THE WAGES OF HATE:

It's good to harvest crops

Indeed, basic crop harvest is in some ways even more given to these labor dynamics because "just import the wheat from somewhere else" is an extremely viable option if labor costs get too high. Most Americans have higher aspirations in life than doing agricultural work in Nebraska, so this is what you get:

"We've struggled on this issue for a long time to try to come up with a more reasonable, common-sense approach," said John Hansen, president of the Nebraska Farmers Union, which is part of a group lobbying Congress for new immigration laws. Vilifying immigrants "just makes it harder to get there."

The population trend is clear in Nebraska, where only 24 of the state's 93 counties gained residents. Of those 24, just eight reported an increase in the white population, suggesting that most of the growth was driven by minorities, said David Drozd, a research coordinator for the University of Nebraska Omaha's Center for Public Affairs Research.

The key dynamic in farm work is that -- while, again, there is of course some hypothetical wage at which you can persuade people to spend all day picking strawberries -- the American consumer will only pay so much for berries. When labor is scarce, it makes more sense to let your strawberries rot on the vine than to pick them:

One thing explained the stark difference between Serrano's two fields: despite offering nearly twice the going wages, he had been unable to secure enough workers to tend and, when the time came, pick his strawberries. The shortage of labor had forced him to perform farming's version of triage and abandon the berries to ensure that he could harvest as many zucchini as possible, which he is contracted to sell to Costco. "Summer squash are this farm's bread and butter," he explained. "I had to give them first dibs on workers."

Now again, it's genuinely great that people are finding job opportunities that are better than "pick fruit for low wages."

But the problem with immigration curbs as an economic development strategy is that telling unemployed former factory workers in Ohio, "don't worry, we fixed your problems by getting rid of the immigrants, so now you can go be a berry-picker in California" doesn't make sense. That's a downwardly mobile occupational trajectory. The genius of immigration is that these jobs are actually upward mobility for lots of foreign-born people who are eager for the opportunity to come here and work. And them doing that work not only mitigates inflation on the supply side, but it also creates more opportunities for Americans to do higher-value stuff elsewhere in the great economic chain of being.

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