Let US pick Lettuce

Jobs Americans will do. They just won't do them for $2.00 an hour!!! Now lets blow the crop picking debate out of the water once and for all. I will give you the hard numbers to show that a salary of $12.50 per hour picking lettuce only equates to a labor cost of four cents per head.
A single worker picking eight head of lettuce per minute turns into a total of 480 lettuce per hour and 3840 total head for an eight hour shift. Forty workers would pick a daily total of 153,600 lettuce with a combined labor cost of $4,000 dollars. This is only 2.5 cents per head. If we drop the already sluggish pace of picking down from eight head per minute to an outright torpid pace of five and one half head per minute we up the cost to 4 cents per head.
Colorado taxpayers alone are saddled with $3 Billion a year in cost directly related to illegal immigrant workers. The long term savings are two fold to the consumer by eliminating the illegal job market and opening up an industry to place people off the welfare rolls and into the agriculture workforce at a salary approximately twice that of the minimum wage.
Tax savings would be much greater than the added cost of two pennies per head of Lettuce.