Construction Bosses Complain Trump Will Stop Them From Hiring Illegals
(www.breitbart.com)
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And? Am I supposed to care? Not to sound like one of the socialist retards on reddit, but construction "bosses" typically fall into one of two categories from my understanding. Good, actual construction bosses, and greedy morons who do everything they can to squeeze a few extra bucks into their own pocket.
The Good ones actually hire Americans/and or legal migrants (green card holders who can actually speak English) and their work tends to be much higher quality. The more or less thrive on reputation alone, since they make less per project (given they have to actually pay their employees non slave wages and have to remain at least somewhat competitive). These are the companies that big developers tend to use for their commercial projects and rehabs since quality is better than quantity when it comes to large scale real estate projects like apartments, hotels, shopping centers, etc. You have to actually be able to attract renters/customers to your buildings and if it's all crappy then you'll be getting few to none.
These guys are also the ones that tend to build the nicer "stick built" homes you see these days. The ones that cost millions of dollars and often have completely custom designs. Mostly because the people who can afford to build stuff like that actually want a nice house, not something slapped together that "looks" nice for a few years before falling apart.
On the other hand, you have the ones this article is talking about are the construction equivalent of a slumlord (I mean this literally as this is the type of people slum lords would actually use). They quick fix everything, cut corners everywhere possible, and do everything they can to squeeze out a few extra dollars for their own pocket. That's why everything they build falls apart after a few years. It's quantity over quality. "How many crappy houses can we build in as short as period of time as possible?" They're almost entirely focused on residential housing, because pretty much no commercial sector clients will touch them. They have horrible reputations, but like u/Verumvalet pointed out, they often compete for the lowest big on things like insurance claims, which are notorious for cheaping out as much as possible. They focus almost exclusively on residential buildings since they can pump them out in much higher quantities, so they often put in bids for subdivisions as well.
On the plus side, the latter is overwhelming outnumbered by the former. A quick google search tells you that between 13-30% (depending on the source) of construction workers are illegals. From what I gathered, it seems that roughly 30% of workers are immigrants, but only about 13-15% are illegal, with the rest being legal green card holders. So in reality, this wouldn't really effect anyone in any meaningful way.
The only thing it would really do it cut down on those crappy cookie cutter subdivisions where the houses fall apart after a few years (Think DR Horton Sub contractors). Which wouldn't affect 99% of people because most people with two braincells to rub together wouldn't touch those houses with a 10 foot pole anyway.
Tl;DR: The only ones effected are shady contractors who shouldn't be in business in the first place, who make up a small part of the market.