Originally posted by Sandman
Punishing farmers for hiring people to do a job that no one else will do won't fix the problem. It'll simply escalate costs.
Pfft yourself, you sound like yet another economically ignorant in-the-pocket-of-big-business Senator when you throw out that argument.
There is no such thing as a "job that no one else will do," only jobs that no one else will do
at that price. Illegally circumventing minimum wage laws, immigration laws, and everything else put in place to protect workers in this country only artificially depresses the wages to the point that people can spout their BS about "jobs no one else will do" - not to mention increasing domestic unemployment.
So what happens if we get rid of illegal workers in our country? Lettuce might go up to $20 a pound. Demand for lettuce will drop. American farms may go out of business or switch to a crop that is more profitable. The world will not end. I will eat fewer salads. McSaladshakers will get pulled off the market. Armageddon will not ensue.
Then, the market will begin to correct itself. Some enterprising farmer will discover that if he charters a bus from the inner city to his farm, and pays a decent, legal wage, he can sell his lettuce for only $16 a pound. Another will discover that he can invent a new machine to help him pick lettuce and sell it for $15 a pound. A researcher somewhere will say "there's a huge cultural demand for lettuce, yet its price is so high nobody is willing to buy it - I bet if I invented a new lettuce fertilizer, I would sell tons of it to farmers looking to sell lettuce" - so he invents it, sells lots of it, and farmers use it to take lettuce down to $12 a pound. Then, some enterprising farmer figures out how to combine all of these methods effectively, and lettuce again drops in price - maybe even to a point lower than it started, since production is now so much more efficient, even though labor costs are higher.
It could even help out our Mexican neighbors to the south. Say an enterprising lettuce-picker returns to his country when his job dries up, and sees that there is now a huge demand for cheap lettuce in the US. So he hires his old lettuce-picking buddies for reasonable wages, and produces lettuce to import into the US for below the US market price. Now you're providing jobs for Mexicans
in Mexico and alleviating the desire for people to leave. You're building wealth in Mexico as well as providing lettuce to McSaladshaker-eating Americans.
