You're exactly the sort of person who also maintains that burger flippers don't deserve a liveable wage and that there's no such thing as a liveable wage outside of what the market dictates. You'll turn around and scream about inflation due to "highly paid Americans" picking fruit, and demand that something must be done about such outrages. You can't have your cake and eat it too.

> You're exactly the sort of person who also maintains that burger flippers don't deserve a liveable wage

U.S. nationals and permanent residents can get EITC to supplement low wage income. Letting in more illegal aliens that will compete with them in the labor market is absolutely a policy choice - it has zilch to do with "market dictates". If you don't allow illegals into the country, the market will thereby be allowed to "dictate" higher wages.

I fully support increased wages for menial jobs, as long as they're not going to illegals

So the illegal immigration issue is not important to you for its economics affects or changes to quality of life but just due to your fear of the other. Thank you for making your priorities more clear.

> for its economics affects or changes to quality of life

The premise of the comment that you are responding to is that because of supply and demand, and because these people are desperate, it reducing the wages for those jobs and makes those bad jobs worse.

Thats horrible and less people should be doing those bad jobs, and the wages should increase! Desperate immigrants doing those jobs is just people pushing off bad things to a vulnerable population, and the world would be better off if those jobs got automated away entirely.

What? My issue is that Americans are getting screwed over to help illegals. No more illegals = higher wages for Americans.

Can you show your math on this one? How much approximately are "Natives" losing out to "Illegals"?

Your argument seems to be that a larger population leads to lower wages, which seems very reductive. Please elaborate

> Your argument seems to be that a larger population leads to lower wages

It's not just because of a larger population, it's also because illegal immigrants are often desperate, often willing to accept a much lower standard of living than locals, and therefore often willing to work for very low wages (sometimes illegally low)

Thus creating an under-class of workers who keep wages from ever going up to where they should be

... supply and demand?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supply_and_demand