Too many of the arguments I hear in support of unlimited immigration (or excusing use of illegal immigrant labor) sound exactly like the arguments used to justify slavery before the Civil War. If fact, they are being repeated almost verbatim.
Bottom line is that the continued availability and use of impoverished illegal immigrants flooding into the workplace discourages mechanization and process improvements and depresses wages and working conditions.
Cotton farming in the south just couldn’t continue without slaves - no American wants to do that work. Eventually though, along comes International Harvester and John Deere.
If your business model can’t survive unless people are willing to stand for 10 hours a day gutting fish for three bucks an hour, then maybe your business model isn’t working.
That having been said, yes, the endless extensions and expansions of the welfare state discourages people from taking honest jobs that require one to work and maybe get dirty.
Me and my family and friends all picked cotton in the sixties. And we weren’t slaves. We just needed to eat. The machines put us out of work and a lot of the old timers were really pissed off about it. There were no other jobs in small southern towns.
There is a key difference between work and toil. Work is ennobling and provides both dignity and value for both the individual and society. Toil is borne of desperation and is simply an act of human exploitation which has no place in a civilized society. All "businesses" which rely on toil to survive are ipso facto illegitimate and cannot survive except via the corruption of the society that tolerates them.
The issue is not immigration, or even illegal immigration. The issue is society's tolerance for human exploitation and the systemic moral corruption that this entails. It is all interlocked.