Farmers may wish for more farm workers, just as any of us may wish for anything we would like to have. But that is wholly different from thinking that some third party should define what we desire as a “need,” much less expect government policy to meet that “need.”
In a market economy, when farmers are seeking more farm workers, the most obvious way to get them is to raise the wage rate until they attract enough people away from alternative occupations — or from unemployment.
With the higher labor costs that this would entail, the number of workers that farmers “need” would undoubtedly be less than what it would have been if there were more workers who are available at lower wage rates, such as immigrants from Mexico.
It is no doubt more convenient and profitable to the farmers to import workers for lower pay than to pay American workers more. But bringing in more immigrants is not without costs to other Americans, including both financial costs, in a welfare state, and social costs, of which increased crime rates are just one.
Some advocates of increased immigration have raised the specter of higher food prices without foreign farm workers. But the price that farmers receive for their produce is usually a fraction of what the consumers pay at the supermarket. And what the farmers pay the farm workers is a fraction of what the farmer gets for the produce.
In other words, even if labor costs doubled, the rise in prices at the supermarket might be barely noticeable.
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/350684/who-needs-immigrant-labor-thomas-sowell
