JPod describes my position as:

“All our problems will be solved by ejecting millions of illegals from the workforce and then magically paying people at the lower end of the scale oodles more money.”

To call this a straw man would be an insult to scarecrows. First, as to the “astronomical” increases in prices that would supposedly result from the gradual constriction in the illegal labor force caused by a policy of attrition through enforcement: All low-skilled (less than high school) labor — native and immigrant, legal and illegal — acounts for no more than 4 percent of GDP. Immigrants account for 40 percent of that labor force, of whom illegals are maybe half. So illegal aliens account for less than one percent of national output. Shrinking their numbers and thus raising the wages paid to the remaining, legal workers could not have a significant effect on prices.

Along the same lines: economists calculate (see here) that the average family in 2002 spent $353 a year on fresh fruits and vegetables, the harvest of which is the most immigrant-dependent activity. Of that, farmers got $61, of which labor gets less than one-third. So the average American household pays $20 per year to farmworkers. Doubling farm wages –doubling! — would mean an extra $20 in retail costs per family. Astronomical?

We’ve actually seen how this works. When Congress considered ending the last Mexican guestworker program in the early 1960s, the growers of processing tomatoes said their industry would cease to exist (see here, about halfway down). Congress went ahead and ended it anyway — and result was the perfection of tomato harvesters, run by a smaller, but higher-paid labor force, with hugely increased output and lower retail prices. I vote for more of that.

For more, just see my NRO piece from 2004 on this.