Home health aides, janitors, building cleaners, maids, housekeepers, childcare workers, and food preparation roles, construction laborers, truck drivers, delivery service workers, cooks, waitstaff, bartenders, and hotel staff, farmworkers, ranch managers, and agricultural laborers, taxi drivers, nursing assistants, and cashiers, among others.
President Donald Trump has insisted that immigrants are criminals. But a brief analysis of the work they do tells a different story.
Immigrants perform such diverse jobs that without their existence this country would come to a standstill. The illusory idea that American citizens, white people, would take those jobs is laughable.
The romantic notion that immigrants only come looking for a better life doesn’t fully explain this phenomenon. They come to the United States because there are families, businesses, and companies that hire them.
Take the construction sector, for example.
George Carrillo, co-founder and CEO of the Hispanic Construction Council, clarifies many of these points.
“The people that you see building our homes, the ones that are paving the roads and our bridges, 50% of that skilled workforce is Hispanics,” he said.
“We estimate somewhere between 700,000 to 1 million people. What people really need to understand is we have a workforce shortage in this country, period. Now, if you take out about a million Hispanics that are undocumented, it would devastate the construction industry, and not just that. Critical infrastructure, clean drinking water, sewage. Who’s going to build our homes? We’re about 4.5 million homes behind. All roads lead to construction. If we fail, the broader economy and our way of life dramatically suffers.”
As for the idea that Americans will take those jobs, Carrillo has a logical answer.
“I think that if Americans really wanted to do the work, then they would be doing it. And the other thing is, too, we have a historical, low unemployment rate. So we don’t have enough people in this country to do what we need to do. We can’t just shut the door and say America can be self-sustainable. We’re just not there yet.”, he adds in an interview with NPR.
Many analysts have increasingly come to the idea that all these immigration operations have a political reason, rather than an economic or social one.
“So let’s talk about a real policy. Let’s talk about a work visa for construction workers that can stay here. You know, for undocumented individuals, why don’t we build a work visa, with restitution, make them taxpayers, help out the construction industry?”, he says.
