I’ve been doing an ad hoc poll of contractors and construction workers in recent months, probing their thoughts on “immigrant” workers and the effect on construction sector.  I’ve talked with laborers, foremen, contracting company owners, electricians, roofers, cement finishers, and others I’ve run into while they were working on various residential, commercial, and utility projects around my home, as well as talking with some pros in the supply side of the business.

They sound as though the tide has turned.

It seems from the tenor of the responses that some of America’s greed-lust affair with cheap foreign construction labor may be fading.  Take for example Kevin, a roofing contractor who last year had four crews working full-time, three of them immigrant crews, and did not do well for it.

“I made over $400,000 last year, and I lost money,” he said.

He hasn’t given up the taxpayer shell game that’s illegal alien labor yet, though.  This year he was smarter — he has one American crew he runs, and one other crew of aliens “who are good.”

It seems the other aliens whom Kevin hired were just not good.  (Let’s just assume they all are illegal aliens, since that should be the obvious go-to assumption in these cases of greedy people coveting slave-wage labor, and also because it’s a verifiable fact that at least one in four construction workers is an illegal immigrant.)  Their work was spotty and shoddy.  They couldn’t bid or properly pick the materials correctly (or at least failed to) and created a lot of hassle and other expenses for Kevin, resulting in him having a boom year in which he lost money.

So instead of giving up that ghost, he pared his muchachos down to one crew.  A true American!

Other contractors aren’t so sanguine.  Rob, a roofing contractor who employs a handful of workers full-time and more in very busy periods, said he’d hire aliens more if conditions were different.

“They come into town with license plates from all sorts of different states, and they’re here one week, and gone the next.  You run into them at the supply store and they say, ‘Talk to jefe,’ because only one guy speaks English. ... I’ve got these Guatemalan boys calling me for work, but I don’t know,” Rob said.

Vito, a strapping laborer in his twenties who looks as though he played tackle in college, was a one-man crew on some utility work for a midsize (100-plus employees) contracting company when I ran into him.  He didn’t grow up in the city doing trades work from a young age, as others did; he grew up out in the country, which has a more conservative outlook in general.

I mentioned how his union’s scale wage had not kept pace with inflation over the last 40 years, and that they were several dollars behind in spending power.  Immigration is depressing wages, I added.

“I’m not surprised,” he said with a frown, shaking his head and peering down an open manhole.  “And you know they’re paying to bring those illegals in, right?”

Image: woodleywonderworks via Flickr, CC BY 2.0.