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Barry, the workers that came in for picking season for the citrus industry didn't really bring any measurable social cost when I was young.
My grandad basically had shacks in the middle of the orange groves. They would come in for a few weeks, straight in from Mexico with their families and live in these little shacks with dozen or more people crammed in each one.(because as I said...each worker had his entire family and they worked together as a unit).
Some of them were "foremen" and they would bring their "crew" in with them.
They would pick for the season. Make a freakin' fortune and then leave with all their money.
The kids didn't go to school. They didn't go to the doctor while they were here (they seriously worked all day every day to maximize their money)
And then when it was over...they went back to Mexico and lived like kings. lol
Some people might argue that they didn't "contribute" because they took their money back with them to Mexico to spend it.
And that's true.
But the work they did keeps food costs down for all of us.
I can tell you that riding around with my dad through my grandfathers citrus groves...I never saw even ONE "white" guy out there doing that work. It was too freakin' hard to work out in the hot Florida sun all day long picking oranges.
And no single person could compete with a Mexican family when it comes to attacking an orange tree.
They would have an entire row of trees picked before you could get half a tree done. lol
And in the citrus industry that is vital.
The sugar content of the orange dictates the price. And to have a high sugar content you have to be able to leave that orange on the vine right up to the last second. One day over and the fruit will be rotted. One day too soon and you lose money because it's not fully ripened to it's full sugar content potential.
Those "illegal" immigrants were the ones who could hit a grove at it's peak and get the entire grove picked in a day and loaded on to trucks to head to the office for analysis and then off to the Tropicana plant.
Lot of money at stake in that whole process from targeting which grove was "ready" to getting it to the plant in time.
EDIT: My grandfather paid out by the "tub" of oranges picked...so it wasn't like the Mexicans were undercutting American workers price-wise. Anybody could have come there and worked that job. But nobody was as good at it as those Mexican workers were. They had the ability to bring their families in there and make a lot of money and get the job done better than anyone else could. If they didn't get the job done...they didn't last.
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