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The New York Times spins it in their headline, Housing Slump Takes a Toll on Illegal Immigrants. After reading that I was expecting a story on illegal immigrants getting caught in sub prime lending scams. But the story was concerning the slowdown of new construction and how their are no jobs for those that snuck into the country to work on construction sites.

The real reason for the housing industry slowdown not affecting payrolls is that there were very few on the  builders payrolls. I have a friend who is a builder for a large national company. The site he works at has built over 500 homes in the past 4 years. There are 3 employees working at the site. The sales agent, the builder, and a maintenance guy. Every other person working on the site is a contractor, most of them immigrants of one ilk or another.

So when the building company says, we are slow and stopping construction here, only 3 jobs are in jeopardy according to employment statistics. Every other of the hundred or so are contractors, and many if not most are illegals. I am not saying these folks are not getting hurt, I am sure they are. But when the statistical wonks in Washington look at the numbers, all they see are 3 people building and selling hundreds of homes at this site. Political correctness, lax immigration policies, and other factors have made everyone avert their eyes to the true nature of the housing industry in the 21st century.  

The growing presence of illegal immigrants in home building, mostly working for small labor contractors, might help explain why government statistics have recorded only a small decline in construction employment, despite the collapse in residential investment.
“Technically they don’t fire them,” said Myrna Martínez, coordinator for the Fresno office of the American Friends Service Committee, a nonprofit organization working on social assistance projects for immigrant workers. “They just tell them that there is no more work.”
As building jobs have grown scarce, many of the workers who left farm labor a few years ago are returning to where they came from. They can be seen once again hunched in clusters under the unremitting sun, cutting heads of lettuce or slicing off spears of asparagus for minimum wage, clinging to the hope that home building will resume again.  via New York Times.

Related posts:

1. Some Interesting Real Estate Employment Statistics
2. Illegal Housing Crackdown in Quincy Massachusetts Yielding Positive Results
3. Construction Jobs Down 13 Percent From Last Year
4. Housing Starts Down 54.2 Percent For April, 2009