You know -- California Senator Dianne Feinstein has no problem with telling American employers to raise the wages they pay their workers, even if they have little trouble filling the positions.

Today marks an important step forward in alleviating poverty. Millions of hard-working Americans will finally receive a well-deserved pay raise. The federal minimum wage increase goes into effect today – rising from $5.15 to $5.85 per hour. This is the first increase in a decade. It is a step that is long overdue.

In fact, today’s increase is the first of three increases which will occur over the next two years. One year from today, it will rise to $6.55 and one year after that, in 2009, it will increase to $7.25. Increasing the federal minimum wage to $7.25 will add nearly $4,400 to a minimum wage worker’s annual income.

The bottom line is this: this two-year increase in the minimum wage will mean the difference between self-sufficiency and living below the poverty line for millions of American families who are struggling to make ends meet. It is an accomplishment for which the Democratic Congress can be very proud.

Now I won't get into a discussion of how an externally imposed artificial increase in wages does not help workers or the economy. That isn't what I'm about here.

Instead, I'm struck by the hypocrisy revealed by Senator Feinstein's reaction to the enforcement of American immigration laws.

Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, who has worked closely with growers, described the new enforcement as a “catastrophe.”

“The crisis is that crops will not be harvested,” Mrs. Feinstein said.

That is actually not true -- those crops will, in fact, get harvested. The thing is that growers will have to pay American workers a rate of pay that Americans are willing to accept, not the same amount that they paid two decades ago when I did summer work detasseling corn in central Illinois on days that I didn't have summer school classes. Those harvest jobs are jobs that Americans will do -- if you pay them on an American scale and not the slave wages given to border-jumpers who undermine the wages of American workers.

It is as simple as Economics 101, Senator -- and if you are willing to demand that American employers give a pay raise that does not make sense from an economic point of view, why not tell these folks to give one that the laws of economics clearly require.

Oh, yeah -- and at the same time quit outsourcing American jobs to illegal workers.