Your tomato now costs $10 a piece because the guy who picks it is ow making (lets say) $7 an hour. The guy who picks tomatoes gets paid $7 an hour so the guy who was getting $7 an hour needs to be paid more or he starts looking for a place where he is compensated for his skills.

Would I pay an extra $28 for a tomato if it made it so a legal resident of this country could do a job that is currently often going to illegals? Hell yes.

Would I pay an extra $28 for a tomato if it made it so a legal resident of this country could do a job that is currently often going to illegals? Hell yes.

First, there is no evidence that immigrants crowd out U.S.-born workers in either the short or long run. Data on U.S.-born worker employment imply small effects, with estimates never statistically different from zero. The impact on hours per worker is similar. We observe insignificant effects in the short run and a small but significant positive effect in the long run. ...

Second, the positive long-run effect on income per U.S.-born worker accrues over some time. In the short run, small insignificant effects are observed. Over the long run, however, a net inflow of immigrants equal to 1% of employment increases income per worker by 0.6% to 0.9%. This implies that total immigration to the United States from 1990 to 2007 was associated with a 6.6% to 9.9% increase in real income per worker. That equals an increase of about $5,100 in the yearly income of the average U.S. worker in constant 2005 dollars. Such a gain equals 20% to 25% of the total real increase in average yearly income per worker registered in the United States between 1990 and 2007....

The third result is that the long-run increase in income per worker associated with immigrants is mainly due to increases in the efficiency and productivity of state economies....

Records obtained through a Freedom of Information Act Request show Arizona agencies turned over 23,000 illegal immigrants to ICE over the past three years. Hundreds of them ended in up CCA facilities.

According to campaign finance records, CCA executives and employees contributed more than $1,000 to the governor’s re-election campaign. The company’s political action committee and its lobbyists contributed another $60,000 to Brewer’s top legislative priority, Proposition 100, a sales tax to help avoid budget cuts to education.

Caroline Isaacs from the American Friends Service Committee, which advocates for social justice issues, said the money is evidence of influence the company has on the governor.

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Sponsor

In reply to BigBen, #100:

Yes, if you increase price demand will fall, but if you increase wages it is offset. If the guy I'm paying to pick tomatoes spend the majority of his paycheck in my town rather than sending it back to Zacatecas, it helps my neighbor's bottom line. If the guy I hire isn't claiming 10 dependents and actually pays income tax, it helps our country. There are far more benefits to this than just giving an American a job that an illegal is filling.

1. Machines are built by someone, maintained by someone, etc... Parts are produced, raw materials obtained...there are still jobs. If you're arguing against automation, get in line with the buggy-whip manufacturers. Plus, some foods just can't be machine picked with the machines we have. You're asking for someone to come up with a way that isn't marginally more expensive than using illegals to do the work in the first place when they haven't been able to do so to date. Plus you're asking a farmer to shell out a substantial investment rather than small incremental price increases that they can pass on.

2. Most of the harvesting that is done by illegals is done here because it doesn't make sense to do it and import food. I'm sticking tomatoes because they are grown locally for a good reason. Like most hand-harvested produce, perishability, ease of damage, shipping costs, etc... all play into whether you can outsource a food product. Yes, I can get Mexican hot-house tomatoes in February....they cost me quite a bit more too. What foods generally get exported? Generally it's the ones that are machine harvested already

That fact goes far beyond the good sold in your grocery. If I can bring the same amount of tomatoes from Tijuana for half the price but half of the goods are bruised and unsellable,

where job vacancies that American workers could fill would exist..

First, work-based visas should become the norm in immigration, not the exception. The United States issues about 1.1 million green cards a year and allocates roughly 85 percent to family members of American citizens or legal residents, people seeking humanitarian refuge and “diversity immigrants,” who come from countries with low rates of immigration to the United States.

The remaining 15 percent go to people who are immigrating for work reasons — but half of these are for workers’ spouses and children, leaving a mere 7 percent for so-called principal workers, most of whom are highly skilled. No other major Western economy gives such a low priority to employment-based immigration, and for good reason: these immigrants are the most skilled and least likely to be a burden on taxpayers.

With so few slots allocated to work-based green cards, wait times continue to grow. Immigrants typically enter on temporary visas and adjust to permanent status over time. But most green card categories have strict numerical limits that fall far short of the number of immigrants on temporary visas who wish to stay. The most recent data suggest that 1.1 million approved applicants are waiting for employment-based green cards. Immigrants from China and India are among the most adversely affected because, in general, no more than 7 percent of green cards can be allotted each year to applicants from any one country.

In place of our current system’s lotteries and “first-come, first-served” policies, the government should hold regular auctions where companies can bid for permits to bring in foreign workers. Employers would bid highest for the most-valued workers, creating a selection mechanism that wouldn’t rely on the judgment of bureaucrats or the paperwork skills of immigration lawyers.

Separate auctions would be run for high- and low-skilled workers, because permit prices would depend on prospective wages. Bringing low-skilled workers into the program is vital to stemming illegal immigration, as the current system’s lack of sufficient visas for the low-skilled is a main reason that people cross the border illegally.

These auctions would be more efficient than the current system because they would respond to changes in labor demand. When prices rose, the government could react by increasing the number of permits, better syncing immigration with the business cycle. Work-based immigration would rise with economic growth and fall with rising unemployment.

Finally, the auctions would provide the government with new revenue in an era of huge deficits. Some of that money might be used to offset costs incurred by states or localities with large numbers of immigrants, or to retrain American workers displaced by immigration.