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Notes -
Alabama tried actually hammering down on illegals. It lead to their agricultural sector having such a grave labor shortage of seasonal workers that they tried to get prisoners to do the work. The prisoners were woefully unproductive compared to the illegal migrant workers.
A year later the state legislature very quietly stopped cracking down and the migrant workers came back. This was circa mid 2010s if I remember right.
Sounds like a mutually beneficial situation we’ve got going on
Sounds like an inadequate equilibrium to me. That is, mass immigration has been around long enough that all of the systems, procedures, habits, and prices of goods have adapted to their existence. So a sudden rapid change is likely to disrupt a bunch of stuff. On the other hand, if illegal immigrants had not been here to begin with, or were phased outslowly, then either farms would adapt to require less labor, or raise prices on fruit so they could pay higher wages, or more local people would move to those regions and gain experience and skill doing the job, or some combination of the above.
And, even if we did conclude that cheap immigrant labor was an appropriate solution, turning a blind eye to illegal immigrants is strictly inferior to increasing legal immigration and simultaneously lowering minimum wage, or giving out migrant work visas attached to a lower minimum wage. Because then you don't have people hiring cartels to smuggle them over the border and dying along the way, and you can pick and choose to let in honest productive people instead of workers and criminals alike and hoping you end up with more of the former than the latter. Illegal immigration specifically selects for people who don't respect the law. The only reason it's being used is because there isn't bipartisan agreement that cheap immigrant labor is good, so the people who want cheap labor use illegal immigrants to get their way and circumvent the legal system and minimum wage laws.
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I'd hope the legislature was electorally punished for that, but legislatures almost never are.
The trouble is that it doesn't really work like that. So go ahead, punish the legislature and fuck the farm lobby. After all, we're not farmers. Except now there's a labor shortage and farmers can't find anyone willing to pick fruit for 25 cents a bushel or whatever the going migrant rate is. Part of the labor market is not just that you have to pay someone to do something, but you also have to pay them not to do something else. So instead of competing against Guatamalan day labor you're competing against all the jobs that aren't exempt from minimum wage (and few places are even paying minimum wage anymore). So either you let half your harvest die in the fields or pay twice as much as you normally would to bring it in, and now food costs more and everyone's bitching. Considering that migrant workers are the backbone of everything that hasn't been mechanized, the question is how much more you're willing to pay for produce so that you don't have to worry about immigrants. And just because you might be willing to pay a little more doesn't mean that most people would agree with you, even other people who are nominally anti-immigration.
Yes, there will be an economic cost to more muscular anti-illegal operations. I'm willing to see the nation pay economic costs in order to thwart illegal invasions. The cost of not doing so is worse.
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