Everyone's Allowed One Bad Performance

I'm a huge fan of Thomas Sowell, but for the first time in my memory, he's made some really poor arguments.  They're against immigration and bear in mind that I don't like the immigration bill either.

The first, and perhaps biggest, fraud is the argument that illegal aliens are “doing jobs Americans won’t do.” There are no such jobs.

Even in the sector of the economy in which illegal immigrants have the highest representation — agriculture — they are just 24 percent of the workers. Where did the other 76 percent come from, if these are jobs that Americans won’t do?

All agricultural jobs are not the same.  The best involve owning or managing farms and operating mechanical equipment.  The worst are those which require stooping over all day in a field filling up a  bag of tomatoes for little pay.  Oh, and it's real hot, too.  Americans may very well not find those jobs worth doing.  That's certainly not proven; perhaps if tomato-pickers made more, Americans would do it.  But lumping all farm jobs together is dishonest.

The argument that illegal agricultural workers are “making a contribution to the economy” is likewise misleading.

For well over half a century, this country has had chronic agricultural surpluses which have cost the taxpayers billions of dollars a year to buy, store, and try to get rid of on the world market at money-losing prices.

If there were fewer agricultural workers and smaller agricultural surpluses, the taxpayers would save money.

I'm even more surprised by this one.  The only reason that we've had "chronic agricultural surpluses" (and why would that be necessarily bad?) is that federal price controls and farm subsidies have encouraged them.  Mr. Sowell surely knows that.  If Congress and the President eliminated farm-welfare, the surpluses would disappear as prices decreased.  Immigrants, illegal or otherwise have had nothing to do with surpluses.

As I said, I'm opposed to the current immigration bill, but not for economic reasons.  I suspect that more people in the working in the U.S. only serve to grow the economy.  But I consider myself conservative instead of libertarian for a reason.  The United States must protect its borders and be able to regulate the number of people who come here if only to preserve order.

I'm disappointed that Dr. Sowell didn't come at it from that angle instead of citing easily disprovable economic straw men that would be more expected of someone like Paul Krugman.