Cheap labor? In my neck of the woods the majority of high-priced cars are driven by Indian tech workers. Although I wonder if they are making so much more money than they did back in India that even though they can’t afford the $80,000 car - they think the can?
I worked on oil rigs in the summer in college. I ended up blowing my first paycheck! (I was better with the rest of them.)
You’re right they’re not cheap labor. I live in a small town in one of the poorest counties in Pennsylvania. You shop in the local grocery stores and you see recent immigrants in their native garb or jabbering away in some foreign language. They make their purchases and go out to the parking lot where they get into top of the line, brand new, Mercedes, BMWs, or some other $50,000-100,000+ status symbol. Meanwhile, locals, whose families have lived here for generations, drive rusted pickup trucks or other wrecks and hunt or fish to feed their families some protein. Opioid abuse is rampant. Some of these Americans live in little more than shacks out in the woods. It isn’t because they’re lazy; in many instances their work in the coal mines and steel mills is gone thanks to the policies of the Republican and Democrat administrations, particularly Obama’s. They’ve been forgotten as the government promotes the interests of big business and immigrant rights organizations. The American dream is now for the immigrants driving the big, expensive cars who work in high tech in Pittsburgh and live in the country.