Americans are struggling to afford basic necessities, but the never-ending promotion of illegal aliens as essential to the US economy soldiers on. A leftist news organization tied to the dark money network of notorious globalist progressive billionaire George Soros has platformed “the leading association for the construction industry” informing belt-tightening citizens that new housing simply cannot be built in this country without an army of illegals laying down the tiles and hammering the nails.
“A perfect storm of harsh immigration enforcement, aging journeymen and a building boom for data centers is wreaking havoc on the nation’s supply of skilled trade workers,” News From the States, a publication of States Newsroom that focuses on “state governments, policies and politics,” reported on October 8.
Let’s identify the source here.
“Before 2019, the Newsroom Network was a fiscally sponsored project of the Hopewell Fund, a left-of-center 501(c)(3) funding and fiscal sponsorship nonprofit managed by the Washington, DC-based consultancy firm Arabella Advisors, which manages multiple high-dollar left-leaning philanthropic organizations,” watchdog organization Influence Watch states. Soros is a long-time major financial backer of Arabella’s numerous ventures.
What makes the article especially noteworthy is seeing the Soros journalism tree openly amplifying long-time talking points of construction industry bigwigs – and not in a shy way.
‘There Are No American Kids Willing to Install Roofs in Central Texas’
“Over 50% of craft workers are born outside the United States. We don’t know that they’re illegal but frankly DHS (the Department of Homeland Security) is not being that discriminating in whom they pick up or who feels threatened by them,” Ken Simonson, “chief economist” for the Association of General Contractors of America, told the outlet. “One answer is for the government to allow more worker visas for construction and other trades, he said,” News From the States stresses.
“We’ve been stymied for 20 years or longer trying to get construction treated similarly to agriculture, where if you can demonstrate that there isn’t enough Americans interested in a job you can bring in somebody,” Simonson asserted, spelling out the precise goals of the industry.
The usual description of the work involved as harsh and dirty and thus not palatable for delicate Americans is trotted out once again. “There are no American kids willing to install roofs in Central Texas,” an anonymous roofing contractor is quoted as saying in a 2026 report conducted by John Burns Research and Consulting, “an independent housing research company.”
“Tough immigration reform and not enough Americans to fill the void,” another contractor laments in the report. “A lot of these people have been deported. The next generation is complacent and does not want to do physical work,” a Florida roofer added.
This wooden echoing of boilerplate construction industry lobbying is all the more jarring when one considers the profoundly negative publicity housing manufacturers have received in recent years. Horror stories of child laborers and suppressed wages are not difficult to find.
Biden’s Unaccompanied Minors Hit the Rooftop
Hannah Dreier, a reporter for The New York Times, won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize in Investigative Reporting for a series of articles in 2023 describing the nightmare of child labor roofers in America. The progressive establishment newspaper of record directly tied the problem to the rise of unaccompanied minors illegally crossing the southern border during the Biden administration.
“The rise of child roofers comes as young people are crossing the southern border alone in record numbers. Nearly 400,000 children have come to the United States since 2021 without their parents, and a majority have ended up working, The New York Times has reported in a series of articles this year,” a Dec. 2023 interactive piece titled “Children Risk Their Lives Building America’s Roofs” detailed. “The most common job for these children is under-the-table work in roofing and construction, according to teachers, social workers, labor organizers and federal investigators. Roofing is plentiful and pays better than many of the other jobs these children can get.”
The practice is so commonplace it has its own subculture.
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“They call themselves ‘ruferitos’ on social media. In videos like these, they talk about being underage and pose on rooftops and ladders, often without the required safety gear,” the paper notes. “One slip can be fatal.”
How young are these kids?
“In New Orleans, Juan Nasario said he had been replacing roofs during 12-hour shifts nearly every day since he arrived from Guatemala four years ago, when he was 10,” The Times’ account continues.
Tragic tales of youngsters grievously injured on the job abound. “A 16-year-old fell off a roof in Arkansas and shattered his back. A 15-year-old in Florida was burned all over after he slipped from a roof and onto a vat of hot tar. A child in Illinois stepped through a skylight and fractured his spine,” The Times’ states.
Low-Paid Illegals as ‘Critical Resource’ For Construction Industry
These children can make more money working on a roof than they can from the other limited employment options available in the illegal alien shadow economy. Yet construction work is not an avenue out of poverty for these young illegals.
“Regardless of their legal status, immigrant construction workers’ salaries often fall under the living wage needed to afford basic necessities, according to a 2024 survey by the University of Illinois Chicago and the Workers Defense Project in Texas,” The Houston Chronicle reported in 2025.
The Chronicle disturbingly writes that this labor pool has become fundamental to housing construction in the Lone Star State.
“Access to low-wage workers, who are often foreign-born and sometimes undocumented, remains a critical resource for construction companies responding to steady building demand in Texas,” the lead sentence of the article declares.
As with an agriculture industry that has been largely successful in cementing a perception that an illegal alien workforce is an inevitable requirement, plausible denial and willful ignorance of laborers’ legal status are a standard feature of the construction milieu today.
“Construction is just such a fissured industry. A homebuilder may not have any undocumented construction workers on their payroll, but they’re going to have a contractor, and subcontractors below, there could be five layers,” Laura Perez-Boston, an organizer with the illegal alien employee advocacy organization Workers Defense in Houston, told the paper.
Given the widespread child labor scandals, below poverty-level wages and see-no-evil approach to their own employees, it should be difficult to believe that high-quality “skilled” construction work will suffer without illegal aliens.
A fascinating 2006 Minnesota Public Radio article warned about where all this was heading. A local roofer who saw the new normal solidifying before his eyes and desperately did not want to have to employ illegal aliens described the work being performed by these cheap-labor crews.
“On the roof in Brooklyn Park, roofer Steve Hackbarth takes issue with the notion that quality has not suffered. Hackbarth says a lot of his business now involves fixing mistakes by inexperienced Mexican crews,” the article reads. “Just slapped (the shingles) on, and they did it wrong – nailed them too high and then eventually the shingles started blowing off, and the only answer to it was to re-do the whole roof,” he told MPR. “We’re going to see a lot of roofs having to be redone because people did them wrong.”
Is there any reason to believe a 10-year-old unaccompanied minor illegal alien is doing better work in 2026?
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