When a future administration someday deals sternly with this nation-dividing issue of illegal immigration, they’ll need to begin by removing the job thieves imported here by cartels from South America and elsewhere. They’ll also have to heavily fine, if not bankrupt, some of the companies hiring these illegals.

They must start the deportations with construction workers here illegally in the U.S. According to conservative estimates, 25-30% of all construction workers in the U.S. are illegal immigrants. That thirty percent amounts to 3.3 million illegal workers in construction alone.

People who empathize with the imported job thieves misplace their sympathy at the expense of their friends, neighbors, kin, and themselves. Save your sympathy for people who are from here, please.

The “latecomers” don’t get a pass on the law because they have a sob story and are from a foreign country.

They need to be blamed for depressing wages across the board and for further dividing this nation racially, fined (many of these grifters are driving new trucks which many Americans could never afford, so they are getting paid and their cash sent back to foreign countries could be taxed at 80% to dissuade the job thievery), and deported.

They need to pay back all U.S. government funds they’ve wrongly slurped up as if they somehow deserve them when people who are from this country legally and all their lives cannot make a decent living.

In my town -- “Smokytown,” which aint so smoky for decades since two-thirds of the industrial jobs were exported -- mafias control redevelopment of the city. They prefer mostly Latin American crews who can’t tell you the time if you ask them in English.

I didn’t know this until I asked a crew the time early one summer morning last year and three out of four muchachos didn’t even comprehend “Do you have the time?” while I pointed at my wrist in a common hand gesture.

So I said, “Que hora es?” while still pointing at my wrist and the three looked to their foreman (I suppose) and asked Que hora? He responded initially whilst looking at his phone that the time was two hours later than it was, then corrected himself and gave the right time, all in English, thankfully.

“They’re not sending their best people…” someone once said to great scorn. They are not sending the cream of the crop, and I’m not even sure they are sending mostly adults to the U.S. to steal jobs, from what I have seen in this city.

And it sure aint just about sending men to take men’s jobs in construction and elsewhere -- I have seen Latina women on some of these crews and frankly, they tend to be very short, overweight women so I am not sure how handy or skilled they could be.

Why are we doing this? Why are we allowing our own workforce to be undercut in wages and salaries by lower-achieving, lower skilled immigrants who came here illegally, however long ago? Do we worship rich people so much -- since only they stand to make out on the current deal -- that we allow ourselves to be sold into abject slavery, over a bogus racial grudge trip?

And teens stealing the rightful jobs of U.S. adult citizens? Why not? It aint just for the pork processing industry pal, and it’s what’s for dinner. Like it or not.

Back to construction, and the construction trades -- work I was raised doing and which kept me alive over the past decades as a freelance writer. When we charge these illegals money out of their own pockets to be peaceably returned to their point of entry country (be it Mexico, Canada, or another), when we first cut off whatever public benefits they get and shut down construction jobsites on which they work (and the companies that employ them), we the people will start to see the juice.

It will pave the way for much development (due to more people being able to buy homes and other stuff), a tighter job market, and higher wages for U.S. workers in construction and in every trade.

We need to treat these folks who aid and abet these invading job thieves as what they are -- traitors. They don’t believe in fairness or the American Way of fair competition. They must be labeled, prosecuted, and scorned. They must be made to forfeit their ill-gotten gains, which were based on job theft.

These traitors must pay for what they have done to tear this country apart and encourage an invading workforce of lawbreakers. All government pensions for such folks should be rescinded and when possible, the guilty should have to pay back pension monies already received.

There’s an oft-repeated lie in the construction trade press that goes like this: Why does construction have such trouble keeping good workers? The answer is the sector hasn’t any trouble retaining good workers, they just generally don’t really care about their workers.

Many employers want to pay their construction workers the equivalent of slave wages, which are not livable wages. People are still paying construction laborers $12-$16 per hour to start, which is a complete insult to those doing hard labor.  (A friend of mine worked for a construction company 40 years ago making $13/hour.)

By my count, construction union wages have even lost 7% to 15% in spending power over the past four decades, due to an inability of the unions to negotiate raises that merely kept pace with inflation!

It's not just a blue-collar depression. Schoolteachers with two master’s degrees and 25 years experience often don’t make $75,000/year, and they are just one white-collar example. Depressing wages in construction, or meat processing, or agriculture and in other sectors, depresses wages overall in an economy. It’s an inescapable fact, for those of us hemmed in by low rates of pay.

But having tens of millions of illegal workers in this nation is not an inescapable fact, it can be changed, and it can be reversed.

So, let’s start by cleaning house in the construction industry, then agriculture, then meat processing, and then IT. Enough of the turncoats doing business in our country and rejecting our people for the work, preferring to hire foreigners. Make them pay heavily.

J.B. Pensyltucky, a pen name, is a writer with decades of experience working in construction.

Image: Unsplash