Someone on I know suggested the “simple” solution of deporting all illegals and using volunteer non-violent prisoners to work the fields in exchange for reduction of prison sentences.
I wonder how to pay for the increased cost of transport and guarding of prisoners off-site. I can only assume this person would say that the increased prison cost would be offset by the reduced cost of social programs for illegals.
I don’t know enough about the variables here. Care to chime in?
Prison terms for Overdue library books and the like.
The governors biggest contributor runs the volunteer labor camps.
What could go wrong?
So is the farmer expected to provide the security? Fields are pretty big, usually with unwalled sides, and you’d need rather a lot of convicts on site to replace the illegals.
(If I was a criminal bent on escape I’d love this idea.)
Let’s see, the cost of manpower for locating, chasing down, rounding up, and transporting for deportation all illegals? Then we would have to really secure the borders to keep them from just running back in, right? And then we would have to replace every last one of them (at the wages they were making) in the jobs they were doing so that our economy would not grind to a halt?
Why would prisoners volunteer to work in the fields? Many of them are employed earning wages while in prison, after all.
Sure - SIMPLE!
This someone you know should run for office, they’re a shoe-in! (Really, I’m not joking about this last bit.)
Americans are mostly decent people. When news footage shows government agents kicking down doors and throwing people into buses with crying children, the political will would evaporate.
Also, businesses that use undocumented workers would have their labor prices rise. Businesses that cater to the consumption of undocumented workers would see their sales drop.
Also, there aren’t enough prisoners in total to replace the undocumented (2 million vs. 12 million). They likely couldn’t be put to use for less than the undocumented make because of the cost of securing them and transporting them to job sites.
The government would have an incentive to have large prison populations to garner a slave labor force. This would be bad for civil liberties.
Yeah, that was another question I had. Do we have enough non-violent prison volunteers to go around?
My simple solutions:
(1) Penalise the employers of illegal immigrants enough so that it’s not worth their while to employ them.
(2) Increase the wages of agricultural labourers enough so that legal residents of the U.S. are willing to take those jobs.
Yes, I do think that it’s all about money.
Well, now that’s just crazy talk, Giles.
Yeah, it is kind of funny that the only solution people can think of is slave labor. How about we pay whatever wages are needed to attract qualified employees? If we kick out every undocumented person (about 12 million of them, so good luck on that), we’d have to pay more for agricultural workers and landscapers and nannies. Simple supply and demand. But we can’t have that, it would mean prices would increase, so let’s use slave labor instead, much simpler.
Wait, I thought of a really convenient way to differentiate between slave laborers and regular people! As a hint, it doesn’t involve the content of their characters!
Let’s not forget that pesky little document called the US Constitution. Read up on that part called due process. Due Process is rather simple to understand. However, its appreciation and proper implementation not so cheap nor fast.
There was a huge raid and undocumented worker round-up in some of the meat-processing plants up in Greeley last year. News coverage showed families, including children, crying as their parents were led away to be deported. Nobody cared.
One incident is one thing. But the media would really pound a concerted effort over months or years involving millions.
I can’t provide evidence of course, it’s just something I think is likely to happen.
HELLO! Use volunteer non-violent prisoners for that! What could possibly go wrong?
Obvious solution: imprison the illegal immigrants! 
Genius!
A little ancient history,Goodbye to my Juan, goodbye, Rosalita,
Adios mis amigos, Jesus y Maria;
You won’t have your names when you ride the big airplane,
All they will call you will be “deportees”[RIGHT]Plane Wreck At Los Gatos - Woodie Guthrie, 1948[/RIGHT]
CMC fnord!
The thing is illegals don’t take low wage jobs. They take ILLEGAL JOBS
An illegal immigrant is pretty much working a job that pays under minimum, is unsafe and has unfair practices.
If you deport them and try to replace them with prisoners, suddenly these illegal jobs are exposed.
You take an illegal immigrant making $4.00/hr at an unsafe job and make him legal he doesn’t stay at that job. He quits and finds a minimum wage job at McDonalds or something.
How about just translating one prison day into a working hours worth? So for every hour you work your sentence is reduced by an hour. Basically this would mean you serve time twice as fast while you’re working.
This would mean that if you are sentenced to one year in prison, and work 10 hours every day, you’ll serve 212 days. That’s a reasonable 42% reduction, enough to get many people to volunteer I bet.
The only problem I see with this is that it would create an incitement to imprison people if someone was allowed to make a profit from the work.
Somehwere I read that it would cost about as much as the Drug war.
Cite? I mean, of course they do in some circumstances, but dudes born in the USA also work under the table. As someone who has worked with programs for Undocumented aliens, and investigated working & living conditions, I can tell you that (at least in CA) it just ain’t so. If ICE comes by on a raid, and the records show that the employer is paying “the illegals” less than Min Wage and off the books, it’s very bad. You then have a slam dunk case against him, and the IRS gets into the act, and they are not a nice bunch of dudes when it comes to assessing and collecting unpaid Employment taxes.
If the employer is paying them just the same, and he has a bunch of copies (no matter how bad) of “papers”, he has plausible deniability, he can claim he didn’t know. No IRS, either. Just a few dudes rounded up and trucked off. Nothing but a small and stupid employer will take the risk.
Also, good crop workers are paid on a piece work system, which although involves long hours of hard monotonous labor, can pay much better than Minimum wage.
It’s just not so.