I have to say that Jamie Wilson has just been clearing the fences recently. Here’s her latest:
“Americans just won’t do these jobs.” That phrase infuriated me from the first time I heard it. I knew it was a lie. I had done the tobacco work myself. My brothers had. Every teenager we knew had. Every adult performed the hard labor that kept the region alive. Americans didn’t suddenly lose their work ethic. The jobs were taken from them — not by immigrants directly, but by American employers who built a business model on illegal labor and by a federal government that looked the other way for forty years.
What Americans “won’t do” are jobs that have been made illegal in everything but name — jobs where wages have collapsed to exploit desperation, where safety standards are ignored, where workers are paid off the books, where insurance and taxes are bypassed, and where living conditions violate every regulation on the books. When the floor is lowered that far, legal workers cannot enter the market at all. That isn’t laziness. That’s math.
And her supporting arguments are terrific. Read the whole article.
I remember when #2 Son was looking for some minimum-wage work back when he was in his late teens. At the time, he was living in Dallas, and when I asked how things were going, work-wise, his response was: “I just can’t compete with all the Mexicans who are willing to work well below the minimum wage.”
Eventually he quit that, and fortunately found his niche in online gaming quality control, but had to move down to Austin, enduring a few years of contract work — chicken and feathers income — before he finally found a full-time job at a company which was later bought out and became a division of Sony.
And I know that I published a stupid article on the topic of illegal alien workers a while back, and I cringe when I think of it. (And yes, I was crucified in the Comments by y’all, and deservedly so. I don’t know what I was thinking.)
Anyway, I see that as ICE is starting to do their job and deporting illegals, American workers are benefiting greatly.
So I guess they were prepared to to “those jobs”, despite the lies uttered by the Democrats over the years.
There is another side to this. We recently tried to hire some local high school kids to do some yard clean up work. They wanted $ 35.00 an hour!!!! Maybe that’s because of where we live. Their parents thought it was a reasonable wage for the work. We passed.
The problem with the high schoolers is that they’ll spend a large part of that $35 hour fooling around on their mobiles or otherwise screwing off.
Math time. Back in the 70’s and 80’s I mowed yards as a teenager. Looking at my yard now, back then I would have charged roughly $20 bucks. It would have taken me and my brother ~2 hours to mow and edge. Since our equipment was old and paid off, the $20 covered gas and then us. So say $2 in gas, then $18 divided by two kids for two hours of work, that gives a grand total of $4.50 per hour when minimum wage was $3.35. We were doing good back then.
Today I could pay a service $35 to mow my yard. A ratty old truck pulls up with trailer loaded with high end gear and 4 illegals. They all hop off and finish the yard in an hour. I’d say the service takes half that fee off the top to cover gear, gas and overhead. That’s probably fair given the high end equipment, easily. That leaves $17.50 divided by four grown men for one hour of work. That’s $4.37 per hour wages, less than what I was making in 1980. Also well below minimum wage.
A quick Google check, that $20 in 1980 is worth roughly $80 today. Now, do I want to spend $80 to have my yard mowed? Hell no. But I’d gladly pay some local teens $50 to mow it. Except that they can’t really compete against 4 illegals willing to work for half of the minimum wage. So I mow it myself. But yeah, used to mowing yards all summer was teenager work for beer money, now it’s a professional business that relies on illegals getting paid less than min wage under the table. Get rid of the illegals, charge the real going rate, and put local teens back to work.
I remember awhile back when ICE cleared out a meatpacking plant. There were something like 1200 applications for the jobs that were opened up by the raid.
What happens down here in DFW where I live is you’ll need a new roof, or a floor, or an addition. The contractor shows up, flags on the truck, flags on the brochures, good ol’boy. Then the mexican sub shows up, who may or may not be a legal business, but usually is, and he has a crew of illegals. He’ll be the only English speaker in the bunch.
I had a concrete pad poured for a spa. The contractor was a black dude, about my age. He had two mexicans digging and building the forms. He said he tried over and over to help black kids in his community get started in a field that kept a house over his head, and sent his kids to school. He’d never been without work. He said they’d last 1/2 a day. The work is too hard.
My neighbors fence blew over in a storm. He hired a beer bellied white contractor to replace it. He had a crew of kids that seemed right out of high school. A paleface and a few dot indians. It took them three weeks. The fence looked like boiled dogshit. Meanwhile, another neighbor had a contractor like above, with a three mexican crew. They were done in a few days and the fence was a masterpiece.
I have no answers.
Yes you do, and it’s like mine.
At our Florida house we had a 4 year old drain field fail and the health dept was twisting the screws and gave us 15 days to fix it, or face a $100 a day fine.
I contacted 3 legit companies and all of them were in the $18k-$20k range and couldn’t get to it for a month.
Contacted a mexican dood someone told me about. He charged $8k, had 15 mexicans on site the next day and 3 days later the job was done.
I ran an architecture business in Cape Coral, FL for 20 years and the costs of licensure, regulations, fees and codes were constantly increasing as well as everything else to where I shut the whole operation down, laid off my employees, terminated the office lease and started working as a sole proprietor out of my home office. I made less money but I also spent less money.
20 years ago we moved to the woods in Indiana and I still do architecture work but do it only for cash, I pay no taxes, fees, etc. I make less money but I spend much less, and all of the money I earn is mine alone. Our home and everything else is paid for and we are debt free.
Did I describe a picture you can see?
Whenever anyone mentions “Work Americans won’t do”, be sure to tell them the other half of that sentence should be “at that price.”
Every wage and salary in America has a floor these same people will not go below, whether they are Senators and Congressmen, TV News Readers who think that they are somehow qualified to say stupid stuff on the air, Lawyers, Doctors, and Business Executives. If a lawyer is yapping about work Americans won’t do, ask him or her if they would carry an action for a client through the trial verdict for $5,000. When they get snuffy, remind them that construction or Garden care are semi-skilled tasks and someone willing to do it for under $5.00 per hour, they are likely not skilled.
I only hope there are sufficient numbers of native born Americans available to fill those jobs who can do hi-tech things like read a tape measure. /sarc
There have been millions of young Americans so enstupidated by government schools since 1986 that they are unemployable and maybe untrainable, not to mention a lack of work ethic.
It’s the same in most any field, really.
In software development, where I work(ed) for 30 years, wages haven’t really gone up in 20 years, if you ask for a raise you can expect to be replaced with a cheap guy working from some offshore location in India or Romania.
4 of them for the cost of employing you, and it only takes 3 of them to do the same amount of work.
Adjusted for inflation, I was making LESS in 2024 than I did in 1999…