Housing slump, job losses conflict
Immigrant workers often go uncounted
By Bob Willis, Bloomberg News: Alexandre Tanzi in Washington and Valerie Rota in Mexico City contributed to this story
Published June 4, 2007
The slump in home building, the deepest since 1990, has taken only a modest toll on the U.S. job market. Workers like Francisco Leon may be part of the explanation.
Two years ago, Leon, an undocumented immigrant from Guatemala, had little trouble finding construction work five days a week in northern Virginia. Nowadays, the 22-year-old mainly does odd jobs, often only two days a week.
As Congress debates whether to provide a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, workers like Leon, hired off the books for day labor, are among the first to lose their jobs as home building falters. Such workers often go uncounted as well, meaning official labor statistics don't fully reflect the decline in construction-related jobs.
Will the illegal immigrants stay when the jobs, the reason they came, are gone?
2 comments:
i will tell you what....there are a lot more of them then we are told and as an armed insurgency, fuck voting block, we will have are hands full......of hell !
it is all fun and games untill there is not enough to go around !
that time is near.
I'll tell you where they'll go...straight to the welfare rolls. The undocumented workers are going to be another segment of the population that we will soon be supporting!
I'm sure that public aid will somehow make its way into the new immigration legislation. Once the Hispanics figure out that they too can collect for doing nothing...the middle class will be in even more trouble.
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