GOP Was The Cause Of Immigration Problem. Really Started With Ronald Reagan.

[TheMastersNemesis]

3. It Was Not Just The Amnesty But Inaction On People Crossing The Border -----

along with not doing anything to reign in employers hiring these workers. Now I worked at DOL during that time and we could see wages going down. Trade workers and other workers were coming in losing their jobs. In many cases they were being replaced by undocumented workers. This kind of activity was under the radar.No employer sanctions were being applied and the laws were and still are weak.

The reason I know what was happening was that I was interviewing many of these workers. Here is one example. There was a time when if you worked in a meat processing plant you made a decent wage and had benefits. And there were a lot of construction trade jobs that were union had apprenticeships that paid well also. Over time I was seeing more and more of these workers as companies began to replace workers. Undocumented workers were cheaper and could not report abuses. In construction union shops and companies had to compete with companies using undocumented labor. The feds did nothing.

By the time I left DOL in 1998 pay and stability in these jobs was sinking badly. As Reagan attacked the unions they were weakened. Plus the federal government essentially DID NOTHING about these abuses. If you go into meat packing or you look at construction the work force is very different. Pay now is barely above minimum wage.

You would not know this information unless you worked as an interviewer like I was. I was able to observe the deterioration where I worked.

What Reagan did was pretty sophisticated and the usual labor stats did not reveal what was really going on.