Rig, you said, in part:

There is no shortage of labor in agriculture. The shortage is in people who have better options than to work for nothing.

In your second sentence above, I think you really meant a shortage in "people who have NO better options than to work for nothing."

You are right in part, that higher pay should TEND to supply more labor to agriculture. But the agricultural producers in this country do have a problem, in that they are not operating in an economic vacuum. If they raise wages for agricultural labor prices for their produce will have to be raised, and cheaper-labor, lower-cost foreign sources will gain market share, perhaps to a catastrophic degree. That is clearly a serious question for the agricultural producers in question, but it may also be a problem for the United States in terms of balance of payments, and in terms of potential bad health effects of produce from cheaper-production countries which are not required to conform to this country's food production standards.

There is also the reported phenomenon that, in some cases, even higher wages have not attracted the numbers of American workers necessary for processing of crops. One might say that they didn't raise the wages enough to attract the labor they need, which may be true, but then we get back into the international competitive situation I referred to in the paragraph above.

The other thing that would have to be done to satisfy me would be to put some kind of limitation on "birth-right citizenship." Some illegal aliens cross the border for the sole purpose of having their child become a US citizen, which allows the parents to line up for public assisted housing and other public programs.

This would take a constitutional amendment, which is difficult, slow, politically fraught, and like shooting mosquitoes with a cannon.

I suppose that no one can gainsay that "Some illegal aliens cross the border for the sole purpose" etc. But that statement is not meaningful, because the unquantified "some" could be anywhere from just-more-than-zero to let's say fifty or more percent. Frankly, I seriously doubt that any significant portion of the illegal immigration traffic is so motivated. Having read many of your posts on many subjects over the months, I should expect your take on that is different from mine.

The upshot of all this is that (Greg F. to the contrary) the illegal immigration problem really is a significant and consequential problem, and one not easy of solution.   

Dave Oesterreich