““This would be an emergency, a dire, dire situation,” said Nancy Foster, president of the U.S. Apple Association,..”
I am not sympathetic.
Truck farmers and orchardists hire illegals on a temporary seasonal or need basis, then let them go. These illegal aliens then are not working year round and the public, in the end, has to pick up the welfare costs.
There is a solution. Asparagus growers despaired of ever getting in their crops without illegal alien workers, and then an invention which allowed the harvesting of asparagus appeared, saving their businesses.
It can be done, and for the sake of the rest of the nation, it must be done.
NPR, in its typical fashion, had a sob story about Georgia blackberry farmers who lamented the fact that they couldn't find seasonal workers for their farms.
When the reporter asked the owner whether he would consider hiring parolees or raising his wages he told the correspondent that he would rather shut down his farm.
The term is "privatize profits/socialize costs". As you point out, they get the benefit of cheap labor, while the rest of us have to deal with the cost of the illegals.
I'm willing to pay a bit more for my cabbages. As you also point out, if they didn't have cheap illegal labor, it would create a market of picking machines, which would permanently solve the problem.
As long as there is "cheap" labor available it will be used. When one must pay a respectable wage for labor then machines or techniques will be invented to eliminate the need for cheap labor thereby creating jobs in the machine or other industries for skilled, better paid labor.
Such is the brilliance of the free enterprise system. No one picks cotton by hand anymore.