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.

1069

Wow. It sounds like learning Spanish could've really saved your arse.
You can learn it for free. Just go sit in on Spanish classes at your local community college. Tell them you're not enrolled for credit, you're just auditing the course.
Then if this sort of thing ever happens again, you'll be prepared.

__________________
"I do love this idea that one can scream and scream and scream, with that utopia just one more scream away."
~ Scucca

rivrrat

That whole post, with tons of information and real life experience regarding the negative aspects of illegal workers on an ENTIRE CITY... and all you pull out of it is that he could have learned Spanish?

Please don't tell me you're that oblivious to the problems illegal workers (from anywhere) cause. The problems he spoke of couldn't be solved by him auditing a god damned Spanish class. I mean, was that seriously the only thing that crossed your mind after reading his post?

__________________
Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one word: equality. But notice the difference: while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude.

Monk-Eye

"Struggles"
Are you feeling bitchy today 1069? a bit crass? itchy about adding insult to injury?

Housing construction is mismanaged, hyperinflated, over accellerated, due to cheap illegal immigrant labor.

Complaints that hispanic foremen are sequestering employment away from a myriad of american laborers in favor of like kind has been stated by more than a few witnesses.

A virulent hispanic community exists, who are isolating themselves, adopting illegals, and pursuing an agenda to numerically overtake the US, by undercutting labor, and outbreeding the population.

Strict enforcement of citizenship, of work requirements, and a change in the 14th amendment to allow only children of citizens to become citizens would be ideal.


The worker raids are symptomatic of pursuit for extremes over the means - golden philosophy.

The anarcho capitalists keep exporting manufacturing and infrastructure, ficticiously claiming that better jobs (computer technology - aka telemarketing) in the service sector (menial labor, clerks, over exhonorated secretarial positions, and storefront salesmen) somehow represent real domestic productivity, also, that there are plenty of those jobs to go around.

To anarcho capitalists, assuring domestic productivity is protectionism (depicted by them as foolishness), and its destruction is essential in order to compromise others and exploit extremes for personal gain.

At one time, eventhough these things are less lucrative to the predator elite, continued enhancement of domestic productivity, for self sufficiency, for self improvement, as a principle of means, was an undeniable quality of personal character.

__________________
Hanged Man
Melpomene

Khayembii Communique

Whose fault is it that those workers "can't compete" with these workers? Those that took the lower pay, or those that set up the competition in the first place?

Summerwind

Sounds to me like those that employed the cheap, illegal workers and profited from your loss should be held accountable. I wonder if anyone has ever sued another company for illegally effecting the bottom line of their own company. Seems one should be able to do that just as one could go after them for monopolistic and other illegal behaviors.

1069

Your unapologetic racism is the one facet of you that I've always disliked, Monk-Eye.
I try to overlook it, because I want so much to like you.
I keep hoping that one day you'll just overcome it if we all keep looking the other way, although that is no doubt a futile hope.
You're way too smart to harbor such racist sentiments.

Monk-Eye

"Identity Theft"
Perhaps you are overgeneralizing my position.

I am personally not a forced segregationist, or a supremacist, however, I do support people's self adherence to racial consistency for family, marriage, and children.

When observing race mixing, it seems that a disservice is being rendered, in that, when certain irreversable physical qualities are relenquished through breeding.

Being a member of a disposable society, who would expect otherwise?

In spite of my preference, I feel able to accept people for their personal qualities and am open to diverse inclusion.

The issue raised earlier, is that a socially uninclusive agenda of hispanic job sequestration and outbreeding is being pursued, which prompts reciprocity and self protection.

Summerwind

So you think we should lower our standards to third world for our citizens? What a peach. I personally think we should be forcing the third world and cheap labor practices around the world to climb to our standards if they sell or in anyway produce bits, pieces, or whole products that are sold in the US.

Awesome!

If your a contractor or laborer be prepared to change jobs/careers etc if you think you can always demand top wage for work, because the reality is that the legal and illegal work force in this country will continue to reduce the hourly wage. This has been the reality going back to the Irish, Chinese, and Italian immigrants. You can't depend on wages to stay the same, it's just too idealistic in this world economy. AND YOU CAN STILL WORK IN AMERICA AND PROSPER even if you have to bust you arse for a few years. I don't speak that much Spanish, but I know enough to coordinate some labor with my present position, so I hired someone that could. Let's get creative and stop blaming or insinuating that all is lost in America because of illegals.