Some years ago, my husband and I needed some new tires for our pick-up. To get them, we fell back on one of our favorite tricks for getting "extra" money. We drove the truck to the farmers' market in Cordele and looked for watermelons.
We met up with a farmer who was selling a few watermelons from one of the stalls. He didn't have very many there, but he said he had a whole field of them still unpicked and invited us to follow him to the field and have a look. We did so. He let us pick a couple at random and cut them open so we could see and taste the quality. We struck a deal.
He told us to give him a couple hours to round up the crew and pick a load of melons for us. His crew lived just down the road, not in Mexico, so he could do that. We went to a nearby cafe and bought a meal and some iced tea and fiddled away a couple pleasant hours. When we returned his crew had a pile of melons ready to load onto our truck for us. We took them home, picked up our children from their grandmother's house and we all rode around selling melons.
That system worked well. We got our truck tires. We spent a good bit of family time together. The farmer sold a big bunch of melons. Two local men made some wages. The cafe sold a couple meals and the waitress made a tip.
Back in those days you would find fruit and vegetable stands all over the place. A lot of peaches, melons and pecans went north in small pick-ups and the backs of cars as well as in 18 wheelers.
Now before you start whining about how the "Mexicans" need the work and that system cut them out, that's a contrivance of greedy fat cats. Nothing in that system cuts out the Mexicans.
When the Mexicans come in gangs and pick the crops, they get paid so cheaply that they cut out the local folk. The crops are lower quality because they have to be picked in a narrower time window.
But there is nothing to stop Mexicans from going to the market, buying a field of melons and selling them on their own. The local folk will still get a cut of the pie. The Mexicans will get a better deal out of it and the farmer may be able to grow more because the system has added more distribution possibilities.
There are already plenty of Mexicans who live here. They have certainly shown enough resourcefulness to survive in an underground and black market outsider economy. Quite a few of them are even here legally.
I am really sick of hearing rich people trying to tell us that we NEED to exploit Mexicans in order to support our farmers. That kind of bull is best spread on the fields.

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