So illegals are ONLY doing farm work??
How big a lie is that?
Well, since construction demand is down, there is probably a higher perecnatge of “undocumented workers” in the general category of “food processing” than in any other.
That would include field work, orchard picking, mushroom harvesting, processing fish and meat, and working in chicken factories. Even tobacco harvesting depends on temporary labor.
There are probably a few watching other folks’ kids, but that number has probably dropped during the recession. Demand for nannies and new buildings and decks may plummet. But the demand for food at cheap prices will always remain high.
It’s a huge lie.
I was in commercial printing. I started as a delivery driver and fill in bindery worker 1n 1985. We had one Mexican who swept the floors and filled in with hand folding, etc. The entire shop floor at that time was white. All the pressmen were journeymen types, many with technical school certs and the like. High school kids worked summers learning to feed and handle paper, and some came to work full time for the company.
Well, this mexican guy got his wife a job too. He said he was legal and had docs, so no problem, right? 10 or 12 years later, she is a bindery lead, in charge of hand work. $15 an hour in 1995. She would be calling in 5-10 girls, (all mexican, of course), to hand fold certain jobs on a moments notice. She had 2 names. The name all her friends and family used, and the one management used.
Over the years, as I moved up into middle management, I would train people to operate machines. The first mexicans that were promoted to a new job were well spoken bilinguals.
I noticed fewer and fewer whites on the floor.
Eventually, maybe 10 or 12 years, is all it took, I had to learn enough spanish to communicate with an operator, because they had no english. When the company went out of business in 2004, the entire floor was hispanic. Many good trade jobs.
I saw first hand how wages were depressed and good jobs taken by illegals. That’s printing. Then there’s construction and various other trades.
They’re not stupid, or inferior, or anything else. They want something better, and are willing to cheat and game the system to get it.
There is no down side to being illegal.
About as big as the "they get paid less than min wage." See following from http://usda.mannlib.cornell.edu/usda/current/FarmLabo/FarmLabo-05-20-2010.pdf
Agricultural service operations provided 260,000 workers for the Nation's farms and ranches during the week of April 11-17, 2010. Agricultural service workers in California numbered 100,000 this April, up 2 percent from last year.
The average wages received by agricultural service workers in California and Florida were $10.90 and $10.80 per hour, respectively. Comparable wages in April 2009 were $10.85 per hour in California and $10.30 per hour in Florida.
Now, we ALL know that there are way more questionable 'workers' than this, in CA at least. Hell, as far as I am concerned I am in the 'minority' class, being a white American and all.