Border Control?

From a free-market point of view, this movement of people looks like a classic example of the law of supply and demand. Mexico is poor, overpopulated, intensely corrupt and has a nearly limitless supply of cheap, willing labor. Thanks to the North American Free Trade Agreement, competition with inexpensive American corn has ruined tens of thousands of small Mexican farmers, while many of the light manufacturing plants just south of the border that drew so many northward a decade ago have moved operations to Asia. People are going hungry.

The United States, on the other hand, is rich and needs workers who will take jobs Americans don't want, for lower wages than Americans will accept. (Try this thought experiment: Imagine suggesting that your teenager take a summer job picking melons for 12 hours a day in California.) If, by magic, the Minutemen's dreams were granted overnight -- if the border were sealed and the estimated 11 million people living in this country illegally were deported -- America would most likely be unrecognizable, and not in a good way. Crops would rot in the fields, bathrooms would stay dirty, mothers of small children would be stuck at home. America is addicted to cheap labor, and withdrawal is beyond contemplation.

Still, we maintain the pretense that we don't want a docile underclass of workers coming into the United States, and we keep trying to catch them as they cross an increasingly policed border.