The benefits of unemployment absolutely can take care of all of your expenses for the month if you're not blowing up your debt to income ratio including your other monthly expenses. In other words, living within your means. I've done it. It's based on your previous 12 months of income (or the last 12 months you were employed if you're unemployed longer than a year).
Department of labor does not push you to take any job. They require you to apply to jobs, starting in your field but applying to any job is allowed. They then also flat out tell you "Don't take just any job because if you have to quit or leave, you can't get back on unemployment until XYZ".
I live in a city. My 4 bedroom, 2 bath, 1 acre is $842 before insurance/taxes. It's all on the market.
People have to accept that some jobs can't pay higher wages because the profit margins are already thin.
And that's the problem. People are used to artificially low prices caused by uneven trade prices, artificially depressed wages.
because I tend to work in the horticulture
Whoa, what do you do? That's a field that's I've always been curious to examine (but not learn or work in). Just the idea of looking at different plants and knowing loads about them is appealing to me.
In Georgia unemployment benefits can only be collected for 14-20 weeks so the DoL pushes people to take any job regardless of if it's in your preferred career path. And the benefits aren't something you can live off. The incentive of making more money than you receive from unemployment is a pretty good incentive in my book. Also since agriculture tends to be away from large cities, the cost of living is pretty significantly lower. Example, I can find a 3 bedroom/2 bathroom house on over a half acre of land near me for $900/month while a one bedroom studio apartment in Atlanta runs the same amount.
Reasonable pay means different things in different areas and if the farmers raise their labor rates then they will lose money farming because they don't get to set their selling price. That's determined in Chicago on the futures market or some overseas futures market. And with the damn tariff war with China, a lot of farmers are being impacted right now. They can't afford to be raising labor rates right now. People have to accept that some jobs can't pay higher wages because the profit margins are already thin. Either they need to accept that agriculture is low paying for hard work or accept that migrants are going to be used to fill those jobs because the migrants are happy to have a job in the US.
H-1B visas definitely need to be fixed because there is too much room in there for abuse of the system, as evidenced in your experiences in your career field. That's something I don't have an answer for because I tend to work in the horticulture which is generally tied to Agriculture.