That is an economic fact of immigration today.

But are we really going to be arguing that U.S. workers being able to get a multinational corporation's hamburger for 99¢ because the lettuce and tomatoes are being harvested for a couple pennies a pound (and the beef is government subsidized) is important to their well-being?

That's a place we don't want to be.

Overall, immigrants benefit the U.S. economy.  That benefit is not shared fairly, along with vastly more important causes of inequality, like inherited wealth, corporate personhood, and political and economic corruption.  And in addition to being unfair and an affront to liberty, extreme inequality hurts the damned economy that brung it.

The poor in the United States are getting blasted with or without immigration, and immigration is going to continue whether its legal or illegal, unless corporations are faced with massive penalties.  (And that only addresses a small part of the pull of jobs, and nothing of the push of economic disaster and political persecution, itself largely driven by international wealth.)

The fact that big businesses are benefiting from exploiting immigrants, and that this is what you have to address if you don't like immigration, has been a left point for a while, and one my Dad in particular made, but now that it's finally gaining traction in the establishment media, it's been turned against us.

Workplace raids are not a targeting of corporate wrongdoing, they are a spectacle designed to give a show of doing something, playing to our racism, that shatters a lot of very real lives to no effect on immigrants coming nor their exploitation, in the broad sense.  And as Al mentioned, many immigrants are in the small businesses and contractors, what passes over into the United States' informal sector.  No doubt some people in the fascistic-sounding Homeland Security Department are sharpening their nets (or something, work with me here) for this new set of innocents to sacrifice to political theater.

Immigration laws are like the drug laws but worse, what the totalitarians want to be able to apply to everyone: you can be declared illegal merely by your existence.

Illegal people?  Isn't that a clue we have to rethink the laws?

If it weren't for the vast inequality of wealth and resources on the international scale, immigration wouldn't be considered a problem.  Indeed, restrictions on crossing national borders would rightly be seen as an outrage against freedom.

We are not overwhelmed with immigrants from Europe (although we were a century ago), Australia or New Zealand, or Canada (too much).  A five or even ten percentage point difference in the unemployment rate doesn't drive migration, a fifty point difference does.

And for a century, the United States government has lead the very successful effort to keep the whole world exploitable by its businesses, actively promoting economic inequality and aiding political persecution that often derives from it-- the two main drivers of immigration.

Against immigration?  Fight for global justice.

Learning how to organize from the political energy and consciousness Latin America has shown relative to the rest of the world, and gaining allies is a lot more important than trying to keep more crumbs to ourselves.

Trying to shut the door on an empire in decline is not good strategy from virtually any U.S.-centric perspective.  From the progressive standpoint, we in the United States have one last chance to use our unequal position in to change the world for the better, to change the international rules of the game away from economic exploitation, political oppression, and military domination.  One last chance before other state-based powers (or even corporate-based powers or other non-states) rise to try to rule the world.  Powers that may do an even worse job than our government has done.  That's what scares me, folks.

One last chance.  And we can't do it alone.