I was curious to see the immigration "audit" at Kreider Farms, where the feds earlier this month identified 100 employees — one-third of the workforce — as having "invalid documents." Which means they may have been here illegally, and are ineligible to work in the U.S.

Kreider Farms officials were shocked. The employees' documentation seemed to be in line, but as a spokeswoman acknowledged, "We are not required by the law to be document experts."

In other words, if you're here illegally but your papers look real, you can slip through. Or could, as Kreider Farms is now using E-Verify, which lets employers check employees' immigration status via the Internet.

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What struck me was the reason the Kreider Farms spokeswoman said the company, like so many other agricultural firms, hired a lot of foreign employees: "I have not had American people wanting these jobs. ... Farming is really hard work, and as a society, Americans have kind of gotten away from that a little bit." Maybe.

But Americans might get back to it, if those jobs paid more.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the mean hourly wage for farm workers who, among other things, "attend to animals produced for animal products, such as meat, fur, skins, feathers, eggs, milk and honey," is $11.56 an hour. Assuming a 40-hour work week, that's just over $24,000 a year.

It ain't peanuts. But it isn't much more. And the work is hard. So if firms like Kreider Farms have a hard time finding American workers, is it because Americans are lazy and feel entitled to more than this?

Or is it because there's a fundamental mismatch between the nature of the work and the wage paid?

Reporting on the farm labor shortage in Alabama — which passed a Draconian immigration law last year that drove most illegal immigrants from the state — Bloomberg Businessweek in November noted:

"It's a hard-to-resist syllogism: Dirty jobs are available; Americans won't fill them; thus, Americans are too soft for dirty jobs. Why else would so many unemployed people turn down the opportunity to work during a recession? Of course, there's an equally compelling obverse. Why should farmers and plant owners expect people to take a back-breaking seasonal job with low pay and no benefits just because they happen to be offering it? If no one wants an available job — especially in extreme [economic] times — maybe the fault doesn't rest entirely with the people turning it down. Maybe the market is inefficient."

The market requires immigration — legal and illegal — as a safety valve. Without a large pool of workers willing to accept low pay, companies would have no other option but to boost wages.

That would result in higher food prices and lower profitability. This is why we have been so lax on immigration law and enforcement; if all undocumented workers are kept out, food prices rise. Guaranteed.

But maybe we should be willing to accept higher prices in return for higher wages. Economically, America is caught in a downward spiral in which we argue that offshoring or tolerating high levels of immigration are beneficial because they lead to lower consumer prices. But lower consumer prices are necessary in an environment where wages are low.

It's an impoverished chicken, broken egg sort of thing.

But higher wages in one sector could put upward pressure on wages in other sectors. There's a famous story of how Henry Ford in 1914 more than doubled the average autoworker's wage. Liberals like to say he did this so his workers might be able to buy what they produced. That's wrong — Ford paid the higher wages specifically to reduce attrition — but his move boosted workers' buying power. They made more, so they could afford more. What a concept.

America might want to revisit it sometime, if we ever want to get our economic mojo back.

Gil Smart is associate editor of the Sunday News. Email him at gsmart@lnpnews.com, or phone 291-8817.