More on illegal immigration

This excerpt from Andrew Greeley’s latest column in the Chicago Sun Times caught my eye:

Moreover, if one could effectively arrest all the 11 million felons in the country, where would replacements be found to fill their jobs? The American economy would grind to a halt. The illegals are, in a nice irony, essential to American prosperity.

With all due respect Mr. Greeley…you are a moron!

The very instant the 11 million illegals are no longer available to toil in the lettuce patch for $2/hour, the grower would be forced to raise his wage to whatever it took to entice Americans to pick his lettuce: it is as simple as that. His only alternatives would be to let the lettuce rot on the ground or have Paris Hilton and Nicole Ritchie pick it for an episode of “The Simple Life”. Maybe prices would increase moderately at the store (actually only about 3-5% of the cost of produce is harvest labor), but what American would not gladly pay an extra 50 cents for a head of lettuce in exchange for the dramatically reduced demand on social services that the low income, under-educated immigrant population ravenously consumes? Their pay scale is so low that their tax burden, if they have one at all, is miniscule compared to the vast treasure of American taxpayer funded entitlements they demand.

No matter how the pro-illegal immigration crowd rationalizes it, I keep coming back to this one question: Why, in heaven’s name, do people who are criminals in this country, and citizens of another country, have any demand at all to even a single tax dollar of Americans’ in the first place? Unbelievable!

Adequately derisive words to describe the utter stupidity of the last sentence in the excerpt of Mr. Greeley’s wildly farcical, pro-illegal immigration essay escape me, so I’ll just state the obvious:

No single group of anything or anybodies is indispensable to American prosperity, Andrew. If you don’t understand anything else (and it appears that you don’t), try to grasp this:

What is essential to American prosperity is the preservation, at all costs, of a dynamic, adaptive, legitimate free market economy, complemented by a competitive labor force which is undiluted by a vast underclass of unskilled illegals willing to work for pennies on the dollar.

Regardless of the piddling, unskilled day-jobs they perform, millions of illegals dramatically depress wages forcing Americans into unemployment and onto public assistance, consume vastly more tax-payer subsidized resources than they contribute, further burden the already over-burdened criminal justice and education systems, and remit tens of billions of dollars each year out of our economy into Mexico’s. Tell me if you can Andrew, how this set of conditions is essential to American prosperity.

There’s one more thing about his comment that bugged me: he asked, “…where would replacements be found to fill their jobs?” Just to clarify: employees do not own their jobs; they merely fill them for a price. Jobs belong to the employer and he contracts with the employee to do that job for a time. Apparently Mr. Greeley, like most Liberals, believes, wrongly, that workers have a right to “their” jobs and the benefits that go with them…they don’t! Employees serve at the pleasure of their employer.