You have this backwards. My point wasn't that immigrants are taking American jobs, it was that Americans are giving them these jobs because Americans are being lazy, soft and cheap.
The immigrant is not at fault. It seems like you're responding to Fox News talking points, not to me. I would suggest doing that on foxnews.com.
At no point did I suggest that better labor standards are a bad idea, but I did observe that anyone who thinks society will eliminate all the jobs Hacker News perceives as shitty is drinking a lot of kool-aid.
Don't blame the American who doesn't want to do back-breaking work for pennies. It's the same everywhere: for example, Finland imports seasonal berry pickers from Thailand.
No sane local wants to work on the rates the market is willing to pay; mechanised agriculture has pushed the prices low enough to make manual agricultural work simply unsustainable. To make local work profitable we'd need to radically raise the product prices or provide subsidies.
These problems can be solved in other ways. A real world solution probably involves some workers getting paid less than they would like, and some businesses paying higher wages than they want to.
The least moral solution is to develop an illegal underclass and deny them human and political rights. This sort of thing is cancerous for a democracy and bears an unsettling resemblance to one of America's original sins, one which I'm sure I don't need to name directly, but which we knew was wrong from day one, and which we spent a lot of blood and treasure to abolish.
I'm not sure how to react to cases where this is true but the seasonal workers still see it as a good source of income. Would the market bear the increased cost? Likely not. Avocados would be imported in the US, and in Finland berries would disappear as an industry ingredient as there are no low-cost countries with climate suitable for cultivation.
When the Reagan administration changed the regulations around meatpacking to break the unions and ship the industry back to 1910 standards to rural places, none of the principled conservatives were complaining about cheap meat packing and illegal workers who didn’t collect workers compensation or have pesky demands for health insurance.
Likewise, none of the large apple growers around me were too concerned about guest worker visas when they were able to hire on Jamaicans for a few months, house them in onsite dormitories and pay below market rates. They love to bitch about Mexican construction guys though.
When I worked in the mall in the 90s, the struggle of unskilled workers was obvious and sad. At that time, most workers made $4.25, and the barrier to moving up for folks not in college was a car. Getting a $12/hr job as a line cook at Pizza Uno or $15/hr job cleaning offices meant freedom for those people.
If labor standards didn’t allow the abysmal working conditions that only desperate Latin American or other immigrants are willing to take, the market would take care of that problem. Instead of shipping in Apple pickers from 4,000 miles away, you could hire folks 10 miles away and bus them in.