Your rebuttal is cogent and completely believable, but Nick Kristoff often writes from a place of common sense and believability and I don’t believe the average person reading the NYTimes (I include myself in this) will think back on what he previously wrote and see the disconnect. But thank you for pointing it out because I need to read and digest more than what a well known columnist spits out in the NYTimes.
Kristof doesn't say it, but I can't help but wonder... some of the most vehemently anti-immigration narratives (and diatribes) I've heard over the years come from... immigrants or 1st gen children of. Why? Because they focus on their own experience (and possibly those close friends/family), look at "the situation" they see today (a mixture of media and possibly anecdotal first-hand observations) and conclude "it's different now/these new immigrants don't respect the system, etc" and hence, not legit/being exploited/out of control/requires stricter measures etc. It's a version of "young people have it easy/in my day it was harder" theory combined with the same instincts that create things like austerity measures.
On a purely economic level, the person most similar to somebody arrived this year is somebody arrived last year, so those people have the most to lose from competition.
But I think it's mostly a (maybe subconscious) way to become "one of the good ones". Legally, they are already safe, so they have no personal incentive to not kick down the ladder, but tons of social incentives to do so.
Hi Robert, I'm a first-gen and I understand why that seems like a possibility, but I respectfully disagree. My stepfather's family were all Mexican immigrants, and they were, as you say, antagonistic toward newer arrivals. However, their anger wasn't directed at all newer immigrants, it was directed at illegal immigrants. I can't think of anything more American than the anger one feels towards people who shortcut the legal process for their own gain. (When I moved to Italy I had the hardest time adapting to the Italian way of (not) standing in line and waiting your turn, and that's not even against the law!) Anyway, as I stated in my comment (above) I feel like this column and almost all the responses fail to distinguish between legal immigration and illegal immigration, both of which have their own unique huge sets of problems. (ex-Sgt Pepper, 25th ID)
Your clarification is important, and I would tend to agree--I would amend my comment to say that, yes, their focus is as such, but with one qualifier: that they ALSO believe that immigration has come to be dominated by this--the word itself has become for them as conflated as what you're stating, and the preponderant American "situation" is "overrun" by illegals (with healthy doses of Fox News to confirm their fears and anger. That's not a stereotype, that's a direct observation, multiple times over). And for what it's worth, the people I've conversed with on this most weren't Mexican or from Latin America. They were Eastern European, Indian, Jewish, Filipino, Russian, and Korean. Some are even relatives of mine--almost impossible to talk to in a rational conversation about the topic.
Because it's an empty distinction. It's a thought-terminating cliché. Congrats, your stepfather somebody sponsoring him. My ancestors had not, but they came at a time when "legal immigration" meant stepping off a boat and declaring your name.
The fact that people exactly like your stepfather or my ancestors today would be illegals says more about the law than about the illegals frankly.
My parents immigrated from England after WWII, legally and without sponsors. My stepfather's family immigrated from Mexico in the 40's, legally and without sponsors. My wife's grandparents stepped off the boat from Italy and gave their names. I've lived for a few years in Mexico and in Italy. I am as much an advocate for immigration as anyone. I'm a fan of Matt Yglesias' book, One Billion Americans. I grew up 10 miles from the border and have actually assisted (in other words, in real life) undocumented workers. I lived near the Salinas Valley for another 20 years and volunteered time to help farm workers. I'm a huge fan of the asylum system. Yet when the system is overwhelmed precisely because people know the law cannot be enforced, and the demand for labor is huge, then many more people will come for purely economic reasons and overwhelm the asylum system. Citizens, for whatever reasons, valid or invalid, will be upset and seek support from whatever political party promises to make it stop. This is happening all over the world. This was Brexit. This was the success of the "post-fascist" Brothers of Italy. Marine Le Pen in France, Orban and Trump. Check the EU election results the other day. So you'll have to forgive me if some philosophical distinction about the unworthiness of the law ends up being used as an excuse for bringing these awful people of the far-right to power. That, to me, the lack of political pragmatism, is the most thought-terminating cliche I can think of. It's like progressives saw the rise of the Right and said, Hmmm... what can we do to make this a complete success? While I can agree with you in principle, I can moderate my expectations for progress in my lifetime so as to not rip a whole in the fabric of society.
This is yeoman’s work - debunking Kristoff. Nicely done!
The immigration issue makes me tired to think about, knowing that it’s just a messaging issue for Republicans, and we won’t actually do most of the things which would help.
The point of immigration being a messaging issue is for it to be talked up as a huge problem when a Democrat is president, and then to be not talked about when a Republican is president. There can be differences in policy, but mostly the difference is in how it is talked about by the GOP.
Agreed. Kristof frequently (always?) abstracts from personal anecdotes as if there weren’t a giant industry (some might call it the Ideas Industry) that has studied immigration from an economic and sociological perspective, both quantitatively and qualitatively, and there’s political and historical studies as well.
The problem is that the results of pretty much any serious analysis of the matter is "yes, we are leaving trillions of dollars on the table and crushing millions of lives out of narrow mindness, sheer bigotry and legislative inertia", which means the crazy libertarians and crazy leftists types are right and the soi-disant sensible centrists are murderously wrong, which is something Kristoff is basically constitutionally unable to admit
Something I wonder about is how much anyone really notices immigrants. In my sub, there are more immigrants than native born, most I suspect illegal. The biggest problem they cause is that they park their ubiquitous white vans on the street. Around here, the trades & the hospitality industry depend on them, and I think that's true in most metro areas. My cousin's restaurant in South Bend certainly did. So I wonder if #MAGA politicians, who've never met a lie they didn't spread, haven't created a crisis where there isn't one. What do you think?
You can always spot the tell. It’s when they drag out the big numbers that our rickety old republic couldn’t possibly bear!! We cannot save all the billions in need. It’s a distraction. Big numbers are scary sounding, and it adds confusion to the story rather than clarity.
Yes the immigration and asylum numbers are big, but compared to the size of our country and our economy it’s shouldn’t be that big a deal. We’ve got huge swaths of this country literally dying on the vine. Places in the “Heartland,” whose most pressing need right now is young hardworking families to move in. They shouldn’t be picky about what they spice dinner with.
I bet there are still ghost neighborhoods leftover from 2008 that we could fill with grateful people almost instantly.
I don’t understand the point of op-ed writers. Are they ever qualified? Do they ever know what they’re talking about? It seems impossible given they cover so many things, that they could really know very much about them.
Too bad the sanctuary seekers got caught in a national election.
The rethuglicans want to run on illegal immigration as their main issue as they don't have any others. The plan is to underfund the Border Patrol and the courts so the current surge can't be handled effectively and they can "View With Alarm".
Also many of the seekers have been scammed by coyotes into believing they can claim asylum and get jobs and stay.
Your "hot take" (and it really does seem to be a mostly emotional argument, Daniel) elides a few critical points. One, rational, moderate citizens don't want their fellow citizens to never consider new evidence and (god forbid!) change their minds. Hence faulting Kristof for deviating from a past stance is disingenuous at best. Two, pronouncing his arguments as "extremely" faulty is nothing short of displaying your own unmitigated certainty of your own position, and smart people know better than to believe everything they think. It's fair to point out that some of Kristof's argument is based on anecdotal evidence, but then you neglect to mention the more objective evidence that he does provide. Three, while there is nothing wrong with arguing pro-immigration based on the economics (which I think are sound arguments), you have ignored something more important: the law. There are many, many, many, many, many of us (I myself am first generation; forgive me for being anecdotal) who welcome immigrants and wish that more immigration would be allowed, while also being able to hold a more important principle in our heads at the same time: this is a nation of laws, and when you want something changed, you have to convince enough people and change the laws. Asylum is an incredibly worthy ideal that has been trashed by the rush to the border of millions from all over the world for purely economic reasons. Entering the country illegally in order to claim asylum, instead of turning yourself in to the authorities at a port of entry in order to do so, is a complete bastardization of the overwhelmed process. And that trashing of the process is enabled by people whose ideals of a borderless world conflict with the actual law of the land, and they are too lazy to work for change. It's progressive "yard sign politics" at its worst. Don't get me wrong; I love progressives, I lived and worked in San Francisco for almost 20 years, and some of my best friends are still in that bubble. What they don't realize is that the highly-principled countries that they admire the most, i.e. Europe, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, etc., have very tough immigration laws.
It’s always nice to have someone around with the confidence to decide which of their miserable neighbors is truly worthy of aid and comfort from (checks notes,) the richest country in history,) and which are just trying to pull a fast one to (shuffles notes again,) feed their family because home has no economy anymore.
Lou, regardless of how you feel about your neighbors and how much you actually do to help them, you don't get to decide which laws apply and which laws do not. So go ahead and impute greedy motives to me, even though I clearly stated that I'm in favor of increased legal immigration and am also a big fan of the asylum project. Listen, I don't care how my neighbors got here, I will always help them. You want to believe that everyone who disagrees with you must be greedy or racist, which is quite childish and a hallmark of progressives. If you want populist authoritarian schmucks like Trump, Orban, Bolsonaro, Meloni, Geert Wilders and many others to gain power, keep pretending that legal immigration doesn't matter to over half the country.
And you want to imply that anyone who questions the severity of the crisis, the nature of the response or the reasons anyone might be suspicious of various actors motives as if we are starry eyed bleeding hearts at best or comical anarchists at worst.
The current legal regime is a bipartisan mess incapable of handling the influx of migrants no matter what their reasons for coming. I think we both agree that reforming that process should be a legislative priority.
But you are fooling yourself if you think you don’t care how your neighbor got here, you’ve been clear about that. You care if they got here legally. Whether they have a case for asylum or not, whether we’ve even tried to determine that status are both irrelevant.
Trump, Orban et al have risen to power by appealing to crude nativist ideologies that demonize immigrants, racial, religious and sexual minorities and women because there are evidently enough racists and fascists out there who feel comfortable cheering them on. Also by cheating a lot then bending the law to cover their asses.
It’s legalism, abusing the law to pervert justice. And speaking of abuse I’m sure a solution to our immigration problems that involves locking people up will work great in our top notch and perfectly humane legal system.
You may think that's my implication, but in principle I actually agree with your suspicions, and with your wish that people could just "get over it" and be like you and I, welcoming any and all immigrants. But in the real world, I'm inclined to agree with Andrew Sullivan's take, that it's as if progressives saw the rise of Right and said "what's the one thing we can do to make this a complete success?" We do both agree that reforming the immigration system is a top priority. (Btw, if you'd like to hear a well-done podcast on immigration, I enjoyed a recent 3-part series on the Freakonomics Radio podcast.) I don't think the legislative process is an irredeemable mess. We almost got there a few months ago, if not for Trump and his political needs. Which begs the question, whence Trump? You think chicken ("Trump, Orban, et al"), I think egg. Just as when I lived in Italy a few years ago, and listening to my Aunt in England pre-Brexit, and growing up on the border with Mexico, and having an immediate family full of immigrants, and volunteering at agencies that assist undocumented farm workers, I've learned there are plenty of people who for reasons both valid and bigoted are against illegal immigration, especially on a massive scale. If you'd have them all be racists and fascists, then that's part of the progressive "mind"set that I'm against. People can disagree with me without being evil. As far as my personal particulars go, I'd recommend for the sake of civilized discourse that you don't presume to know more about how someone is than the person himself.
I’m sorry, but I don’t buy the “liberals made me racist,” framing of the fascism problem. It’s “look what you made me do,” politics, it excuses reactionary bigotry as understandable if there’s a “crisis.” I’m not trying to paint everyone who disagrees with me as evil, I’m saying that focusing on the legality or illegality of someone’s entry into this country is doing the fascists job for them by signaling that it is ok to consider immigrants a threat. Because they are CRIMINALS. They BROKE THE LAW! And we can’t just LET people break the LAW!
We don’t get to choose what laws we obey, but we do have a choice in what laws we ENFORCE and how we do so, as well as the rhetoric we deploy in support of those laws.
So... I agree that this whole "open border" trope is another Republican hysteria that they will not work on in good fairh...
One anecdote on my side though...
In the 80s I was teaching at UC Santa Cruz, and building a granola factory on the West Side. Every carpenter and framer in the Cruz was booked, making the unheard of $25/hour, and there was a building & remodeling boom as the first wave of Silicon Valley yuppies poured over the coast range.
Then - bang - all the big contractors took over and had all undocumented crews making $8/hour. The quality went down for awhile but sometimes went up! (Especialy with stone work).
But it wiped out a whole sector...
Things seem stable now although I'm always saddened to see the guys at Home Depot hoping to grab a few hours... 40 years later, the going rate is $25/hr...
Your rebuttal is cogent and completely believable, but Nick Kristoff often writes from a place of common sense and believability and I don’t believe the average person reading the NYTimes (I include myself in this) will think back on what he previously wrote and see the disconnect. But thank you for pointing it out because I need to read and digest more than what a well known columnist spits out in the NYTimes.
Kristof doesn't say it, but I can't help but wonder... some of the most vehemently anti-immigration narratives (and diatribes) I've heard over the years come from... immigrants or 1st gen children of. Why? Because they focus on their own experience (and possibly those close friends/family), look at "the situation" they see today (a mixture of media and possibly anecdotal first-hand observations) and conclude "it's different now/these new immigrants don't respect the system, etc" and hence, not legit/being exploited/out of control/requires stricter measures etc. It's a version of "young people have it easy/in my day it was harder" theory combined with the same instincts that create things like austerity measures.
On a purely economic level, the person most similar to somebody arrived this year is somebody arrived last year, so those people have the most to lose from competition.
But I think it's mostly a (maybe subconscious) way to become "one of the good ones". Legally, they are already safe, so they have no personal incentive to not kick down the ladder, but tons of social incentives to do so.
Hi Robert, I'm a first-gen and I understand why that seems like a possibility, but I respectfully disagree. My stepfather's family were all Mexican immigrants, and they were, as you say, antagonistic toward newer arrivals. However, their anger wasn't directed at all newer immigrants, it was directed at illegal immigrants. I can't think of anything more American than the anger one feels towards people who shortcut the legal process for their own gain. (When I moved to Italy I had the hardest time adapting to the Italian way of (not) standing in line and waiting your turn, and that's not even against the law!) Anyway, as I stated in my comment (above) I feel like this column and almost all the responses fail to distinguish between legal immigration and illegal immigration, both of which have their own unique huge sets of problems. (ex-Sgt Pepper, 25th ID)
Your clarification is important, and I would tend to agree--I would amend my comment to say that, yes, their focus is as such, but with one qualifier: that they ALSO believe that immigration has come to be dominated by this--the word itself has become for them as conflated as what you're stating, and the preponderant American "situation" is "overrun" by illegals (with healthy doses of Fox News to confirm their fears and anger. That's not a stereotype, that's a direct observation, multiple times over). And for what it's worth, the people I've conversed with on this most weren't Mexican or from Latin America. They were Eastern European, Indian, Jewish, Filipino, Russian, and Korean. Some are even relatives of mine--almost impossible to talk to in a rational conversation about the topic.
Because it's an empty distinction. It's a thought-terminating cliché. Congrats, your stepfather somebody sponsoring him. My ancestors had not, but they came at a time when "legal immigration" meant stepping off a boat and declaring your name.
The fact that people exactly like your stepfather or my ancestors today would be illegals says more about the law than about the illegals frankly.
My parents immigrated from England after WWII, legally and without sponsors. My stepfather's family immigrated from Mexico in the 40's, legally and without sponsors. My wife's grandparents stepped off the boat from Italy and gave their names. I've lived for a few years in Mexico and in Italy. I am as much an advocate for immigration as anyone. I'm a fan of Matt Yglesias' book, One Billion Americans. I grew up 10 miles from the border and have actually assisted (in other words, in real life) undocumented workers. I lived near the Salinas Valley for another 20 years and volunteered time to help farm workers. I'm a huge fan of the asylum system. Yet when the system is overwhelmed precisely because people know the law cannot be enforced, and the demand for labor is huge, then many more people will come for purely economic reasons and overwhelm the asylum system. Citizens, for whatever reasons, valid or invalid, will be upset and seek support from whatever political party promises to make it stop. This is happening all over the world. This was Brexit. This was the success of the "post-fascist" Brothers of Italy. Marine Le Pen in France, Orban and Trump. Check the EU election results the other day. So you'll have to forgive me if some philosophical distinction about the unworthiness of the law ends up being used as an excuse for bringing these awful people of the far-right to power. That, to me, the lack of political pragmatism, is the most thought-terminating cliche I can think of. It's like progressives saw the rise of the Right and said, Hmmm... what can we do to make this a complete success? While I can agree with you in principle, I can moderate my expectations for progress in my lifetime so as to not rip a whole in the fabric of society.
This is yeoman’s work - debunking Kristoff. Nicely done!
The immigration issue makes me tired to think about, knowing that it’s just a messaging issue for Republicans, and we won’t actually do most of the things which would help.
The point of immigration being a messaging issue is for it to be talked up as a huge problem when a Democrat is president, and then to be not talked about when a Republican is president. There can be differences in policy, but mostly the difference is in how it is talked about by the GOP.
Agreed. Kristof frequently (always?) abstracts from personal anecdotes as if there weren’t a giant industry (some might call it the Ideas Industry) that has studied immigration from an economic and sociological perspective, both quantitatively and qualitatively, and there’s political and historical studies as well.
The problem is that the results of pretty much any serious analysis of the matter is "yes, we are leaving trillions of dollars on the table and crushing millions of lives out of narrow mindness, sheer bigotry and legislative inertia", which means the crazy libertarians and crazy leftists types are right and the soi-disant sensible centrists are murderously wrong, which is something Kristoff is basically constitutionally unable to admit
Something I wonder about is how much anyone really notices immigrants. In my sub, there are more immigrants than native born, most I suspect illegal. The biggest problem they cause is that they park their ubiquitous white vans on the street. Around here, the trades & the hospitality industry depend on them, and I think that's true in most metro areas. My cousin's restaurant in South Bend certainly did. So I wonder if #MAGA politicians, who've never met a lie they didn't spread, haven't created a crisis where there isn't one. What do you think?
You can always spot the tell. It’s when they drag out the big numbers that our rickety old republic couldn’t possibly bear!! We cannot save all the billions in need. It’s a distraction. Big numbers are scary sounding, and it adds confusion to the story rather than clarity.
Yes the immigration and asylum numbers are big, but compared to the size of our country and our economy it’s shouldn’t be that big a deal. We’ve got huge swaths of this country literally dying on the vine. Places in the “Heartland,” whose most pressing need right now is young hardworking families to move in. They shouldn’t be picky about what they spice dinner with.
I bet there are still ghost neighborhoods leftover from 2008 that we could fill with grateful people almost instantly.
I don’t understand the point of op-ed writers. Are they ever qualified? Do they ever know what they’re talking about? It seems impossible given they cover so many things, that they could really know very much about them.
Too bad the sanctuary seekers got caught in a national election.
The rethuglicans want to run on illegal immigration as their main issue as they don't have any others. The plan is to underfund the Border Patrol and the courts so the current surge can't be handled effectively and they can "View With Alarm".
Also many of the seekers have been scammed by coyotes into believing they can claim asylum and get jobs and stay.
Your "hot take" (and it really does seem to be a mostly emotional argument, Daniel) elides a few critical points. One, rational, moderate citizens don't want their fellow citizens to never consider new evidence and (god forbid!) change their minds. Hence faulting Kristof for deviating from a past stance is disingenuous at best. Two, pronouncing his arguments as "extremely" faulty is nothing short of displaying your own unmitigated certainty of your own position, and smart people know better than to believe everything they think. It's fair to point out that some of Kristof's argument is based on anecdotal evidence, but then you neglect to mention the more objective evidence that he does provide. Three, while there is nothing wrong with arguing pro-immigration based on the economics (which I think are sound arguments), you have ignored something more important: the law. There are many, many, many, many, many of us (I myself am first generation; forgive me for being anecdotal) who welcome immigrants and wish that more immigration would be allowed, while also being able to hold a more important principle in our heads at the same time: this is a nation of laws, and when you want something changed, you have to convince enough people and change the laws. Asylum is an incredibly worthy ideal that has been trashed by the rush to the border of millions from all over the world for purely economic reasons. Entering the country illegally in order to claim asylum, instead of turning yourself in to the authorities at a port of entry in order to do so, is a complete bastardization of the overwhelmed process. And that trashing of the process is enabled by people whose ideals of a borderless world conflict with the actual law of the land, and they are too lazy to work for change. It's progressive "yard sign politics" at its worst. Don't get me wrong; I love progressives, I lived and worked in San Francisco for almost 20 years, and some of my best friends are still in that bubble. What they don't realize is that the highly-principled countries that they admire the most, i.e. Europe, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, etc., have very tough immigration laws.
It’s always nice to have someone around with the confidence to decide which of their miserable neighbors is truly worthy of aid and comfort from (checks notes,) the richest country in history,) and which are just trying to pull a fast one to (shuffles notes again,) feed their family because home has no economy anymore.
It's not even being worthy of aid, it's being worthy of aiding themselves by engaging in voluntary transactions.
They are burning trillions of $ on a bonfire of bigotry, and then acting all smarmy if somebody notices.
Lou, regardless of how you feel about your neighbors and how much you actually do to help them, you don't get to decide which laws apply and which laws do not. So go ahead and impute greedy motives to me, even though I clearly stated that I'm in favor of increased legal immigration and am also a big fan of the asylum project. Listen, I don't care how my neighbors got here, I will always help them. You want to believe that everyone who disagrees with you must be greedy or racist, which is quite childish and a hallmark of progressives. If you want populist authoritarian schmucks like Trump, Orban, Bolsonaro, Meloni, Geert Wilders and many others to gain power, keep pretending that legal immigration doesn't matter to over half the country.
And you want to imply that anyone who questions the severity of the crisis, the nature of the response or the reasons anyone might be suspicious of various actors motives as if we are starry eyed bleeding hearts at best or comical anarchists at worst.
The current legal regime is a bipartisan mess incapable of handling the influx of migrants no matter what their reasons for coming. I think we both agree that reforming that process should be a legislative priority.
But you are fooling yourself if you think you don’t care how your neighbor got here, you’ve been clear about that. You care if they got here legally. Whether they have a case for asylum or not, whether we’ve even tried to determine that status are both irrelevant.
Trump, Orban et al have risen to power by appealing to crude nativist ideologies that demonize immigrants, racial, religious and sexual minorities and women because there are evidently enough racists and fascists out there who feel comfortable cheering them on. Also by cheating a lot then bending the law to cover their asses.
It’s legalism, abusing the law to pervert justice. And speaking of abuse I’m sure a solution to our immigration problems that involves locking people up will work great in our top notch and perfectly humane legal system.
You may think that's my implication, but in principle I actually agree with your suspicions, and with your wish that people could just "get over it" and be like you and I, welcoming any and all immigrants. But in the real world, I'm inclined to agree with Andrew Sullivan's take, that it's as if progressives saw the rise of Right and said "what's the one thing we can do to make this a complete success?" We do both agree that reforming the immigration system is a top priority. (Btw, if you'd like to hear a well-done podcast on immigration, I enjoyed a recent 3-part series on the Freakonomics Radio podcast.) I don't think the legislative process is an irredeemable mess. We almost got there a few months ago, if not for Trump and his political needs. Which begs the question, whence Trump? You think chicken ("Trump, Orban, et al"), I think egg. Just as when I lived in Italy a few years ago, and listening to my Aunt in England pre-Brexit, and growing up on the border with Mexico, and having an immediate family full of immigrants, and volunteering at agencies that assist undocumented farm workers, I've learned there are plenty of people who for reasons both valid and bigoted are against illegal immigration, especially on a massive scale. If you'd have them all be racists and fascists, then that's part of the progressive "mind"set that I'm against. People can disagree with me without being evil. As far as my personal particulars go, I'd recommend for the sake of civilized discourse that you don't presume to know more about how someone is than the person himself.
I’m sorry, but I don’t buy the “liberals made me racist,” framing of the fascism problem. It’s “look what you made me do,” politics, it excuses reactionary bigotry as understandable if there’s a “crisis.” I’m not trying to paint everyone who disagrees with me as evil, I’m saying that focusing on the legality or illegality of someone’s entry into this country is doing the fascists job for them by signaling that it is ok to consider immigrants a threat. Because they are CRIMINALS. They BROKE THE LAW! And we can’t just LET people break the LAW!
We don’t get to choose what laws we obey, but we do have a choice in what laws we ENFORCE and how we do so, as well as the rhetoric we deploy in support of those laws.
That's okay, I had no expectation of convincing you of anything. You're not buying it has no bearing on whether it's right or wrong.
There are many views on immigration, but all agree: It should not be done illegally.
So... I agree that this whole "open border" trope is another Republican hysteria that they will not work on in good fairh...
One anecdote on my side though...
In the 80s I was teaching at UC Santa Cruz, and building a granola factory on the West Side. Every carpenter and framer in the Cruz was booked, making the unheard of $25/hour, and there was a building & remodeling boom as the first wave of Silicon Valley yuppies poured over the coast range.
Then - bang - all the big contractors took over and had all undocumented crews making $8/hour. The quality went down for awhile but sometimes went up! (Especialy with stone work).
But it wiped out a whole sector...
Things seem stable now although I'm always saddened to see the guys at Home Depot hoping to grab a few hours... 40 years later, the going rate is $25/hr...