Freedom Folks: Boom & Bust

Source: Wapo

What happens when the illegal aliens "doing work Americans won't do" (sic) can no longer find work?

The gold rush came in drywall, laminate flooring and granite countertops, and Amilcar Guzman came with it.

Guzman left El Salvador at age 18 in 1999 and landed in Manassas. Soon he had $15-an-hour jobs cutting lumber, driving nails and running a Bobcat loader. He got a car, got married. The Washington region was hungry for houses, houses, houses, and word of the boom reached Mexico and Central America, drawing thousands more eager, jobless men like him.

Then sometime last year, Guzman said, the rush began to go bust, little by little, month by month. The contractors stopped hiring. The phone stopped ringing. Washington, it seemed, had all the houses it could hold .

So Guzman got a plane ticket. On Jan. 20, he is taking his family back to El Salvador, with plans to open an auto repair shop with the money he has saved. “There’s no work here anymore,” he said, having spent the past month unemployed. “And when there’s no work, it’s time for Latinos to go back to the countries where they came from.”

Hispanic immigration to the Washington region has always followed a seasonal pattern, as the winter puts a chill on outdoor labor and drives workers south. But with home sales and housing starts dropping after years of steady growth, many Hispanic workers — legal and illegal — say the good times are gone.

Have no fear though, insane pro-illegal activists are on the job...

Gustavo Torres, executive director of CASA of Maryland, said he’s concerned that tensions over immigration will spread and intensify if large numbers of idle construction workers are not quickly absorbed by other services and industries. “We’ve seen workers leaving for other states for jobs in construction or agriculture,” he said.

Torres argued for the need for job training programs to help workers make the transition into other sectors, saying he feared that “confrontation will accelerate further” if the slowdown worsens.