Illegal Immigration

We must first consider one question. Why is there illegal immigration in the United States? I posit that the reason we have an illegal immigration problem is because of a demand for sub-minimum wage unskilled labor in the United States. Given this, we can also posit that as long as there remains a demand for this labor there will also always be some form of supply of this labor. Thus, efforts to enforce current immigration laws will prove to be futile. Factually, it is literally impossible to effectively enforce a legal requirement for undocumented immigrants to return to their countries of origin.

This impossibility is created by the fact that the sheer number of undocumented immigrants in the United States makes it impossible to move them to their countries of origin. At the current time, according to the department of homeland security states that by best estimate there are 11,550,000 undocumented immigrants residing in the United States. This estimate is on the low end of the spectrum with numbers as high as 15 or 20 million being a distinct possibility. Of the 11.5 million undocumented immigrants 20% of these come from Mexico. Regardless, when discussing numbers of people in this quantity, moving them all becomes impossible in terms of cost and effectiveness, especially since the other 80% are from countries which do not border ours.

Something else worth considering is that every law the United States Congress passes has both intended and unintended consequences. I would also argue that enforcing the current immigration laws and forcing all the illegal immigrants to leave the country will have the unintended effect of devastating local economies, particularly as it pertains to the agriculture industry.

Now, why would this happen? Some local economies thrive off of illegal labor. The agriculture industry is one industry which thrives off of illegal labor. Once illegal immigration laws are enforced employers of illegal immigrants will be forced to pay more for Americans to take these jobs. The increase in the cost of labor also increases the price of the good the industry is trying to sell. Thus, the industry will sell the good, in this case produce, at a higher price. Currently the agriculture industry, due to its low labor costs, is actually able to export goods to other countries. However, once illegal immigration laws are enforced the goods will become more expensive which will hamper the agriculture industries ability to export because the price is too high. Thus, in terms of GDP enforcing illegal immigration laws will decrease our net exports and thus decrease our overall Gross Domestic Product.
Another way enforcing illegal immigration will negatively effect the United States Economic Growth is that the money the illegal immigrants spend in order to live in the United States will be gone. According to the United States Cencus bureau the national household income for undocumented immigrants is $45,748. Multiplied by 11.5 million that equals $517,500,000,000 annually, that money if removed from the economy would decrease overall consumption spending by even more than 517 billion dollars.
Furthermore, forcing undocumented immigrants to leave will hamper the ability of businesses to expand. For instance, the availability of foreign workers at low wages in the Nebraska poultry industry made companies realize that they had the personnel to expand. So they invested in new equipment, generating jobs that would not otherwise be there. In California's strawberry patches, illegal immigrants are not competing against native workers; they are competing against pickers in Michoacán, Mexico. If the immigrant pickers did not come north across the border, the strawberries would.