“The number of people leaving Mexico to work in the United States has dropped by roughly 65 percent during the last decade. Big agriculture has sought to counter this by lobbying in Washington for an easier path by which farm workers could gain citizenship. But they’ve also hedged the bet by investing in research that could turn the field jobs over to machines. A firm in Mountain View, Calif., has developed a Lettuce Bot that thins plants in the field 20 to 40 times faster than a human can do it — and the unit works day and night. Its inventor told the San Francisco Chronicle that the robot can thin a 15-acre field, normally a day’s work for 25 people, in less than two hours.”
http://onlineathens.com/opinion/2013-09-15/funt-technology-will-end-illegal-immigration-debate