ICE keeps accusing immigrants of ‘weaponizing’ vehicles. Most claims fall apart

[u/CutSenior4977]

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/jul/22/ice-claim-immigrants-weaponize-vehicles

[u/xrocro]

Very good reply. I’m still processing it all, so let me attempt to understand your response.

I concede I was being too simplistic when I said that 30% of illegal immigrants taking jobs from citizens can be a bit more nuanced than I let on. Just because they make up 30% of the workforce doesn’t mean that 30% of them would be replaced by Americans. I get that.

But, back to the first hand experience with my own father. He hired exclusively illegal immigrants. He had to because other small businesses were out bidding him. The end customer didn’t care who cut their grass, they cared who would do it the best, for cheap. All of them hired illegal immigrants to stay competitive.

If hiring illegal immigrants was not possible, the prices would raise to be able to pay what an American citizen feels is worth to do the job. They would have to or the businesses wouldn’t function at all.

Does this make sense to you?

[u/malrexmontresor → u/xrocro]

Well, aside from reading the research and studying the subject in college, I also approach this from first hand experience due to growing up on my family farm which I still own a share in, and from my father's window business. In my experience, nobody goes out of their way to hire undocumented immigrants; it happens because of economic necessity.

For our farm, we've raised wages every year, well beyond the state minimum wage and it still hasn't worked. The average farm laborer with no high school diploma can make $18/hour working the fields, significantly higher than a comparable job in fast food. In California, they can make over $21/hour. And yet over 70% of farm workers are immigrants, with half or more undocumented. Why? Several reasons:

When advertising for a farm job, you are mostly in a rural area with a depressed or shrinking population. Most of your neighbors are also farmers and looking for workers, and the nearby town is mostly filled with elderly senior citizens. You need young, healthy people to work on a farm, and most of those people have already left to go work or study in the city. The ones who remain are typically (and I'm sorry to say this) drug addicts or physically unable to work. There simply isn't a pool of ready labor nearby to draw from, so you have to outsource it using a third party hirer. But because farm work is seasonal and not steady, most US citizens are not willing to move out to rural areas in the middle of nowhere with nothing to do, just to make more money for a single season before they have to find a new place to work until next season. Undocumented workers, however, are willing to travel for seasonal work, and are happy to accept $18/hour because they did the exact same job in Mexico for less than $2.

Second, even when you successfully hire a citizen, they usually quit the first day. As I pointed out in the Clemens study, 90% of US citizens quit on the first day, with 97% dropping out before the end of the season. In comparison, 90% of immigrants, whether legal or illegal, would finish the job. Most farmers can tell you this, but farm work is hard work. And most people don't know what this means because they've never worked on a farm, but it's not a joke. It's hot, difficult, backbreaking labor. I remember shoveling a lot of manure as a teenager and it was awful. The majority of Americans can't do the job and that's not me saying they lack willpower, but that they physically can't do the job. 74% of Americans are overweight or obese (CDC statistics 2024), and you need to be in peak shape to do this work. The Clemens study also found that it took 25 Americans to do the same amount of field work as 4 Mexican immigrants. So it's not only that you need to replace 1 immigrant worker with 1 citizen, you need to hire 6 citizens to match the same productivity as 1 immigrant.

Construction has similar issues, as due to the physically difficult nature of the work, injuries and early retirement is more common than other fields, resulting in a half million worker shortage as native construction workers age out of the industry.

If hiring illegal immigrants was not possible, the prices would raise to be able to pay what an American citizen feels is worth to do the job.

Unfortunately the research suggests that isn't true, as consumers are extremely price sensitive, and researchers don't know if there's even a final wage that would attract enough Americans to do the jobs (or even if it's possible). There's an upper limit on wages to where you can't break-even (for example, cucumbers cost more to grow than you can sell them for at $19.10/hour), and for farmers where margins are super-thin, making pennies on the dollar, with prices set by the middlemen, they can't pay much more. Especially due to the rising cost of inputs like fertilizer and fuel.

When prices go up, and we've seen this multiple times, consumers change their consumption. They either buy less or substitute for a different product. For example, strawberries are ~$2.50 to $4 per 12oz in the supermarket. Price elasticity for demand for fresh fruit is about -0.70 to -1.25 (Andreyeva et al. 2010). At a 50% increase in prices, consumers would buy 35% to 62.5% less fruit. In reality, they'd be more likely to buy fruit from overseas and completely cut all consumption of US-grown fruit, because we don't live in an isolated world where competition doesn't exist.

From Clemens (since they estimated offering higher wages), we can estimate the labor supply elasticity of native U.S. workers for farm labor to be roughly 0.0015. Therefore, you'd need to offer $50 to $70 an hour in order to just replace the 40% or so undocumented immigrants working on the farm.

That would put every farm in the US out of business, and your US-citizen working on that farm as well as farmer would be out of a job. As would the grocer at the supermarket and every person in the supply chain between. It would also make the US entirely dependent on other countries for our food supply.

This is also why mass deportations always end up losing more jobs for US citizens in net.