It was the cover story in National Review: in big, bold headlines, GOP, You Are Warned: Immigration could cause a Republican crackup.[1]

            “There’s no issue where the beliefs and interests of the party rank-and-file diverge more radically from the beliefs and interests of the party’s leaders,” wrote Mr. Frum.  Well, maybe not, but if not it is because we have spent such a great deal of time lying to ourselves. 

            There have been complaints about illegal immigrants, usually meaning Hispanics, for as long as I have been interested in politics .  .  . and that’s a long time.  Illegal immigrants were “taking jobs away from Americans” we used to be told.  Nobody says that anymore, because it has become so blatantly obvious that the immigrants are taking jobs that Americans don’t really want.

            I’ll put it bluntly: we have illegal immigration because we want illegal immigration.  Oh, few people would say that they want it, and I’d guess that few people even realize that they want it, but when it comes down to their actions, comes down to voting with their wallets, they vote for it almost every time.

            That lettuce would cost eight dollars a head without illegal immigrants picking the crops is by now an old saw.  What I see in life is the movement of immigrants, primarily Hispanics, into construction.

            I have been involved in concrete construction for most of my adult life; I supply ready-mixed concrete these days, but I started out on the other end of the truck, as a laborer and concrete finisher.  In the 1970s, when I started, all of the finishers were Americans, all of them spoke English.  It was in the late 1980s, by which time I was in concrete production, that I started seeing Hispanic (which I assumed to be Mexican, but some could have come from further south) placing and finishing crews, primarily on larger commercial jobs.  I saw them scatter into the woods one day (near Williamsburg, Virginia) when an unmarked car with three antennae showed up on a jobsite; that pretty much told me that they might be short a green card or two.

            The story wound up being the same, at least up and down the east coast: contractors bidding on commercial jobs wound up using Hispanic labor, or subcontractors using Hispanic labor, because they could get the job done at a lower cost.

            The job I mentioned near Williamsburg was the Williamsburg Waste Water Treatment Plant, a government job.  There were government inspectors around the project the entire time, and they could not have missed the fact that half of the workforce spoke Spanish.  Neither James City County (where the project was located) nor the Commonwealth of Virginia (which paid for a significant part of the project) nor the federal government (which had its own money involved) ever said a thing, because the lowest bidder was doing the job, pretty much on time and on budget.

            Well, it’s 2005 now, and President Bush has been touting an “ownership society,” something that National Review certainly supports and applauds.  In December of 2003, the President signed into law The American Dream Down Payment Assistance Act, which “allows people that earn less than 80 percent of the median income in a region, in a city or a locality, to get a government-sponsored down payment, 10 percent of the value of the house -- or $10,000 or 6 percent of the value of the house to help them purchase their first home.”[2]

            “The U.S. Census Bureau has been measuring home ownership rates since 1965. In the fourth quarter of that year, the home ownership rate was 63.4%. (The home ownership rate is defined as proportion of households that are owners.) The rate has risen slowly but steadily ever since. In the fourth quarter of 2003, the home ownership rate was 68.6%. In those 39 years, the home ownership rate went up 33 times.”[3]

            Clearly we are moving in a positive direction in home ownership.  And that has long been a major economic goal of our society: that’s why the government makes home mortgage interest tax deductible, to encourage buying rather than renting a home.

            But I can tell you one thing: one of the major factors in keeping homes affordable has been the use of Hispanic labor in construction.

            I see it every day: concrete these days is, at least in the northeast, poured primarily by Hispanic crews.  I see basement floors, concrete foundations and garages, in single family homes, in condominiums and apartments, poured every day, and the crews, my customers, are very heavily Hispanic.  They pour late in the afternoon, something it gets difficult to find “American” crews willing to do, and the bosses don’t care because the crew aren’t getting overtime.  Saturdays?  Bring it on!

          If you want to buy a newly built home these days, you can have a fair (though certainly not absolute) amount of confidence that the electrical and plumbing work was done by Americans.  But when it comes to the concrete, the landscaping, the framing, the roofing, the interior drywall and exterior siding, the odds are pretty significant that there will have been some illegal immigrants doing part of that work.
 

            The cost of homes is high in the northeast, at least around the urban areas.  I see townhouses (row houses, really) that are new construction around Conshohocken and East Whiteland township and many of the suburbs around Philadelphia that can cost more than a quarter of a million dollars for 1,700 square feet.  I have seen subdivisions by Toll Brothers around Hockessin, Delaware in which the cheapest homes start at $350,000, and can tell you that they’d cost a lot more if it weren’t for low cost Hispanic labor.

            How low cost?  On the Glenn Beck morning show on WPHT-AM[4] a few weeks ago, the host was discussing how drywall “tapers” were getting about $10.00 an hour, which was what the crew chief made as a “taper” in the mid 1980s!  What I made as a concrete finisher in the late 1970s was not much less than a Hispanic concrete finisher makes today, not adjusted for inflation.

            The fact is that it’s not just lettuce at eight dollars a head that is the problem anymore: Hispanic immigrants, some of whom are legal, and some of whom are not, are so heavily involved in construction that President Bush’s ownership society is dependent upon them.  And while Mr. Frum may believe that the beliefs and interests of the rank-and-file of the GOP are diametrically opposed to illegal immigration, it is precisely that Republican rank-and-file which has benefited from illegal immigration.