Yes, everything is economically connected, but I noticed your free market example stops short of undermining your own point, which it invariably will. To wit people might decide not to pay 30 per salad, ergo no demand for lettuce.
Leaving aside the fact that illegals involved in US agriculture make up from between 1 & 3% of our illegal population.
Bottom line is if we wish to remain a sovereign nation with the liberties intended for us by the founding documents illegal immigration must stop.
All arguments otherwise are rationalizations & sophistry.
Your supply and demand issue, taking it out, is valid, and dealing with theoreticals like we are, who knows where that price breaking point would be for certain goods and services. I only stopped short because we could make this an entire book.
And yes, illegal immigration MUST stop and it should have been stopped 50 years ago, and if it had, none of this would be the case and our economy would have evolved totally differently and likely evolved much better.
My only points for this exercise were this: A: this immigration HAS happened and it is now so ingrained in our economy - some of it in good ways as well as the bad - that unwinding it is just more complicated than most think it is and that in some ways, we all benefit from it as well as all pay the price for it.
...and B: there is little difference on the work force between legal and illegal hispanics, since they look the same, their paperwork looks the same, and the things like e verify etc are still new and still flawed.
I never was in favor of it, and never think it should have happened, and think we should do everything we should do to stop it. What happened is, since I pointed out that they were now part of the supply and demand curve of everything, people assumed I liked the fact that this was the case. NO, I don’t....but it is the case.
I feel like a secure border and a removal of hand out benefits and a deportation of apprehended criminals would unwind this problem in a few years to maybe a decade anyway in a manner that would not disrupt our already fragile economy. And I would am in favor of all of that happening.
Therefore my arguments are not sophistry - we want 90% of the same thing - and if we got that 90%, the problem would be all but solved....which we both want.