When I pulled up the other day, the crew had just poured concrete foundations into the open Altadena area. Two workers were loading equipment into trucks, while the third was hosing fresh cement sitting under the new home.
I asked how things are going and if there is a problem with finding enough workers for the ongoing migrant raid.
“Ah, yes,” said one worker and shook his head. “Everyone is worried.”
The other said that when fresh concrete is poured into this big task, it requires a crew of more than 10 people, which is difficult to get.
“We’re still working,” he said. “But it goes very slowly, as you can see.”
Eight months after thousands of homes were destroyed by wildfires, Altadena is still a way away from major reconstruction, as is the Pacific Pallisade. However, immigrants including the construction industry. And this week’s UCLA Anderson predicted the US Supreme Court ruling, which raised a new fear that “deportation will drain the construction workforce,”
Various estimates show that the construction industry already had an A, where between 25% and 40% of workers are immigrants. Housing shortages become even deeper as deportations slow and tariffs and trade wars make supply narrower and more expensive.
And not only deportation is important, but their threats are said to be Jerry Nickelsberg, senior economist at Anderson forecasting. If undocumented people are afraid to show up to install drywalls, Nickelsberg told me, “It means you’ll finish the house more slowly, which means fewer people will be hired.”
Now, I’m not an economist, but after President Trump promised the nation and promised that we were heading for the “golden age” of America’s prosperity, it may not have been in his best interest to hold the nation down in the nation’s biggest economy.
Especially in many cases, when we have never seen a drop in the promise of food and consumer goods prices, and when labor statistics were so embarrassing, he fired the head of the Labor Statistics Bureau and replaced her with something else.
I only had one economics class in university, but I don’t remember the section on the values of only criminals, including construction workers, carbohydrates, seniors, housekeepers, nannies, gardeners and other offenders.
Now, please tell me my email address. the
And why am I telling you that?
Because I have experienced that some of you have reached out to feel foamy, foamy, itchy and reach out to you and that illegal means illegal.
So go ahead and email me if necessary. But here is my response:
We’ve been lying for decades.
People come across borders because we want them. We almost ask them. And by us, we mean a number of industries led by conservatives and Trump supporters, including agribusiness, hospitality, construction and healthcare.
Why do you think so many people to eliminate undocumented workers? Because they don’t want to admit that many of their employees are undocumented.
In Texas, Republican lawmakers can’t stop demonizing immigrants, and the introduction of bills for dozens to mandate the wider use of e-verify. but
why?
Because tough stories are lies and hypocrisy is no longer shamed. It’s a corrupt environment where no one has the integrity to acknowledge that part of the Texas economy is partly supported by an undocumented workforce.
In California, at least, he begged Trump for almost everything in June to facilitate the attacks that had affected businesses at farms, construction sites, restaurants and hotels. Instead, do an honest work on immigration reform, they pleaded, so we can meet the needs of our labor in a more practical and humane way.
It makes sense, but politically, it’s not about TV ads raiding the streets, recruiting ice commandos and arresting Tamale vendors.
The Los Angeles Regional Chamber of Commerce CEO said small businesses, restaurants, moms and pops have been hit particularly hard. Those who survived the pandemic were once again kneeled in the attack.
With the Supreme Court decision, Salinas told me, “I think there’s a lot of fear that this will come back more vigorously than before.”
From a broader economic perspective, massive deportation is meaningless. It’s clear in particular that Trump is not the violent criminal he continues to talk about.
Giovanni Peri, director of the UC Davis Global Migration Center, said he is in the midst of a similar demographic transformation to that of Japan, addressing the challenges of aging and restrictive immigration policy.
“We will lose nearly a million Americans each year over the next decade, simply because of aging,” Peri told me. “We have a very large elderly population, which… requires a lot of services in home healthcare (and other industries), but there are less and less workers to do these types of jobs.”
Dowell Myers, A. has been studying these trends for years.
“The numbers are simple and easy to read,” Myers said. Every year, the ratio of workers to retirees decreases and continues. This means that even as a number of balloons for retirees, we are heading towards a serious shortage of workers paying for Social Security and Medicare.
If we really wanted to stop immigration, Myers said, “We should send all the ice workers to the border. But if you’re going to take 10 and 20 years of people here uproot, there are also extreme social and economic costs.”
Despite the risk of the attack, three men embraced hope for work where workers were still gathering. Two of them told me they had legal status. “But there’s very little work,” Gavino Dominguez said.
The third one he said was undocumented, circled the parking lot and was left to serve the contractors.
General contractor Humberto Andredo loaded concrete and other supplies into trucks. He said he lost a scary employee for a week and another for two weeks. They were desperate and came back because they had to pay the bill.
“The California housing shortage was already terrible before the fire, but now it’s getting 10 times worse,” he says, representing a developer whose Altadena rebuild project was temporarily slower after a visit from ICE agents in June.
“It’s more than pissing these people to slow or shut down work sites. There will be fewer people trying to start a project,” Harris said as building permits are beginning to flow.
Harris said most people in the office have legal status. “But if the shovel doesn’t hit the ground, the costs are all borne by everyone, slowing down the rebuilding of LA.”
There are many uplifts on the road to the golden age of prosperity.
