I would have the strength to make some of the hard decisions they have to make.
Answer: Inflation.
In economics, inflation is a rise in the general level of prices of goods and services in an economy over a period of time.[1] When the general price level rises, each unit of currency buys fewer goods and services. Consequently, inflation also reflects an erosion in the purchasing power of money – a loss of real value in the internal medium of exchange and unit of account in the economy.[2][3] A chief measure of price inflation is the inflation rate, the annualized percentage change in a general price index (normally the Consumer Price Index) over time.[
Economists generally agree that high rates of inflation and hyperinflation are caused by an excessive growth of the money supply.[6] Views on which factors determine low to moderate rates of inflation are more varied. Low or moderate inflation may be attributed to fluctuations in real demand for goods and services, or changes in available supplies such as during scarcities, as well as to growth in the money supply. However, the consensus view is that a long sustained period of inflation is caused by money supply growing faster than the rate of economic growth.
(Taken from Wikipedia, the last sentence is the most important one.)
Since there may be some people who don't understand how the government cooks the books on inflation numbers, I'll give a simple example using only two of their tricks on an economy that has only two products. The two tricks are: declaring that the price increase is because the products are better, not because of inflation; and comparing apples to oranges by neglecting changes in standard of living.
Say there are two products: steak and hamburger. Hamburger costs $1 per lb and accounts for 10% of sales. Steak costs $4 per lb and accounts for 90% of sales.
Say there is 200% inflation, so prices are 3 times higher a year later and many people can no longer afford steak. That is, hamburger now costs $3 per lb and accounts for 70% of sales, while steak costs $12 per lb and accounts for 30% of sales.
There is a range of quality of beef, so now that less of it goes into steak, it is of higher quality--this accounts for $4 of the price increase, leaving the inflated price at $8. Similarly, some of the meat that used to be made into steak is now made into hamburger, so it is of higher quality--this accounts for $1 of the price increase, leaving the inflated price at $2. You will note that half of the inflation has now been eliminated by saying the price increase isn't due to inflation. And even though the beef is really no different than it was the year before, it is now "better" whether it is made into steaks or hamburger.
Now we take the amount purchased into account to derive prices to compare. The original, or baseline, price is:
$1 x 0.1 + $4 x 0.9 = $3.70
The new inflated price is:
$2 x 0.7 + $8 x 0.3 = $3.80
So the price increase is only ten cents and the rate of inflation is
0.10 / 3.70 = 2.7%
which is right in the comfort zone 
