Consider why anyone would work at a difficult low-skill job at below-subsistence wages that are lower than unemployment benefits?

Illegals will often work for such low wages only because they can’t get unemployment benefits. And as our current social culture reflects, with the huge number of skilled working people on welfare, once people become eligible for welfare they often stop working.

This leaves a huge vacuum of jobs that Americans seemingly will no longer do. We fill those jobs with more illegal immigrants, and the cycle continues to worsen.

Germany’s problem is different, but yet similar with respect to their own self-destructive social welfare programs.

What we can conclusively say is that 9% (or whatever that employment figure is) will not harvest asparagus at the price being paid the Polish. There will be a new equilibrium price set as farmers lure Germans to the fields with higher wages.

Lawrence (correct me if I’m wrong) seems to be looking at it from a national security perspective. I would think that if the Germans were, they would reduce the number of workers from 90% not to 80% but to 0%. This seems to be an effort to get Germans off of unemployment. That’s not a bad idea, except later in the article they are telling the farmers to seek government support to handle this. They should get the money to pay these folks from higher prices, not from the government dole.

But I disagree with the larger premise, which assumes that native residents won’t reliably do the jobs that foreigners will. The problem with this assumption is in overlooking the issue of compensation. With regard to the U.S., we can’t compare a legal resident that pays a significant amount of income taxes and lives comfortably off the economy, with illegal aliens (or foreigners) that effectively don’t pay taxes and are willing to live at well below poverty level for what would otherwise be considered slave wages.

So, it’s really not that nationals won’t do the jobs foreigners will do. It’s that nationals won’t/can’t do the jobs for slave wages, while the foreigners can and will.

We do our immigrants absolutely no service by allowing them to immigrate here and then allowing (if not forcing) them to live in squalor when we refuse to enforce our work/employment rules and immigration laws.

As we can see, the problem isn’t just about illegals, but also the people willing to hire them at less than equitable wages. Add on the government allowing us to do so, by selective border enforcement, effectively translates into the U.S. importing what is effectively becoming the trafficking of a neo-slave class of people.

The only solution is to close the borders and enforce immigration and existing guest worker laws. If businesses lose their access to this illegal neo-slave culture, they will be forced to hire legal citizens (at a fair wage) to get the work done.

The solution I outline here is exactly what the German government is trying to do, and is what we here in the U.S. should also be trying to do.

Maybe they’ve learned something from our example about how uncontrolled immigration turns into uncontrollable illegal immigration, and all the problems that causes.

And I suspect the rules of supply and demand, in a relatively open market, given time to work without constant government intervention, will work to some equitable solution for the harvesting of asparagus.