Posted on 12/17/2016 12:02:11 PM PST by Timpanagos1
Though it's illegal, brothers Israel and José Martinez have no shortage of work, moving from one construction job to the next in the ongoing building boom of Central Texas. They’ve worked on homes in affluent communities along the Upper Colorado River and renovated sprawling apartments in North Austin. They were on a crew that erected a new health center at a high-end retirement community, and as expert masons have built luxury pools, interior chimneys and backyard grilling stations.
Their compensation often falls below minimum wage. They might receive just $90 for a 14-hour workday, or about $6.42 an hour — and that’s when they do get paid. On more than a few occasions, the brothers have gone days, weeks and even months without receiving payment for their grueling labor.
In all their years in Texas, Israel and José — pseudonyms, since both asked that their real names not be published — have experienced a lot. One thing they say they haven’t seen: U.S. citizens doing the heavy lifting on construction projects.
“We’ve never seen any Americans carrying cement, picking up stone, working from sunup to sundown,” Israel said. “Never.”
(Excerpt) Read more at texastribune.org ...
When a company starts to hire illegals, they don’t really want citizens working there; afraid they will turn them in. When a business hires illegals they not only save the hourly wage, sometimes they aren’t paying payroll taxes either and safety on the job and other regulations may not be a priority- illegals are not likely to say anything. The illegals always have a friend or relative needing a job and they do stick together. If citizens are working with illegals the illegals do gang up on them and run them off so their friends and relatives can get the job.
Many businesses have hired illegals so long they cannot hire citizens even if they want to, they have a reputation for only hiring illegals. Some business owners that hire illegals are truly too stupid to know why citizens won’t work for them so they claim “Americans won’t do those jobs” makes it all better don’t you know, someone else’s fault.
This is the type of thing that will not be easy to undo, this mess has been years in the making.
The whole system in Mexico is such a disaster I don’t think we could have helped them. They have a caste system with very rich light skinned (Spanish descendants) at the top of power and money, the darker the skin the lower they are on the rung. The rich do not want a middle class, they want no way for those at the bottom to work their way up. The only way up in their system is through criminal activities. It is just a mess. They do have resources, and possibly if we had not let their poor migrate in mass numbers at some point they might have had a revolution and ended up better off. Mexico has had many revolutions with no real improvement though so who knows. No way to know but I think we were better off to keep out of that mess, we should have secured our borders and enforced our laws.
When we enforced our immigration laws Mexican men came up here and worked agriculture jobs legally, but they were temporary/seasonal jobs. I know of several that went back and forth and used the money earned here to build a business in Mexico. When we stopped enforcing our laws most stopped going back and brought their families up here. It is our fault we decided we would allow our politicians to ignore the laws.
If we had stuck with enforcement I think Mexico would have gradually changed with the workers going back to invest their money in business. It was headed in the right direction.
I’m going to pile on and say I meet plenty of illegal Mexicans who do stone work and they are expensive and still demand cash and make you feel lucky to hire them.
Hillbilly Elegy tells about the guy who lost his decent job because he didn’t like getting up in the morning but blamed the Obama economy. I know lots of them just like that.
You didn’t add that most of them are far better educated, at any given level of wage rate, than our fellow citizens. Especially in math.
Here is what people forget. For those wiling to accept that wage it is not “peanuts”. Compared to wages where they lived it is quite generous.
Sure, it’s not peanuts to them. Wage arbitrage. Always the plan, if the ‘market’ won’t pay wages for the locals, import workers, innovate or offshore. Sometimes it’s cheaper to automate McDonald’s or bring in the third world.
When you have to speak Spanish as a foreigner to get a job in a kitchen or construction site, you’ll find that only foreigners are hired.
// As to Americans doing that work at those pay scales - yep, they would do it, if we actually stopped paying them to sit home and play video games. //
-and- #47 // Or they fill in labor gaps caused by people who could work deciding not to work. ...As much as I think there should be penalties for the hiring of illegal immigrants I know the main reason besides wages such crews are hired. It is that bosses really do want [*need*] people who will work and get the job done. //
To those points (also #50 & #55): A while back I came across an interesting agribusiness study from (I think) South Carolina dealing with the very real problem of finding and keeping workers to harvest crops — jobs that obviously absolutely MUST be done, and in timely, reliable manner. Ads were placed, but very few responses from legal workers came in, even with above minimum wage. Then, of the few who were found to work, few actually showed up, and none kept at it.
As you point out, why should a person work when he can indeed get paid for sitting home playing video games? That needs to change in order to fill the many hard jobs that most Americans are — in truth — unwilling to do.
I’ll see if I can come across that study again & provide link.
About the study:
The above article is about this Bloomberg (i.e. pro-illegal immigration) report, which is not what I’d read, but is similar:
http://www.renewoureconomy.org/sites/all/themes/pnae/nc-agr-report-05-2013.pdf
Similar stories from 2011:
2011 NYT article: http://mobile.nytimes.com/2011/10/05/us/farmers-strain-to-hire-american-workers-in-place-of-migrant-labor.html
// It didn’t take me six hours to realize I’d made a heck of a mistake,” Mr. Harold said, standing in his onion field on a recent afternoon as a crew of workers from Mexico cut the tops off yellow onions and bagged them.
Six hours was enough, between the 6 a.m. start time and noon lunch break, for the first wave of local workers to quit. Some simply never came back and gave no reason. Twenty-five of them said specifically, according to farm records, that the work was too hard. //
Don’t waste your time looking for the study - business owner after business owner can confirm the same thing.
I suggested to a buddy of mine who’s a plumbing contractor that he hire high school kids to work with him - pay twice minimum wage (which means nearly twice what they could make anywhere else) and he would be flooded with applications. He was having bad luck with the slightly older kids being fed to him from the trade schools (i.e., dumb, lazy, stealing).
Silence. Hell, to learn plumbing from a Master, I would have worked for free in high school...but I guess things are different now.
The younger people of this country USED TO do the that work, and without issue - today’s generation can do the same...and God willing, they will under Trump.
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