You seem to know what you're talking about. I hope you'll excuse some uninformed questions from a layman.
The words of an expert in the field!
What kinds of jobs are you thinking about here? What would happen if you removed this labour source, and do you think that any government will ever seriously try to?
Many jobs you could train a food-motivated chimp to do. Factory work, fruit picking, being a member of parliament, children's tea party organizer and so on. If there was no labour source they would not get done. No, it would be impossible. Also the kind of people who employ massive amounts of people illegally have dinner at the club with MPs and it is in neither of their interest to do so.
Just to check that I understand what you're saying here: the unemployed are competing for jobs that businesses could be paying at more than the minimum wage, which drives down the wages of those jobs? But doesn't that problem come back to unemployment, rather than the minimum wage? What do you mean about the minimum wage being an 'attractor'?
Firstly minimum wage causes unemployment. There is a spectrum of ability in C2DEs which is accounted for with no minimum wage states having a spectrum of pay for the group. Now everyone get paid the same, the jobs where people would have got paid less don't officially exist and jobs that would have paid more... pay minimum wage. There is a glut of highly employable technically illegal immigrants with good papers to whom the wage is worth five or six times what it worth to a UK citizen. There is no pressure to pay more and lots to pay the minimum.
I'm guessing this relates back to point 3 and my question above (businesses are saving money on theoretically above-minimum-wage jobs). But aren't businesses annoyed with the minimum wage because it makes some potentially profit-generating jobs illegal? Not everything can be done by immigrants and the guys with dreadlocks after all, much as they try.
MW is bad for small and medium sized businesses for reasons like you say and for growth. Really bad for social cohesion. It is great for big businesses. Its all very Marxist to be deluded so to think that magically everyone is economically worth X because you think that morally everyone should have a "right" to the amount.
Sorry you're getting abuse because of the economic worth vs. social/human worth thing.
Ta, but you haven't met my wife. This "abuse" is very relaxing for me, feels like a holiday.