Allen Wilson writes in a comment that “We should give them a week’s worth of food and transportation to the orchards and farms of those states where there are complaints that new immigration laws are scaring off Mexican workers.”

This really cuts to the heart of things.  The very existence of food-stamp programs and minimum-wage laws gives the lie to our fork-tongued politicians who wish to perpetuate the exploitation of the “undocumented” and their cheap labor, while claiming that picking fruit and mowing grass are jobs Americans won’t do.

We should think of our federally sponsored welfare programs as a jobs program, wherein the underclass is paid to be indolent, the way the FedAg pays farmers to keep land fallow.  The entry-level position could be called Urban Labor Engineer.

But if you add up the value of food stamps and other welfare payments per week and divide by 40, does the quotient equal minimum wage?  How does it compare with the under-the-table cash payments for the jobs Americans won’t do?  Or are our federal overlords so racist that they think the (largely African-American) welfare recipients are too ignorant or too lazy to mow grass or pick vegetables?