Comments Elsewhere

“Fruit pickers wages are several times higher in the U.S. than in Mexico. Why do you think that is?”

Because the agriculture industry in the United States is much larger and more productive than in Mexico, and because the percentage of the population willing to do hard farm labor at prevailing wages is higher in Mexico than it is in the United States. Thus the marginal productivity of another farm worker in the United States is considerably higher than in Mexico. This is true in several hard working-class jobs outside of agriculture as well.

“What do you think would happen to wages in this sector”

I don’t know. Mises demonstrated that socialist economic calculation is impossible; so while I can take some guesses from the data on the table, there isn’t any definitive way to know other than to open up the market and see what happens.

That said, let’s take some guesses about general trends based on what we know about the factors at hand.

“if the US Government did not intervene to…

• enforce a general minimum wage?”

The U.S. government does NOT enforce a general minimum wage. It enforces a minimum wage in some industries, a different minimum wage in others, and none at all in some. In point of fact, several classes of agricultural workers (those working for employers who use 500 man-days of farm labor per year, those employed on the range for production livestock, and seasonal hand-pickers paid on a piece-rate basis, inter alia) are completely exempted from the federal minimum wage. No agricultural employees are covered under federal overtime requirements. As I’m sure you know, employers of undocumented immigrants often pay them under the table, and when they do so aren’t constrained by the federal law in what they pay.

”- control the flow of Mexican pickers into the U.S.?”

The supply of Mexican laborers in the United States would most likely increase. All things being equal this would cause wages to tend to decrease. But of course all things are not equal. Freeing undocumented workers from threats of La Migra substantially increases their bargaining power with employers, their ability to go to the court to report labor abuses such as debt bondage and outright slavery (there have recently been major cases uncovered in South Carolina and Central Florida). It would also open up many jobs other than traditional farm labor to immigrants (since finding a job would no longer require them to seek out low-visibility labor where payment under the table is common), which would tend to countervail against the increase in supply.

Short answer to a long list of worries: I think that there’s actually reason to think that government action keeps wages below where they would be on a free market. But there are countervailing factors and there’s no good way to know for sure which would prevail, short of actually letting the market work and seeing what happens. Fortunately, markets do work, so there’s no need t