I’m seeing it happen in real time.

Douglas Flint | December 29, 2025, American Thinker

In the eighties, I had a friend who worked for me on and off.  He was a competent handyman and could do an oil change without screwing it up, something that was always useful in an auto shop, which I ran.  Eventually, however, he got a better paying job as a drywaller.

Anyone who has ever done a home project with even a small drywall repair knows how difficult it is not to have even a small repair stick out like a sore thumb.  Stevie was good and patient.  He has that ability to measure with his eye.  And so he was a very good drywaller, making a respectable wage with some benefits.

But about a decade later, he came back to my shop, needing work.  He explained that his business had been taken over by mostly Hispanic workers, who worked as sub-contractors and were paid not by the hour, but by the number of sheets of drywall they hung.  No benefits, of course.  Their work may not have been great, but it was acceptable.

In all likelihood, many if not most of these new drywallers were illegal aliens.  And in a one-decade cycle, drywalling became one of those jobs Americans just won’t do.

There is no such thing as a job Americans just won’t do.  There are jobs Americans don’t want to or can’t get hired to do at the prevailing wage.

Some guys have the balance of a cat. They can walk on a 60-degree slope as easily as I walk on a treadmill.  They tend to make good roof, chimney, and gutter masters if these are the fields they choose to enter.  A fair number of guys would do this work when it pays a fair wage with benefits to cover the risk.  I would say that in today’s market, that would start $35 an hour up to $45 and top out at $65 to $75 an hour.  But not too many guys would want to do that kind of work for $15–$20 an hour, paid in cash, to illegal aliens.  And if one of those illegal aliens happens to roll off a roof, he will be dropped off at the emergency room with instructions to “no hablar.”  The taxpayers, not the contractors, will pay the medical bills.

Being a truck driver used to be a respectable “lower middle class” job.  Most respectable truck-driving jobs require a CDL (commercial driver’s license) which once required a certain level of study, integrity, and skill to obtain.  Now we are discovering the wonders of the “non-domiciled” CDL, which seems to have no function other than to act as a pipeline to allow a mass of migrants, many illegal, to poach those good jobs and turn them into “jobs Americans just won’t do” by running the wages down and destroying the fair working conditions that limit driving hours, so that zombified drivers running on caffeine and other unregulated stimulants don’t turn our roads into scenes from The Road Warrior.  According to Victor Davis Hanson, this has already happened in his part of California.  And it’s not just the “open road truckers.”   

I work maintaining a large fleet of cars and trucks, and we regularly “out service” vehicles.  Once they have been stripped of our logos, radios, and specialized equipment, the company we pay to help manage the fleet arranges to pick them up (they must be towed out), and eventually they go to auction.  Vendors call contractors, who call sub-contractors.  And at the bottom of that chain, someone shows up at my lot with a flatbed truck or trailer to haul the vehicles away.

Three years ago, the men at the end of this chain showed up with tow trucks and flatbeds and seemed “American” in their speech and demeaner.  Over the past year and half, this has changed.  Guys wearing shorts and sandals (not a scrap of safety gear, such as boots or steel-toed shoes, or at least long pants) with little to no English started showing up with what looked like converted landscaper’s trailers pulled by pickup trucks.  Often, they could not communicate and spoke into their phones in strange tongues (not Spanish).  Through inquiry, I found that most of these guys came from “the Stans” (Uzbekistan, Tajikistan…also one from the Republic of Georgia).  It was clear from their frequent phone calls that they were directed by personnel located outside the United States.  How did they get here?  Who found this loophole to take over this seemingly insignificant industry?  What lack of laws, regulation, and common sense allows this?

So another set of jobs is suddenly “work Americans won’t do.”

There seems to be no stopping of the flow of immigrants, legal, illegal with green cards, without green cards, with H1-B visas and without.  I truly believe that the president is doing all he can do, but now it is time for Congress to step up to the plate and call a halt to all immigration for 25 years.  If there is a dire refugee crisis somewhere, then refugee camps can be set up outside the United States that can act as true temporary safe havens for genuine refugees.  If there is a group of refugees who seem like a good fit into our culture, Congress can go into session, carve out and exemption, and pass it.