Sounds fishy to me?

I heard the mayor of Yuma Arizona say on the radio this morning that although he is oppossed to illegal immigration, he feels that legal immigration is absolutely necessary to conduct a three billion dollar a year farming industry.
What do you think about this statement? Should we encourage legal immigration, or close our boerders to everyone for a while?

I know what you mean. What I cannot get a straight answer about is this. When such a claim is made are we to assume they are paying these illegals less than the minimum wage?
The reason I ask is I don't see how hiring Americans at minimum wage or legal immigrants at minimum wage costs more than paying illegal aliens minimum wage. If they are paying them less than minimum wage, isn't that also illegal?

If a business cannot succeed paying minimum wage it should not be in business.

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Legal immigration should be welcomed 100%!!! Closing off the borders completely, imo, is a mistake.

He is wrong. Recent statistics have shown that 76% of workers in the agriculture industry are legal and citizens. Farmers and ranchers are using illegals to keep their costs down. We should not encourage legal immigration. We don't have to. People from all over the world are trying to get into the US.

we need to immigrate professionals and stop bringing in a unskilled working class that take jobs away from our native unskilled working class.

So basically our immigration hurts the working poor most of all

Illegal immigration is needed for large corporate farms that are putting American farmers out of business. Just as all the mom and pop businesses have been driven out of business by large corporations. Illegal Immigration helps corporations lower pay and undercut American workers because legal Americans need higher wages to pay taxes for the illegals and third world countries.

Whether you think immigration is an important positive to our economy or not, and whether you're talking about unskilled labor or highly skilled technical labor, the bottom line is this:

If we cannot control our borders, we don't have any.

The simple solution to illegal immigration is this: Any illegal who is convicted or pleads guilty to any crime should be immediately deported in a prison jumpsuit, having forfeited all property within the US to the federal government, including bank accounts.

Is that harsh? Yes, but it only targets the ones that are really a problem, and drug forfeitures were okay with us, so why not?