Hmm? If the prevailing wages are low, then claims that there is a shortage are lies; if there were a genuine shortage, then any employer could guarantee they got as many as they wanted by offering a better wage, and would have already done so. The entire point of setting a wage cutoff is that it's an impartial standard, which can't be fooled by false rumors of shortages. Making exceptions would defeat the purpose, and it would be bad for the people in fields covered by those exceptions.

> If the prevailing wages are low, then claims that there is a shortage are lies

That's not necessarily correct. That's only the case in a vacuum, it falls apart in reality.

For example, the US has routine shortages of farm field workers, in places like California, for picking etc. The wages are very low. It's a combination of nobody but illegal immigrants wanting to do the job for $10 / hour because it's a miserable job, and the business owner not being able to afford dramatically higher wages. It's a very persistent problem throughout California. In your theory, the wages could only be so low due to a vast over-supply of labor; there are in fact many other reasons an imbalance like that can occur.

http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/2015/oct/25/decline...

http://www.wsj.com/articles/on-u-s-farms-fewer-hands-for-the...

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/30/us/california-farmers-shor...

This is, again, straightforward microeconomics. The reason none of the farm owners is able to afford higher wages is because the price they can sell their crops at is set by competition with other farms, whose prices reflect the fact that they are not themselves paying higher wages. If cheap labor were unavailable, wages and prices would both rise and the business owners would end up about the same.

The situation is somewhat complicated by the seasonal nature of the work, which means yearly cycles of hiring and firing. We normally associate periods of intense hiring with a shortage (ie, a recent shift in the economy means much more demand for some category of worker and not enough people have been trained yet to fill the demand), but in the case of agricultural work, that's part of the economy in steady-state.

It's not purely that simple. Ideally, the farm owners are trying to hit the price point at the intersection of the supply and demand curves. If the demand curve was perfectly inelastic your explanation would be sufficient, but most consumers are going to balk when a carton of strawberries reaches a certain level, and therefore the market is putting downward pressure on the price due to demand.

Maybe if these luxury crops can't be sold economically without resorting to illegal labor, they should be replaced with other products that are more economical.

I can go pick my own strawberries in New England when they are in season for $1-2 a pound. That season might only be about three or four weeks in June/July, but there's other stuff the other eleven months of the year. If I want fresh strawberries in December, they ought to be at a premium.

We used to use a lot of teen-aged labor for this kind of low-skill seasonal work, and I don't necessarily think there's anything wrong with that. There's still parts of Aroostook county in Maine where they have a weird school year, because traditionally they needed every warm body to get the potato harvest picked in early fall.

The demand for product X is always only sufficient to attract Y workers. That's how the economy works, your confusing a demand shortage for a worker shortage.

Apples and oranges. The average nurse is vastly more skilled than the average software "engineer."

Well, with nursing it's not so hard to know since they created the shortage.

Why can't the central government concern itself with the health of its populace over the dire shortage of iPhone developers?