His bean-counting is out of date.
His bean-counting is out of date.
A pparently getting a jump on Joe Biden’s DEI executive order, Pete Buttigieg urged a conference of county officials last week to make sure construction workers look like the communities where they work.
“We have heard way too many stories from generations past of infrastructure where you got a neighborhood, often a neighborhood of color,” he said, “that finally sees the project come to them, but everyone in the hard hats on that project, doing the good-paying jobs, don’t look like they came from anywhere near the neighborhood.”
Needless to say, this is not a concern shared by most people who don’t apply the Buttigieg “not around here” standard to the workers building bridges and other infrastructure in their areas.
It’s not often, if ever, that you hear someone say, “It’s a major inconvenience that this highway project has been delayed yet again, but at least the guys blocking off a lane of traffic at rush hour look like they came from somewhere near the neighborhood.”
Regardless, Mayor Pete’s bean-counting is out of date.
This might come as a surprise to anyone living in or near a major urban area, but whites are robustly represented in construction, at 50 percent of workers, according to Steve Camarota of the Center for Immigration Studies. They are still a little underrepresented compared to their share of the total workforce, at 56 percent, though.
It is Hispanics, of course, who are overrepresented in construction. From Camarota again: Hispanics are 37 percent of construction workers and 18 percent of the overall labor force. The disparity is starker when it comes to immigrants. Foreign-born Hispanics are about a quarter of construction workers, or three times their share of the total labor force, at 8 percent.
Using data from 2016, the Center for Immigration Studies estimated that 15 percent of construction workers are illegal immigrants.
A study last year by a different organization, the Center for Migration Studies, came up with numbers that match Camarota’s. It found that between 2015 and 2019, 54 percent of foreign-born construction workers in the U.S. were illegal immigrants.
In New York City, the figures are especially stark. “Between 2015 and 2019,” the Center for Migration Studies report said, “immigrants comprised just 37 percent of the total New York City population, but 44 percent of the city’s labor force and 63 percent of all its construction workers.” Its estimate is that 41 percent of immigrant construction workers were illegal.
That sounds high, but it’s actually astonishingly lower than the number for the United States as a whole.
Meanwhile, non-Hispanic black workers are underrepresented in construction. Camarota notes that native-born blacks were just 5 percent of construction workers, half their representation in the workforce as a whole.
All of this means that if Buttigieg wanted to be frank about current realities and make his same point, he’d have to say something like, “Look, folks, we’ve got the wrong sort of brown people working construction. Let’s all look for opportunities to balance it out. If at all possible, please find ways to discourage Hispanics from working on your projects.”
That’d be too dumb and offensive for even the most DEI-intoxicated apparatchik to consider saying.
Another point that is actually true but would never occur to Buttigieg is that illegal immigrants, through their willingness to accept lower wages and worse working conditions, are crowding out other immigrants and natives from construction jobs, at least at the margins. And that the social networks of illegal-immigrant workers make their overrepresentation in construction self-reinforcing.
If Buttigieg really wanted to try opening up more opportunities for black workers, he’d urge the Biden administration to crack down on illegal immigration, not just at the border, but in the interior, too. These are workers who may or may not look like people in the neighborhoods where they are working, but don’t belong in this country at all.
That’s a fact, unfortunately, that’s beneath the notice of our glib, preposterous transportation secretary.