Assume there are 100 people in your community who do the work you do and 100 jobs for that type of work that local employers want to fill. You are in a pretty good position: You can stay employed.

Now assume there are only 95 people in your community who do the work you do and 105 jobs that local employers want to fill. You are in an even better position: You can stay employed and demand a higher wage because the demand for the work you do exceeds the supply of able workers.

You are, in fact, like all workers in a free society, a small business owner. You are an enterprise of one. You have something of value to sell, which is your labor, and you have a right to hold out for the highest price you can get from willing buyers. Harvard Law School graduates have this right, and landscape laborers have this right.

It is at the heart of free enterprise, a core element of our American way of life.

Now suppose the government decides to stop enforcing the nation's borders and immigration laws, allowing 25 people from a foreign country who do the same kind of work you do to illegally enter the United States, settle in your community, and begin competing with you and your neighbors for the jobs you hold.

With additional illegal aliens pouring across the border daily, there are already 120 people seeking the 105 jobs of your type in your town.

A few of your lifelong friends are laid off. Your own job is threatened. Your employer slashes wages, and you accept the pay cut because the supply of workers now exceeds the demand.

You begin wondering when you'll see a pink slip in your pay envelope.

The illegal-alien families, which pay less in taxes than the formerly higher-paid American workers, put their children in public schools, secure health care at public hospitals and place a net financial burden on their neighbors. Taxes go up; the quality of services goes down.

This is before the recession.

First, economic growth slows. Then, it stops. Then, it drops off a cliff. Month after month, hundreds of thousands of additional workers are thrown from their jobs as the economy tumbles down a mountainside. Continued...