Just because you get rid of illegal migrant workers doesn’t mean you get the jobs back.
Minimum wages are fair, but may not be efficient
Automation is getting better with time and unskilled labor doesn’t.
What they fail to mention is that the wages suck and the work conditions are even worse, to the point that only someone utterly devastated by poverty would suffer the grueling work and the humiliation of the abusive conditions for such a pittance of a wage.They’re not offering a living wage, barely even minimum wage and with undocumented workers probably far less. This for extremely taxing physical labor over long hours, work that is seasonal and unpredictable.Compared with the relative strain of working at McDonalds, for instance, being an agricultural worker ( or “Picker”) is several times worse and you would think that meant getting paid much, much more, but they’re often paid much less.
In the context of actual capitalist mechanisms, the reason people don’t take the jobs is because they’re not being offered enough to accept them based on the specifics of what the work entails. Just like you can’t go into a car dealership and expect to buy a brand new Porsche for ten dollars, you can’t expect to buy labor if you’re not paying what it’s worth.
The moralizing over how “American kids are lazy” because they won’t take the jobs is about as rational as claiming women must be lesbian if they refuse to date you. It’s sour grapes.
Immigrant labor is willing to do the work because they are more desperate and usually because wages in their own countries are lower (just as their cost of living is also lower. I know that in the context of Eastern European guest workers in Western Europe, wages similar to US minimum wage could be well above a living wage in their own countries (i.e. comparable to a 20-25 dollar wage) and an actual Western European living wage is pure luxury.
Because migrant workers bring their earnings home (documented workers) and spend it in their own countries, every dollar goes a long way. Comparing their willingness to work for what to them is a solid living wage with the unwillingness of American youth to do the same job for less than half the living wage in their communities is at best improper and at worst deliberately deceitful.