Well, this explains a lot. You have no problem w/ illegals, because you can exploit them to reduce your labor costs. BTW, knowingly hiring illegal aliens is a crime. Maybe you should ask for documentation next picking season.
You state Americans (do you mean white Americans? or just the brown ones?) would love these jobs, so I must ask: would you care to harvest my orchard next year with a crew you can find of the citizens you profess covet this work? With your crew of English speakers or Anglos, whomever you organize, you could thereby make your point in the realm of deed and not rhetoric. I pay market price, no more. As a capitalist, the market will always govern-- and thus the immigrants come.
Americans, of any color (don’t try to invoke racism here), may not love, but would take these jobs if the wages were comparable to comparable jobs in the market.
No, I would not care to participate in your harvest next year. That is because I worked full time while putting myself to school and earned a college degree. I then went on to become a certified professional in my field. However, I have a more-than-full time position & during tax season I take on extra work on the weekends & after work preparing tax returns.
Now, I’ll tell you that growing up in Central Illinois during the ’60 & ‘70’s I started out in about the 5th grade walking beans. This is manual field labor walking miles in bean fields pulling, by hand, weeds. I did this during the summers until I was old enough for the local grain company to hire me to detassel corn. This is standing on a rickety old machine, going through the fields, pulling tassels out of corn plants. If you were real good, you could get a couple of extra weeks at the end of the season doing hand-inoculation. These jobs usually lasted until early afternoon, at which time I would come home & mow lawns in the neighborhood. There were plenty of (white, if it matters to you) high school kids doing this right alongside me for generations in my town. Plenty of them were farmer’s kids & are now farmers. Many others went into the armed services to protect the citizens of America.
Would I like this as a career for my kids – no. But, I wouldn’t mind if they did it for a summer job, in order to learn what real work is & the value of a good education. I’ll tell you, when my kids are big enough, they will be mowing my lawn, and performing other chores around the house. Where I live, most people hire gardeners & maids. Not me. I will not hire anything done that I can do myself.