I kind’ve wonder though: what would it be like in a country where fruit-pickers actually got paid minimum wage? Where they were treated with decency? Would it bankrupt the farms if we required such things? More importantly, where do we get our Florida orange juice from when the industry collapses?! (j/k)

I wouldn’t be surprised if requiring that farm workers get decent wages leads to more farm subsidies, which is a very tightly related other can of worms. Anyway, I think the principle still stands – we need to treat such workers as humans. Somehow we justify not doing that by the fact that they aren’t citizens. And we don’t want to treat them like citizens, because, well, they’re flooding the country and using up a lot of social-net programs’ resources. And, well, that pisses off a lot of people who *are* citizens.

The ultimate solution lies somewhere around two points, I think: clamping down on immigration (as you said), as well as enforcing that minimum wage. I’m pessimistic that this will ever happen though, since both of these would require more man-power (person-power?) than the government can allocate to such causes.

By the way, I just did a search… and I was surprised to find that I haven’t used the phrase “free market” in any of my weblog entries.

It seems to me that ‘clamping down on immigration’ using the methods you outline (wall, draft, etc.) includes tinkering with economics in a way that suggests a slippery slope downwards to a planned economy. And we all know what happens then.

I know I’m being glib here, but the fundamental question remains for you: in this case (immigration, demographics), you would not favor the mechanics or mechanism of a free market, contra the necessity to suppress illegal immigration.