I am confused by this assertion. If they are undocumented, wouldn't they be excluded in the stats? And if they aren't included in the stats, shouldn't we expect an artificial increase in worker productivity? If there is a 4:1 undocumented to documented ratio, then that 1 documented person will get "credit" for the work of 5 people! Even if 4 of those people are relatively unskilled, that's still a big boost.

My initial thought about this is that productivity declines because workers wait around a lot, and they wait around because of ballooning administrative overhead. This would also be consistent with what we know about state of the medical industry and academia during the same time period.

If I was to steelman the idea, though; I would guess that removing incentives in the form of higher pay will lower the contributions of everyone involved?

If you think it means the worker is on the books, but is not a citizen, then you get to your question. It should be roughly the same.

If you think it means that the worker was off the books, regardless of citizenship, then you arrive at the other.

My consideration is if I am a cleaner and get my child to help out on a few jobs, my child will not be a documented worker and it will be a transparent boost to my productivity. Indeed, many subcontractors and migrant workers will use family as a cheap way to boost productivity so that they can take more jobs.

I grant that construction may land on the other interpretation. There are usually more rules for that kind of work. (Though, in rural areas? Not sure.)

Thieves, murders, fraudsters, etc

Illegal immigrant doesn't seem especially derogatory for someone who illegally immigrated.

I think it would be better to focus on the fact their felony crime rate is far below the native population than arguing over a pretty tame word used to describe them.

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=illegal+immigr...

Look at the amount of legal immigration:

https://www.migrationpolicy.org/programs/data-hub/charts/ann...

There have been plenty of people who have been in this country without appropriate paperwork historically - they were never called illegals (see above). In fact even now people make differentiations between "visa overstayers" and people who snuck across the border, even though both are technically illegal aliens.

I think you don't have to go far to see the implications.

1. you seem to be implying that during periods of "white" immigration, americans were fine but the public changed their tune when it became south american/asian. However, irish/italian immigrants also received pushback. Specifically, irish were hated because they were catholic, and itlians weren't considered white back then.

2. You can also flip this around to say that as a society, we've gotten more accurate with our wording. Rather than lumping all immigrants (legal and illegal) into one bucket, we take care to point out that we're only against the illegal type of immigration. That seems like a win to me.

It's just shorthand for "person who has immigrated illegally" anyway, arguing over these words is a distraction. You have any solutions?

https://www.migrationpolicy.org/programs/data-hub/charts/ann...

The current legal immigration levels are way too low, hence people breaking the law trying to establish roots in the country (or fleeing persecution elsewhere). We used to call people foreign-born instead of illegal, and not care about their immigration status at all. Oh, wait - that's when the Europeans were immigrating: https://www.migrationpolicy.org/programs/data-hub/charts/ann...

If many many people are breaking a law (i.e. jaywalking), one should consider whether the law is actually reasonable in the first place.

I’m not sure if something similar happens in construction, but I’ve heard that in the landscaping business a supervisor will just pull up to a Home Depot with a pickup truck, and there’ll be a bunch of people waiting around, and they’ll go “Who wants $X for Y hours?” And then 4 or 5 guys get in the back of the truck and they head to the work site.

In a situation like that, you’re probably keeping track of how many people you employ each day so you can figure out how many you need for future projects, but you’re not gonna be able to produce a list of social security numbers if someone asked.

Over time, these folks become skilled, and generally end up running crews. It's very commonplace to find the more experience undocumented workers being the ones running small subcontract crews under the table with day labor, because they speak fluent Spanish.

I'm interested where the blind-eyes are built in.

The blind eyes are built in at every single layer. I mean, it only requires a master's license to pull a permit, but master's in trades almost are never hands on, it's all journeymen, apprentices, or day labor. You as a general contractor sub out a master and his crew, and as long as the permitting happens in a timely manner and the inspection passes, you really don't care about anything else. The city doesn't care, because the master is on-site for inspection, so as long as inspection passes, they're not going down the line and asking everyone for ID or anything.

There's SO MANY blind eyes, at every layer. It's pretty much a "don't ask, don't tell" policy because if we actually started enforcing the law, nothing would get done. There are significant industries in the US that are almost entirely reliant on day labor / undocumented immigrants, construction is one of them.

Given that, very large successful organizations whose competitive edge is not software may still have terrifyingly low software production efficiencies.

> and each crew has mostly new/unskilled folks with a few skilled folks to guide them and keep them on track.

In some cases the crew changes from day-to-day so any context a work has on a particular job isn't necessarily carried over form day-to-day. The day laborers are highly dependent on the crew chief for direction.

> It's very commonplace to find the more experience undocumented workers being the ones running small subcontract crews under the table with day labor, because they speak fluent Spanish.

This too introduces inefficiencies if that crew chief isn't present, late, or leaves the site for any reason. And often the crew chief will instruct works to do the wrong thing, or lacks the knowledge (e.g. electrical) to challenge something.

Either way its a pay drop.

Your expense is someone else's wage + a capitalist's profit margin.

Expenses across the entire economy can only outgrow wages if someone's taking a bigger slice of profit off the top.

When we talk about inflation, we always conflate the two, as if they are the same thing. They are not.

Have you paid attention to the Delta between executive pay and that of general labor over the past 4 decades? This is exactly what has been happening.

Source? Even the famously wrong[1] productivity/wage gap graph from epi.org admits that wage has at least been growing in real terms.

[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/badeconomics/comments/6rtoh4/produc...

Then there is some reference to Mankiw making some assumption about labor supply and demand being infinitely differentiable and continuous, as well as violating "Rule V" in the adjacent sidebar. Meanwhile the newly-constructed local Taco Bell has two employees, a closed dining room, and the drive-in queue starts on the road before the entrance to the parking lot. This is my shocked face, at Mankiw doing something dumb.

Essentially, we should not see 40 year runs of compensation lagging productivity due to some outsized returns to shareholders. That would likely reveal a structural problem in the labor market, at least by my understanding. "This would be a bad thing and our system is perfect so this accusation of badness must be wrong!" OK, Pollyanna. It would be inconvenient if the increased market concentration we see in every industry has given the remaining firms greater pricing power both as buyers of labor and sellers of products, so let's assume that didn't happen even though this graph clearly shows it.

Truth in advertising for this subreddit, it seems. Psychological commitment to the status quo yields unconvincing arguments plainly contradicted by public experience.

[0] https://research.stlouisfed.org/publications/economic-synops...

What about waste on MBAs?

-

I have MILLIONS of square feet of FAANG builds under my belt (including healthcare, which is never included in FAANG (but now that one of the hospitals I was designer of was purchased under the Zuck's name...)) should be included.

I've made so many people more rich.

There are lots of levers that determine if a person can afford a home. income, interest rates, % income that goes towards housing, etc. But its obvious cost of building the home plays a factor.

Go compare the costs of identical pieces of plywood from the Home Depot on West 23rd Street in Manhattan and the Home Depot in Jersey City, directly across the river.

Manhattan: $76; Jersey City: $37

Is that the cost of shipping a piece of plywood an additional 3-10 miles? Is it taxes?

It's the rent.

Even if you build a "cheap" single family house that's still going to be more expensive than some equally cheaply built townhomes, or apartments because of stuff like parking requirements and minimum setbacks.

Unfortunately we have bad incentives aligned here versus stated goals.

Manhattan and San Francisco are like Japan and Argentina in economics. They're just not the same market as most places. In Manhattan in particular the value really is the land.

Building a bunch of housing in the middle of nowhere for unhoused people isn't going to work unless you also provide them heating, transportation, etc. The least expensive way of doing that is to make it dense like a city. At which point you're just building a planned city, which is fine, but not particularly in the purview of the US.

Another contributor to the problem was outside speculators buying residential properties. Specifically Berkshire Hathaway and Zillow come to mind. But I'm sure others were doing it too. It should be illegal.

Stop blaming everything on immigrants, pls. You have your own agency, dont play a victim and get your destiny in your own hands.

Immigrant labor is what keeps this country together, all those back breaking jobs that Americans consider themselves too good for and prefer sitting on the welfare/unemployment/etc - these jobs are done by immigrants while being paid peanuts.

Without immigrants the housing would be even more expensive and unaffordable, as well as all other services like plumbing, electricians, fast food/dining, hospitality, etc

And wages would be commensurately higher. The greatest real income increase in America happened between 1940 and 1970 when there was virtually ZERO immigration.

How many houses did you build, $username?

Touche?

The cake you can't have and eat at the same time is: "I want affordable housing" and "I want my house to be a good investment."

No it is not. Construction costs (material, labor) are sky high even if property costs are as well. Building high-end housing has always been more profitable than otherwise, low-end housing is simply high-end housing 20 or 30 years in the future.

That was maybe true in the past, but todays exurban sheetrock palaces are impossible to be turned into low-income/entry-level housing. It starts with the zoning requirements - are you really going to divide a 2500 sqft McMansion into a duplex without an epic zoning fight? And then there's the transportation/parking issue.

The real problem is that 1200 sqft entry level housing like it was built in the decade after WW2 isn't made any longer but is urgently needed.

It is my understanding that builders are responding to the demand from home buyers, and people that can afford a (starter) home want 2000sf at minimum.

Also the costs of a house dont scale linearly[1]. A small home costs almost as much as a 2000sf home.

[1]https://www.togal.ai/blog/the-average-cost-to-build-a-house-...

Even in cities with little zoning requirements (like Houston, and heck, even Tokyo), you still see McMansions being built rather than low income housing. Low income housing is still old housing from the 80s/70s, and the problem you are referring to (that housing built today is not very convertible) is one for a sadder future.

> The real problem is that 1200 sqft entry level housing like it was built in the decade after WW2 isn't made any longer but is urgently needed.

Having shopped for homes in the last few years, there were plenty of 1200 SQFT options in the places I looked at, they were just $700-$800k rather than $900k-$1.1m. Condos are the more realistic options in that case (I saw one I liked for $700k with a reasonable HOA, my wife wasn't having it, however). She preferred a 900 SQF SFH over that, for reasons I couldn't figure out. All were still considered luxury however since they were almost brand new.

Note that yes, I live in an expensive area, but usually when we talk about affordable housing, we are talking about places where people want to live (vs. say Detroit).

This is the highest in the world. [1, 2]

That's got nothing on San Mateo's $1264 average list price and $160-350 per square foot in construction costs. [2]

[1] https://cbreemail.com/rv/ff019c9050e5e959ddee96391147a04f828...

[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1234783/average-sales-pr...

Isn't much of the listing price related to land costs (and then of course profit)? To say that construction costs are only 50% of the sold to cost doesn't tell me much, how much did they pay for the land on a SQFT basis?

How long does it take to raise a house?

For 580k I could hire 2 skilled men and 3 undocumented immigrants for a year.

Something isn't right.

Sounds like southern california done fucked themselves with over-regulating that stuff.

A single Ritcher 5.8 quake in Virginia in 2011 caused $300 million in damage and disrupted utilities for days in 12 states. A series of earthquakes in 2019 (6.4, 5.4, and 7.1) in California caused so little damage that it's hard to find a tally. Power was knocked in some cities and restored within hours.

Yes, CA construction is more expensive. But it's also stronger and more resilient than the cheap crap in the county next to you.

This myth of zoning being the only factor is maddening. It's almost like the California folks think their housing market is the only one. Plenty of jurisdictions have loose zoning laws and we still see skyrocketing property values. There's interest rates and inflation to consider.

The cold hard truth is: when a bunch of people all want to live in the same areas, housing is going to be expensive. There's no way around it.

I expect it to drop to below $200k here once they finish rebuilding the thousand or so homes one of our recent wildfires took out.

Sure it wouldn't go for closer to $1.5M?

Outside of major metros, zoning makes houses much bigger, twice as big on average as the 70s.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna66818

These aren’t trivial numbers that can be ignored. But a replacement of much the country.

Grew up in Southern California. It was strange watching everything go from English speaking to Spanish speaking by the time I left the area.

I married a “legal” immigrant who got her citizenship as we were dating.

Borders can be managed. Certain political parties want them to be open however.

"Southern California" was/is a very, very big area. I grew up southeast of downtown.

Can you share where/when you grew up? Just curious.

As far as 'replacement': I can't dismiss such opinions out of hand, but for another anecdote: two of my great grandparents, who came from Germany in the late 19th century, lived in the US for many decades and never learned English that well.

Their children, my dad's father, of course spoke English fluently.

I think you're confusing the term "undocumented" or "undocumented worker" with the underlying concept that's referenced by the terms. The concept has long been in in the public spotlight using different terms ("illegal" or "illegal alien").

Here's some statements from Gerald Ford on the same concept, using the old lingo: https://www.fordlibrarymuseum.gov/library/document/0110/1181...

Border crossings are at a 20 year high, but the problem is that border controls are too tight? That seems odd.

Considering they pay income taxes, sales taxes, social security/medicaid, and don't make much use of US resources, it seems to me that you would want border crossings to increase dramatically, as long as they're accompanied by a corresponding crossing back home at the end of the day.

...which is exactly how it was, 20ish years ago, before 9/11.

I'm in favor of open borders mostly on humanitarian grounds, and I offer our lower wage laborers as offerings on the pillar of sacrifice for that.

Just look at what has happened to Puerto Rico. Everyone who can, leaves. What's left is grim. Easy access to the USA is a great deal for the minority who get out, but for most Puerto Ricans, it's hard to imagine that they're better off as a result.

> I'm in favor of open borders mostly on humanitarian grounds, and I offer our lower wage laborers as offerings on the pillar of sacrifice for that.

Half the country agrees with you, but they'd never admit it.

Either way, the idea that "tight border controls" are a contributing factor to the large number of illegal immigrants in the united states is entirely divorced from reality.

They wouldn't be illegal immigrants if we didn't have "tight border controls" by definition, so it feels related and not "divorced from reality"...

We lived through this, basically all of American history up until 9/11, where the Mexican border was "loose"(er, the US committed some pretty fucked up atrocities using that border a few times in its history); it seems to me that if we returned to that level of interaction with Mexico, the vast majority of concerns raised by anti-immigration folks would be quelled.

I guess pretending the issue is just some kind of Fox News conspiracy theory is easier than actually understanding it?

People use the language of "invasion" for a reason. In Texas, non-hispanic whites make up ~30% of births[0], but accounted for only 5% of the population growth[1].

You'll write that off as "muh replacement conspiracy", of course--I can tell that you've been well programmed!

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Texas [1] https://www.texastribune.org/2021/08/12/texas-2020-census/

I think it'd be awesome if we all had to learn Spanish in some parts of the US. What a boon for cultural diversity that would be! The exchange of ideas would be so good for our shared society.

How did the US southern border work in your memories? Would you be surprised to learn it was almost unrecognizable compared to what it is now?

This is from 43 years ago.

Undocumented workers are sometimes paid in cash.

Such knowledge can also be transmitted from one subculture to another, with varying degrees of success. In order to bring in new people, one must either bring in a few beginners into a majority competent population, or have one subculture highly motivated to absorb and replicate the success of another.

This is well covered in Migrations And Cultures: A World View by Thomas Sowell.

I hope you understand, because of the implications.

or, as usually happens, being "documented" have become more and more difficult, so the number of undocumented workers has gone up as a consequence.

also, immigrants are replacing those workers who are not willing to do the job most of the time.

it's not unusual everywhere you go in the west to witness that a large portion of construction workers are immigrants.

Here in Italy it's mostly people from Romania, North Africa and other eastern European Countries.

Virtually no Italian wants to be a mason anymore.

They rather prefer to work for app-based tech companies (Glovo and such).

And don't underestimate bureaucracy.

Most likely explanation is just that we have been burdened with infinite amount regulatory busy work.

> There are several plausible channels for labor measurement difficulties in construction, including a higher than average frequency of employees working irregular hours, contractor labor that may be misclassified by survey respondents, and, especially in more recent decades, labor supplied by undocumented workers.

It then goes on to talk about that in more detail, but I won't copy that in because every time I do, someone goes on with "but what about X?" where X is also in the very next paragraph.

Nothing wrong with coming up with the hypothesis, honestly. But the extraordinary number of responses to your comment that speculate on something that one can immediately find are just so typical of HN comments.

I sometimes see that in software engineering where some engineer will tell me about some library we're using that we have access to source code for: "yeah, I looked at the docs and it's not clear if it does A or B". But...the source code is right there. Why not just use that? At least then if the library is doing it wrong you'll know for sure.

You can see this literally everywhere. Unless you are going to pay 200K+ you will have difficulties hiring reasonably intelligent, motivated, conscientious workers.

This also has to do with overall rise in cost of good education and decreasing quality of education in public schools across the board.