"1. The supply of cheap labor is for all intent unlimited for the foreseeable future. There are hundreds of millions if not billions of people in SE Asia waiting to enter the low skill labor market and work for $.50/day. 2. The short term benefits to the US consumer are enormous. Our standard of living is very high. It is unlikely we will be willing to pay $100 for a pair of jeans or $5,000 for a home PC."
This is the same silly argument that results in illegals working in our agriculture industry. Recently, that hotbed of conservatism (UCLA) performed a study on the effect/relationship of farm wages to cost of commodity at the market.
In short, farm wages account for 15% of the price of, e.g., a head of lettuce. In other words, only thirteen cents of that 89 cent head of lettuce is attributable to farm wages.
So, if you doubled farm wages, that head would cost $1.02. Big deal.
In fact, they calculated that the proverbial five dollar a head lettuce would support a farm wage of $300 per hour, which, it seems to me, would create some of the jobs Americans are willing to do.
Guess what, bub?!? Even in China, AMD and Intel don't assemble CPUs by hand (all done by sophisticated automated machinery), and doing it here ain't gonna bump the prices of PCs back to $5,000.
Pennies on the dollar only. And that's a small price to pay to preserve this once great nation.