2019考研英语二阅读理解真题及答案解析text3.docxVIP

2019考研英语二阅读理解真题及答案解析text3 美国劳动力缺乏，要么进口食品，要么进口劳动力。小编为大家提供2019考研英语二阅读理解真题及答案解析text3，一起来看看吧！ 2019考研英语二阅读理解真题text3 Text 3 American farmers have been complaining of labor shortages for several years now. Given a multi-year decline in illegal immigration, and a similarly sustained pickup in the U.S. job market, the complaints are unlikely to stop without an overhaul of immigration rules for farm workers. Efforts to create a more straightforward agricultural-workers visa that would enable foreign workers to stay longer in the U.S. and change jobs within the industry have so far failed in Congress. If this doesn’t change, American businesses, communities and consumers will be the losers. Perhaps half of U.S. farm laborers are undocumented immigrants. As fewer such workers enter the U.S., the characteristics of the agricultural workforce are changing. Today’s farm laborers, while still predominantly born in Mexico, are more likely to be settled, rather than migrating, and more likely to be married than single. They are also aging. At the start of this century, about one-third of crop workers were over the age of 35. Now, more than half are. And crop picking is hard on older bodies. One oft-debated cure for this labor shortage remains as implausible as it has been all along: Native U.S. workers won’t be returning to the farm. In a study published in 2013, economist Michael Clemens analyzed 15 years of data on North Carolina’s farm-labor market and concluded, “There is virtually no supply of native manual farm laborers” in the state. This was true even in the depths of a severe recession. Mechanization is not the answer either—not yet at least. Production of corn, cotton, rice, soybeans and wheat have been largely mechanized, but many high-value, labor-intensive crops, such as strawberries, need labor. Even dairy farms, where robots currently do only a small share of milking, have a long way to go before they are automated. As a result, farms have grown increasingly reliant on