[Blue_Runner]

All excellent points fellas. It is most definitely a super complex issue with no easy answer at this point.

What are your thoughts on this:

Yes the price of food would go up without illegals, but at least the $4 per head of lettuce would go back into our own pockets. Kinda like borrowing from your 401k and paying yourself back with interest.

I'm seeing it in the tech industry first hand, not illegals, but jobs going overseas and money being paid out and not going back into our economy....all while shrinking the job market and forcing American salaries down. They've figured out that they can get people in India who barely speak English to do the programming and have a bare bones American staff of so called "SME's" (subject matter experts) to write the specs and be the middle man b/t IT and the business.

But what happens in a lot of cases is the Indian outsourcing companies pad their estimates so much it makes me wonder if we actually save a dime.

Offshore companies still have not figured out how to fully take over System Admin and systems programming infrastructure type roles......yet. I guess if they write a bad program it doesn't impact things as much as if they let an entire server go down for a day impacting hundreds of users ability to do their jobs.

So, which is worse - having to pay more for something and having the money go back into the economy or paying less, shrinking the job market and US salaries, and the money goes to a foreign country?

I'll admit I don't know the answer.