Back in the early 2000's, if I remember the time frame correctly, while living in Tennessee, there was a labor shortage in the state and in particular the larger cities. There were a number of news reports about the shortage and one that was interesting was a restaurant in Nashville was having difficulty hiring and keeping a dish washer. The restaurant had to pay a college student $10.00 an hour to take the job. At that time that was a pretty good hourly rate for that area. Granted there were no benefits but for a college student it paid more money than a lot of other service industry jobs. It wasn't too much later that the city was flooded with illegals who worked for a lot less an hour than a legal citizen would accept and a lot of legal citizens lost jobs.
About 8 years ago, while still living in Tennessee, we had to have a new roof on our house. We contracted with a roofer to have the work done. The guy doing the roofing work for the contractor had been a roofing contractor himself just year earlier. All his competition laid off their legal citizen workers and hired illegals. They were paying less than what a citizen would work for and were able to underbid him because he refused to hire illegals, employing only citizens that cost more in labor. His business folded as he refused to hire illegals.
I worked in real estate for a couple years in the late 80's. When I toured new construction, the workers building the new homes were American citizens. That all changed in the early 2000's when illegals started flooding the area. The only legal citizens on the work sites were the contractor and his foreman and the electricians and plumbers because they required licensing which was very difficult for an illegal to obtain. All these jobs for legal citizens were lost because the illegals work for less money.
They aren't doing jobs Americans won't do, they are working jobs Americans won't do for the wage being offered. Pay a decent wage and Americans will do the work. Of course that will mean the product/service will cost more and that is unacceptable because everyone wants everything as cheap as they can possibly get it. That is why nearly everything in the stores are made in China.
The argument that illegals are only doing jobs Americans won't do is just to justify the questionable morality of people who are willing to let illegals come into the country so they can be exploited for their willingness to work for lower wages.
My tirade is getting a bit long but one more observation. When I started working for the State of Tennessee, the people that cleaned the offices were Americans. The contractors discovered that illegals worked for a lot less and suddenly there were no more Americans cleaning the building. A lot of American citizens lost jobs to illegals because of greed by employers and Americans demanding cheaper products and services.
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