This is the “busy” season in my line of work and I’ve been back on twelve hour shifts, seven days a week. It’s nice to have today off. Back to six, ten hour shifts on Monday. I’ve obviously been to busy to post in recent weeks but I have made some interesting first hand observations regarding the employment of illegal aliens in Arizona.
As a few of you know, I work in the industrial construction sector. Most all of our job-sites are power generating stations across the United States. In Arizona, maybe because of recently passed laws, there are few if any companies working these contracts with illegal alien labor. However, Texas and California companies ARE working these contracts with an overwhelming majority of their workforce being unskilled low paid “residents” of these states. One of the journeymen I work with is hispanic and fluent in spanish. He has talked to many of the out of state workers who have told him point blank with no reservation that they are mostly from Mexico. It costs less than one weeks wages for the fraudulent documentation necessary to gain employment with these construction companies in Texas. For an additional fee, you can get your papers up front and pay later. Another worker told us that all he and his friends needed was a word of mouth referral from another worker to get on the payroll, and that the company gave you a month to get the fraudulent paperwork turned in to their office. He and his friends all hired on in San Antonio.
So there you have it. That is how some major industrial construction companies in Texas are hiring illegal aliens and providing them with a months wages to gain fraudulent paperwork to work and reside in the United States. In this case, Arizona. We were told that on this particular job, working for this particular employer, that easily eighty workers out of the one hundred and ten, were from Mexico and had hired on in the manner explained.