Why there is illegals doing the work now where I live

[NesuD]

....and its people like that that deserve to be punished.

The only way to stop illegal immigrants is to go after the people hiring them. You can have bills like the one in AZ, you can build walls, but no matter what you do, if there are jobs for them, they'll be here.

If he doesn't like the "hoops he has to jump through" to hire a kid, he should lobby his politicians to change it. Not liking the law is no excuse to break it.

The real problem is that there are laws governing both but they are selectively enforced. I have to seriously call into question the fact that hiring a local kid to work on a farm is so tightly regulated that it is almost impossible to do in a financially feasible manner. It is the same for illegals but for some reason those laws aren't enforced. What is that? Something stinks and I am pretty sure we all know what it is.

 

[Apple Of Sodom]

car insurance $1200/year
gas $300/year

So, work every summer, save $5000 without spending ANYTHING beyond the car and gas.
my top 5 engineering school was $28k/year when I started.

No wonder no white kids work. Your life must not be worth much if you're willing to work all four of your high school summers away to pay for 1/30th of your cost of post secondary education (5 years-- only 32% make it out in 4 years where I go-- because it's that hard).

Oh and I worked there for a year, asked for a raise, manager said "why should I give you a raise, I can just hire another mexican for even less". So then I quit.

The payoff of the school I went to? I'm one of the few people that have a job as I'm graduating in this recession; but even then only 28% last term had offers in hand as they walked out the door.

Like I said, it was not worth working 4 summers to be $5000 less in debt. My job I'm starting at in May I'll be making $60k/year with 2x$3000 in bonus options to top it off.

First off, no one really cares what college you go to or how hard it is. We've all been there in one form or another.

You needed a car? What about the bus, walking, riding a bike?

I've been working since I was 14. My first job was making $8/hour, part time. My jobs fluctuated between minimum wage and up to about $35/hour while I was in college.

Then I started working more, and earning more. For 2009 I made right around $350,000 and that really makes what I earned when I was 14 years old look like shit...a drop in the bucket. I mean, why did I work at all?

Maybe it gave me a chance to buy a vehicle and be responsible with my money. It gave me a checking account and taught me how to balance a checkbook. It taught me real life budgeting. It taught me that I have to work for things if I want them. It taught me about pecking order and social interaction at work. It made me who I am today.

The dollars I earned when I was in high school are really nothing compared to what I make now. I made more in the last 2 years of my life then I did in the preceding 13 years. But I learned about hard work, dedication, and busting your ass for what you want...and I wouldn't trade that for the world. That was worth more than even the money I make now.

You are still a snot-nosed kid who thinks he is too good to do a job. Just as $5.15 an hour is shit pay to you, $66,000 a year is shit pay to me. But guess what? I would do either job if I had to and I wouldn't bitch about not having enough money to buy a fucking video game.

 

[OutHouse]

Oh yes, kids everywhere are lining up for manual labor jobs.

acutally for teenagers finding a job is really difficult.

 

[werepossum]

I had a job at a nursery one summer before I was legal, 14 at the time IIRC. This was back in Florida 1994-ish.....every single person I worked with was Mexican and none of them spoke any English. Guy who owned the nursery worked us like dogs. But even when I was a young buck, there's no way a white boy like me can keep up with a mexican on a shovel, those guys are machines.

So while it may have ramped up over the last decade, in certain areas it's been a huge problem for a long time.

One of the things I did in the early seventies before being old enough to drive was pick tomatoes, so I was in direct competition with Mexican migrant workers. They were indeed excellent workers. Today I am in AEC engineering, and I can testify that most G.C.s will tell you they cannot do without Mexican and/or South American immigrants - they simply work harder than do white or black kids.

However that's not a completely good thing either. One thing unrestrained cheap labor does is lower wages, in a big way. While that's good for productivity, it's not good for someone trying to get a start, or someone who's screwed up and learned no marketable job skills, or someone whose job skills have become obsolete. America's middle class really took off during and after World War II, when blue collar jobs were plentiful and a person with a good work ethic and not much else could become pretty solidly middle class. Due to unrestrained immigration (especially illegal) and rampant outsourcing that is no longer the case; today only a few really outstanding and really hardworking people without job skills can escape poverty.

Government is constantly intruding on our freedoms in the name of making us more healthy. How many more teenagers would be doing healthy manual labor like landscaping or farm work or construction if the market were allowed to establish wages without an artificial influx of cheap unskilled labor? There are no jobs Americans won't do - there are simply no jobs Americans won't do for that wage.

 

[tk149]

OP's story reminds me of a news article I read a few months ago. In the article, several local farmers were interviewed as to why they hire illegals. Their answer was simple. They used to employ teenagers, but now couldn't find anybody but illegals willing to do the work at a wage that let them stay in business.

Due to really crappy market conditions, these farmers were in danger of losing their farms. Not hiring illegals would put them out of business.

It's a bad situation with no easy answer.