From: Steve Smith [Email him]

According to The Intercept, migrant laborers in Houston are complaining…about migrant laborers killing wages.

 Hurricane Harvey dumped more than 50 inches of rain on the Houston area, and inestimable tons of moldy debris have to be mucked out as the city rebuilds. Much of the work is being done by undocumented immigrants, who make up half of the Texas construction workforce, according to some estimates. But even as their labor is in high demand, many are silently enduring abuse as they fear deportation.

This is what brought Mauricio “Chele” Iglesias, an organizer with the Workers Defense Project, to the far end of a Home Depot parking lot six weeks after the storm, where men wearing work boots waited to be picked up for their next job.

“Houston needs a construction workforce that is unafraid to demand dignified wages and safe job sites,” Chele told me as we approached a cluster of day laborers.

Immigrant Day Laborers Confront a Perfect Storm of Exploitation in Hurricane Harvey Cleanup, by Renée Feltz, The Intercept, November 13 2017, 2:12 p.m.

for hundreds of years Southern craftsmen looked forward to our "reliable as a clock" annual hurricane season and guaranteed work by Mother Nature, but criminal invasion has killed the American construction worker's living standards in nearly every state. (The workforce that would be “unafraid to demand dignified wages and safe job sites” would be Americans.)

A  Latino day laborer with 5 daughters (I feel sorry for him!) has his own house, apparently.

Now the only people earning a living wage in construction are public employees, and they're being sold a retirement Ponzi scheme, too.

And of course, the migrants are working the system on public subsidies.

See previous letters from the same reader.