Every few years, a discussion surfaces regarding reparations for the victims of an institution that was dismantled 160 years ago. Beginning in the 1960s, mountains of legislation and federal policies have been enacted in penance for a sin to which no living individual has any connection—and taxpayers have seen trillions of dollars spent to fund all those laws and policies.
There is, however, a group of living individuals to whom we owe a debt that can be paid. There are millions of American tradesmen, laborers, and business owners—people of all races—who have suffered from government policies and broken promises over the past 39 years.
In 1986, Ronald Reagan signed the IRCA (Immigration Reform and Control Act), a bill shepherded through the Democrat-controlled Congress by Speaker Tip O’Neill. IRCA was billed as a “once and for all solution to the immigration problem” and was based on three elements: granting amnesty to an estimated three million illegal aliens, securing the border, and making it illegal for employers to hire undocumented workers.
ImageFX.
Ten years passed with negligible change in both the influx of illegal immigrants and their employment. Employers claimed that there was no system for work eligibility verification and that they should be permitted to practice business as usual.
During the Clinton administration, House Speaker Newt Gingrich passed the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA), which the president signed in 1996. This gave employers a resource, E-Verify, that would allow them to establish whether a worker was eligible for employment. It was voluntary, though, to use the program, and a vanishingly small number of employers volunteered.
They had no idea…or maybe they did. Over the course of the next three decades, illegal immigration remained unchecked, and virtually no employers were prosecuted for illegally hiring illegal aliens. Successive administrations, including those of Bush, Clinton, Bush, and Obama, ignored the flood of illegal immigrants and the ease with which they found employment.
The US Census Bureau’s “official” estimate of illegal residents in 2015 was approximately 13 million, but most reasonable people would double that number. Then came the human flood during the Biden administration, adding an estimated 15 million more illegal migrants.
In the area of illegal immigration, reliable numbers are hard to come by, but a reasonable person could safely assume that 20-30 million illegal immigrants are currently residing in the US, and many of them have little trouble finding employment.
Many of these illegal workers find employment in the construction trades, where they are hired under false, unverified social security numbers or, more commonly, are paid by employers using an IRS form called a 1099. Contractors often designate their illegal employees as “1099 sub-contractors” and avoid paying taxes and insurance on the workers’ wages. Although this practice is illegal and immoral, it is quite common, and it has had a devastating effect on the trades.
Except for two years during the first Trump administration, real wages for trade workers have remained flat or lost ground in relation to the cost of living. A framing carpenter who made $20 per hour in 1990 makes $30 per hour in 2025. That same carpenter would need to make $42 per hour just to keep pace with inflation. This has driven millions of workers out of the trades and out of the job pool altogether. The labor participation rate for working-age males has slowly declined over the past thirty years and is now at an all-time low of 63%.
It is fashionable for contemporary politicians such as Sen. Chuck Schumer, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Rep. Jasmine Crocket to claim that illegal immigrants do the work that Americans don’t want to do. But this ignores one fact and disregards another. Americans in the trades cannot afford to work in 2025 for 2005 wages, and it is illegal to employ illegal immigrants.
American tradesmen are the victims of government betrayal and unscrupulous, immoral contractors.
The House of Representatives should take up a bill of reparations to compensate the American trade workers who have suffered decades of diminished wages because of government policies that have destroyed their earning power. Unlike the slaves that were freed after the Civil War, most of these workers are still alive, although untold tens of thousands have died deaths of despair.
The government can recover the cost of the reparations by fining or confiscating the assets of contractors and employers who built businesses hiring workers illegally. These employers and contractors not only avoided paying taxes and insurance on their workers, but they also drove honest employers and contractors out of business. The dishonest, immoral contractors had an immense advantage over those who operated morally and legally.
The reality is that we know that reparations for American workers will never happen, but the Trump Administration can do two things to put us back on the right path: deport all illegal immigrants and enforce labor laws, including E-Verify.
Cboland7@outlook.com
Jesus Christ is King
Comments are closed.