A few observations from industries I am familiar with from my career.
There are a lot of commercial construction jobs that have a periodic work basis. Guys work at a craft for 35 weeks out of a 52 week year. Less in recession time.
These jobs require fit people that can work physically for a full work day as loafing is obvious when you are on a scaffold with five others.
They often are dirty jobs, cumbersome personal protective gear and are subject to bad weather, heat and cold. They also require compliance with elaborate safety protocol, require periodic drug tests and regular attendance without making a lot of false injury claims. They often pay a lot more than the local warehouse or delivery truck job for the same area — say double.
In many areas there are many more immigrants or first generation kids that will do the work meeting that standard than the locally youth who want to smoke grass, stay clean, miss work one day a week, get on work-comp, sell meth and not have to follow requirements.
This is one of the markets for immigrant employees but few illegals in most states in the last three years due to employers being able to easily e-verify for SSN.
I think that meat packing, feed yards, recycling and trash work, reclamation, shipping and the like hire a lot of illegals with the corporations turning a blind eye to the issue.
There really are jobs that we can’t get able bodied young americans to apply or qualify for and yes, these jobs are paying top dollar for their area.
My wife likes to talk about the freshman intern she interviewed a few years ago. He thought if he took a major in Healthcare Administration he could run a hospital after he finished college and had about two years under his belt with that undergrad degree. The concept of learning an industry from the bottom rung and using schooling to jump you through the first twenty years in ten is a lost understanding.
Anecdotal information is fine, but here are the facts:
Among the findings:
Of the 472 civilian occupations, only six are majority immigrant (legal and illegal). These six occupations account for 1 percent of the total U.S. workforce. Moreover, native-born Americans still comprise 46 percent of workers even in these occupations.
Many jobs often thought to be overwhelmingly immigrant (legal and illegal) are in fact majority native-born:
Maids and housekeepers: 51 percent native-born
Taxi drivers and chauffeurs: 58 percent native-born
Butchers and meat processors: 63 percent native-born
Grounds maintenance workers: 64 percent native-born
Construction laborers: 66 percent native-born
Porters, bellhops, and concierges: 72 percent native-born
Janitors: 73 percent native-born
There are 67 occupations in which 25 percent or more of workers are immigrants (legal and illegal). In these high-immigrant occupations, there are still 16.5 million natives — accounting for one out of eight natives in the labor force.
High-immigrant occupations (25 percent or more immigrant) are primarily, but not exclusively, lower-wage jobs that require relatively little formal education.
In high-immigrant occupations, 59 percent of the natives have no education beyond high school, compared to 31 percent of the rest of the labor force.
Natives tend to have high unemployment in high-immigrant occupations, averaging 14 percent during the 2009-2011 period, compared to 8 percent in the rest of the labor market. There were a total of 2.6 million unemployed native-born Americans in high-immigrant occupations.
Some may think that native-born workers in high-immigrant occupations are mostly older, with few young natives willing to do such work. But 34 percent of natives in these occupations are age 30 or younger, compared to 27 percent of natives in the rest of labor force. It is worth remembering that not all high-immigrant occupations are lower skilled. For example, 36 percent of software engineers are immigrants as are 27 percent of physicians.
A number of politically important groups tend to face very little job competition from immigrants (legal and illegal). For example, just 10 percent of reporters are immigrants, as are only 6 percent of lawyers and judges and 6 percent of farmers and ranchers. Estimates of Illegal Immigrants
We find that there are no occupations in the United States in which a majority of workers are illegal immigrants.
Illegal immigrants work mostly in construction, cleaning, maintenance, food service, garment manufacturing, and agricultural occupations. However, the overwhelming majority of workers even in these areas are native-born or legal immigrants.
Although illegal immigrants comprise a large share of workers in agriculture, farm workers are only a tiny share of the total labor force. Consistent with other research, just 5 percent of all illegal immigrants work in agriculture.