*scratches head* If minimum wage isn't a living wage, how would this work?

Apparently, wingers won't be satisfied until American wages are no higher than those in China.

In my opinion, any business that can't afford to pay the meager minumum wage should be out of business.

There are several problems with having minimum wage laws.
#1--- People who don't have good job skills aren't worth the minimum wage, thus they will remain
unemployed, because no business is going to give away money.
#2--- The continual economic underclass for reasons described in #1 above, lead to social unrest
#3--- Government is hardly in the position to meddle in what someone pays an employee. Especially given the Government's own bad track record on economic issues, the poorly run agencies such as FEMA, Post Office, HUD etc.
#4--- By lowering and /or eliminating the minimum wage, those whose skills are very low could at least get a job but if they are priced out of the market relative to their skills they will stay unemployed.

oh... yeah.. great idea. I can just see the riots occuring. We would be the laughing stock of the world. Not that we already aren't. Yeah... lets go back to the great depression. Unemployment through the roof.  imagine all those who will not be able to feed their folks. consider im speaking about legal residents. ooh ooh. and those students who depend on the minumum wage to pay for school. gee. tough luck. what kind of person would agree to this.

God, lowering minimum wage would suck....I don't make much over it as it is.

This suggestion could be a potential problem for any legal workers who are working at minimum wage.

What?  How is that helping?  All it will do is make the AMerican minimum wage workers suffer and the Illegals will still be getting paid under the table (as most don't have SSNs).  That should be common sense.

Rather, employ illegal immigrants and pay them in Mexican pesos at the Mexican wages rate. It will render immigration unattractive.

LOWER the minimum wage? Congress hasn't raised the damn thing since 1996 and there's certainly been no shortage of inflation and general rise in the cost of living since then. In essence, the minimum wage HAS been lowered each year for the last ten years. Lowering the paltry sum even more would be absoloutely obscene. I wish that once, just once, the so-called "credible economists" could dream up a solution to a problem that doesn't worsen the lot of the very poorest in society.

What about the millions of people with minimum wage jobs that have to survive? That would hurt both citizens and emigrants. It would create a snowball effect. Drop minimum wage, and people who could barely pay rent before would not be able to make it. This would increase the number of homeless people who may have to turn to crime to feed themselves and their families. Crime rate increases, there are homeless people all over the place, people are rioting and protesting...and things will turn ugly really quickly. Do you think that if we pay emigrants a couple of dollars less than before that theyll think oh, better go back across the border! NO! Theyll do what they have to to stay in the life they got used to. That is a bad idea, any way you spin it.

The illegal immigration problem is complex and won't be solved unless society (via its agent the government) implements and enforces several changes. One of these (the others to be addressed in related comments) is to reduce the minimum wage. One must start by acknowledging that the government can only mandate that labor be paid no less than the minimum wage, but cannot actually make such labor worth such wage. (The real purpose of the minimum wage is beyond the scope of this comment.) As a result, the current rate is higher than the actual value of such labor, resulting in the growth of economic forces (ie demand) for illegal labor. The rise in the use of illegal labor evidences this reality in that one can justifiably presume that (all other things equal) employers would prefer legal labor over illegal labor (due to penalties, etc.). Nevertheless, this factor alone (assuming for the moment that the government would have the political will to make this change) would not suffice to solve the problem as other changes must be made (eg lowering welfare payments and societal expectations) in order to force legal labor to fill those roles.