USA Today: Growing number of Americans among day laborers

Emily Bazar of USA Today offers "Unemployed U.S.-born workers seek day-labor jobs" (link):

Growing ranks of U.S. citizens are heading to street corners and home improvement store parking lots to find day-labor work usually done by illegal immigrants.

The trend is most pronounced in regions where hot construction markets have collapsed, says Abel Valenzuela Jr., a professor of urban planning at the University of California-Los Angeles.

"You had many, many unemployed construction workers who found themselves without any permanent or stable work," he says. "Some of them have gone on to seek employment by standing on street corners alongside immigrant workers."

..."It's becoming more ethnically diverse. On the corners, I've seen white people, I've seen African Americans and a lot of Mexican Americans," says Pablo Alvarado, executive director of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network (NDLON). "When unemployment benefits run out, I expect to see more."

...Citizens are replacing immigrant day laborers who had trouble finding work and returned to their home countries, says Antonio Bernabe, senior organizer of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles (CHIRLA).

An earlier study from Valenzuela found that about 75% of day laborers are illegal aliens, although there are regional variations. That means that doing immigration enforcement would open up more jobs for American citizens. However, the last two groups and the Department of Homeland Security itself don't really have much of an interest in doing that.

Using this article as a starting point would be a good way to embarrass a DHS official over their failure to enforce the law in order to reduce U.S. unemployment.

Comments

just wait until the hispanic day laborers start to attack the American day workers and some will get KIA.