I know I’m late in posting this (by a couple months), but hell, it’s still pertinent:
When Alabama decided to crack down on undocumented immigrants and suddenly found themselves without workers to pick their crops because, as it turns out, no self-respecting American works hard labor for less than minimum wage with no benefits… I was struck. I was struck because it meant that the South’s economy has not progressed very far from slave plantations. If your economy’s dependent on labor so cheap that, even in a depression, Americans don’t want to do it, well, hell. I don’t even have a punchline for that.