Originally Posted by John1234

I am a Painting Contractor from the Pan Handle of Florida.
I had a small business that always struggled but managed to survive.
Hurricane Ivan struck our area. The majority of the country never realized how bad it was due to Katrina coming next and all of the coverage it got.
There was hardly a single dwelling in our city that was undamaged.

Before we were even finished clearing up our own properties and getting things back in order to conduct business, Illegal Mexican workers started flooding into our area by the tens of thousands.
Normally the going rate of pay for a top of the line hourly painter in our area was about $16 a hour. For contractors it was about $3.00 per square foot for a high class home (Interior).

After they were here for a few months, you just could not get any work.
They were charging so little that the only way to compete vs them was to hire them as your crew.
Most of my competition did just that. They hired on illegal Mexican workers for 7 or 8 dollars an hour. While i am paying 16 dollars an hour.

They fixed our city in about 1 year. When it should have been 4 years of really good paying work.
Ok so that helped the city I guess.
But where does it leave the construction workers that live here?

Once my business collapsed, I tried to get a job at one of the larger construction sites.
But i don't speak Spanish. You cant get a job if you don't speak Spanish.
Not even for 8 dollars an hour.
All of the foremen were Spanish.
(Keep in mind that I had never even seen a Mexican before. There are no Mexican permanent residents here.)

They had another effect.
The combination of the legal American workers, the illegal Mexican workers, and the people with destroyed homes in our area... flooded out our housing market and drove property values through the roof.
So the builders went crazy. They used the illegal work force to mass build high rises all over the place.
Now all the Mexicans have left. Along with the Legal work force that came here.
And thousands of places became vacant.
The housing crisis hits us.
So for the rest of the country the housing crisis just has a minimal impact.
For my area, we got double slammed.
Here its more like a full out Depression for the work force, instead of a recession.
Keep in mind that painters don't typically get unemployment. So we are not part of the statistics.
You can always add a few million construction workers any time you see those unemployment statistics.
We have tens of thousands of vacant units here.
Nothing to build.

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I hold nothing against the Mexican people. And this is my governments fault, not theirs.
But what are people like me supposed to do?
We cant compete with their prices because we cant live on that.
Since the construction industry in the south is already mostly an unregulated cash business, they really are not that different from us, i suppose.
BUT... WE LIVE HERE.

Something has to be done so that these people at least ask for the same pay that we get.
I have mixed views on how to handle it.
But the current method does not work.

I heard President Bush say something similar to this once, "We need them because Americans dont want to do those jobs".
Man i nearly exploded.
Can he really be that dumb and detached from our society?
Or do the super elite rich just not understand?
We want the jobs very badly.
We simply can not compete with the wage they are willing to work for.
What ever happened to democracy?
Supply and Demand?
If Americans wont do a job, then the American way to handle it is to pay more.
Our system corrects itself.
If peope dont want to cut the heads off of chickens for 8 dollars an hour... then Duh!, pay 9 dollars an hour and raise the price of chicken.
Dont screw over the American people by opening the flood gates so that the rich people wont have to pay a little more for their workers.

Even if we make them citizens, its like starting the whole African American thing over again. It took us decades to balance things out with them in the work force and many still feel we have a long ways to go.
It would take us decades to balance out all of these Illegals into the work force where they are not going to be a cheaper work force than the American citizens that were already here.

Is this what they mean by competing globally?

I am too good a person to want to round them up and send them back like criminals.
Most of them are hard working good people just trying to do what they can in life.
But we must secure our borders and send at least some of them back.

I also wonder what effect it has on our housing market when millions of illegal migrant workers are roaming around the country in groups of thousands.
You see, its not only home buyers that control the housing market.
If 10 or 20 thousand people flood into an area because of a new job opportunity, granted they might live 20 to a house, but its still playing hell with the market.

I want to do the right thing by these people as a human being.
But whatever it is we are doing right now is surely not the answer.
Its going to take someone smarter than me to know what to do though, thats for sure.