Using foreign labour would represent the same admission as the British health service is having to face, where about 8% of staff is/has been foreign
What a pathetic piddling percentage! No wonder I hear so many complaints from British acquaintances about the NHS. I suspect Brexit may make things worse, but no doubt Boris will be able to cook up a brilliant solution.
Anyway, back to the topic at hand, I read somewhere (University of Texas study, if memory serves) that fully half of the construction workers in Texas are "undocumented"—i.e., they
entered without inspection (snuck across the border) or entered legally but are not authorized to work in the United States.
During a visit to Mexico last year—which happened to coincide with the inauguration back in Washington of el señor Loco (photo below)—I spoke with four young men, a cab driver and three waiters, who had recently spent time in the States working construction. Not an enormous sample, to be sure, but it represented the only four men of the appropriate age to do heavy labo(u)r with whom I was able to strike up extended conversations. As far as I could tell, they all crossed the border legally. (But who can say?) Three, apparently, used tourist visas. The fourth had a multiple-entry visa, and his last construction job—six months, I think he told me—had provided him with enough money to finish a university degree in psychology at a Mexican university. He was waiting tables to accumulate enough money to continue his studies until he could determine whether it was safe to cross the border again to get another construction job. He didn't seem overly worried about Trump, per se, but he knew Obama had cracked down on illegal immigration and he didn't want to risk his visa status.
It isn't just Texas. My wife and I built a house a few years ago in a small Maryland city on the eastern coast of the United States, not far from Washington, D.C., and the overwhelming majority of the workers—in all the construction trades—were
hispanohablantes. Mostly central Americans, I suspect, and probably the majority of them were working here legally. (But who can say?) I don't think we have a lot of Mexican immigrant labo(u)rers in suburban Maryland, and the South American immigrants and visitors around here mostly seem to be professionals; however, my Spanish isn't good enough to detect regional accents.
We've always been dependent on recent arrivals from elsewhere to do the heavy-lifting in the United States. The Irish, Germans, Chinese, Italians, Poles, Greeks, Indians, Pakistanis, Iranians, and immigrants from various Arab countries—and don't forget the Jews from all over Europe who made the United States the world's foremost contributor to modern science.
So we really need to maintain the immigrant flow. Because after a couple of generations, the descendants of the new arrivals become as unmotivated and lazy as those of us whose ancestors came here centuries ago.
That's the miracle of America.