I think you are right, BS, and I agree with you that they will work their tail ends off. I have a buddy who owns a very successful landscape company and he uses many Mexican immigrants, legal ones however. He arranges to bring them in from Mexico on, I believe, a H1-B Visa. As part of the process, he has to advertise in the local paper for the positions for which he is hiring and the wage he will be paying. Guess what. Nobody shows up (at least they did not prior to the economy going to heck). Armed with the fact that he cannot find local workers for the wage offered, he then applies for Visas and gets the same crew back year after year. He takes the legal costs involved in doing so, and splits it among the workers and has it deducted from their wages. The Mexican workers love it--they get to fly here with actual Visas rather than some other less savory way of making their way to Indiana. They pool together and get inexpensive housing and pack them in. They are very hard workers and never give him any trouble. Even several of his supervisors come to him that way. He travelled to their campesino in Mexico once (all the guys come from the same place--heck it spreads by word of mouth that my friend is a good guy to work for) and they all lived like relative kings down there. Of course they have to leave their wives and children for 9 months of the year, but when they come back, they are able to enjoy the houses they have built with their earnings, their car, etc.
Yes, we need cheap labor, and we need some of the young'uns to get off their butts and provide it.
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