From another reader:
Jonah,
I’ve long been in favor of enforcing our borders and have been opposed to any amnesty program on the grounds that rewarding unlawful behavior is never a good idea. In short, my immigration views have not been very “nuanced”. However, I gained a new perspective yesterday after spending the day on an unrelated legal matter with a client who owns runs a construction company. It’s not a big company but it has locations all over the US, which gives my client a pretty broad based understanding of the practical realities for an industry that typically employs a lot of illegal aliens. Here’s what I learned or, in some instances, already knew:
The company requires facially valid I9 documents, so it complies with its obligations under the current immigration laws even though, as a practical matter, most of the work force is made up of illegal aliens. In fact, the EEOC and the INS (or whatever that agency is called today) have consistently the position that an employer who questions or overly scrutinizes facially valid documents is probably engaged in unlawful discrimination because they wouldn’t do the same for an Anglo applicant/employee.
The company pays very well and withholds taxes. Nearly all of the laborer employees make over $30,000 and most make between $50,000 and $70,000 per year for 8 months of work. Most of them go back to Mexico for the winter months and return to the job in early spring. The job requires long hours and hard physical labor, so the employees certainly earn their pay.
The company has hired numerous Anglos and other native born US citizens over the years and has had very little success in retaining them. Most quit after a couple of weeks, citing the demands of the job as the sole reason.
If the illegal immigrant work force is suddenly shut down, the building trades would, for the most part, grind to an immediate halt.
The U.S. has an employment rate that is so low it’s approaching full employment. If we suddenly eliminate 10+ million workers from the workforce, where are the replacements going to come from?
At the end of the day and despite the inflammatory rhetoric from both parties on this issue, the practical realities of our current workforce must be addressed.
Sorry for tapering off at the end, but I don’t have any great insight into how to resolve these problems. I just wanted to say that they exist and we ignore them at our economic peril.
I’ve long enjoyed your work. Keep it up.