[Farmer's whining about not having cheap labor omitted. ]

To recap: Government criminalizes mutually beneficial exchange through protectionist labor policies; innocent cucumbers rot. (Some will never even have the chance to be born.) Tobacco, sweet potatos, and Christmas trees are also in jeopardy.

Actually, we don't have a war on cucumbers. Cucumbistan isn't being threatened with invasion. America is. And while an immigrant invasion might be mutually beneficial to growers and illegals, it harms everybody in America who pays taxes.

It harms victims of farmworker crime. It harms taxpayers. It harms American workers. It harms American schoolchildren.

Here's something John Derbyshire had to say recently about the jobs Americans won't do.

There probably are some jobs Americans won’t do at any wage level anyone is actually willing to offer.

I would still say: Well, then, let those jobs go hang. If you can’t, for love or money, find any citizens or legal residents to pick your apples, at wage levels not so high that consumers refuse to buy the apples, well, let the apples rot. That’s hard on you, I understand. You’ll have to find some other way to make a living. That happens to people, though–it’s happened to me a couple of times. And the U.S.A. won’t fold for want of apples.

Or for unborn cucumbers.