Jobs Americans Won't Do?

Source: NYT

For Illegal Immigrants, Housing Slump Takes Toll

Hang on to your hats it's going to be a wild ride!

From Fresno to Sacramento, big tangles of wire and PVC pipes clutter vacant lots in silent subdivisions, waiting for houses to be built — some day. Dozens of “For Sale” signs already dot the lawns across new residential communities. And right next to the ubiquitous billboards from builders are fresh signs offering homeowners help to avoid foreclosure.

But another set of losers is less visible: the immigrant workers, mostly illegal, who rode the construction boom while it lasted and now find jobs on building sites few and far between.

Offering more than $10 an hour as well as new skills and a shot at upward mobility, construction provided many illegal immigrants the best job they ever had, a step up from the backbreaking work reserved for those toiling without legal authorization, which in the Central Valley mostly meant pruning and picking in fruit and vegetable fields.

The growing presence of illegal immigrants in home building, mostly working for small labor contractors, might help explain why government statistics have recorded only a small decline in construction employment, despite the collapse in residential investment.

Lesson #1: Illegal immigrants skew gub'mint figures.

Illegal immigrants played a big if quiet part on the supply side of America’s housing boom. According to the Pew Hispanic Center, a research organization in Washington, immigrants from Mexico and other Latin American countries account for about one in five construction workers. Those who arrived since 2000 — who are likely to be unlawfully in the United States because they had virtually no way of immigrating legally — account for an estimated 7 percent of the construction work force.

They were mostly pulled in by the building frenzy of the first half of the decade. According to the analysis by the Pew Hispanic Center, based on census data, Hispanic immigrants took 60 percent of the million new construction jobs created from 2004 to 2006. Those recently arrived took nearly half.

While there are no equivalent statistics at the state or local level, a glance at a construction crew anywhere in the valley confirms the overwhelming immigrant share. “There are only Mexicans,” said Adrián L., an illegal immigrant from Oaxaca who does interior work on homes here. “Now not even the supervisors are American.”

Lesson #2: Illegal immigrants turn good jobs bad. Also, when 99% of a crew speaks Spanish?

There was his other nephew, Roberto, who used to tear roofs down for $15 an hour, and Manuel S., who used to spray stucco on houses in the San Francisco Bay Area. Antonio R. lost a $14-an-hour job cutting wood last October. Chuy R., who got a job wiring homes immediately after arriving in the United States in May 2006, lost it at the end of the year.

Lesson #3: Illegal immigrants erode safety standards.

The immigrants agree. “There are too many people for too little field work,” José Manuel J. complained. “People are scattering up to Oregon and further north because there is little work here.”

Lesson #4: There never was or will be a labor shortage, only a shortage of ethical businesses and consumers willing to pay a fair wage or price for labor and services.

One of the core positions of the lunatic open borders crowd, our president, the bad smell in comments, Jackson, etc, is that illegal aliens are here to do "Jobs Americans won't do."

Am I to understand that Americans won't take construction jobs paying $25-35 dollars an hour? What this shows is that instead of Americans doing well and being fairly rewarded for their skills and labor they were shunted aside for cheaper labor at all points.

The irony is that this article, though written to be sympathetic to our cheerful invaders actually undermines the case for our needing them. In fact, if the New York Times had any clue how markets actually work they wouldn't have printed this piece as it is a withering indictment of the dire effects of illegal immigration in so many different ways.

So let's all rejoice in the New York Times firm policy to exclusively hire naught but cranks and communists as it makes our job so much easier!

H/T Polipundit

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