I’ve asked, more or less, this same question before, but I’d still like to hear more from Dopers around the world.
Millions of Mexicans come to the United States illegally to get jobs- usually low-pay, low-prestige jobs. Their defenders almost always insist that these illegal aliens are merely “doing the jobs Americans won’t do.” And there’s some truth to that- very few Americans are eager to pick grapes or wash dishes for a living.
But that gets me wondering…
Who picks the grapes in Australia’s thriving vineyards?
Who washes the dishes in fancy Parisian restaurants?
Who are the busboys in London?
Who works at slaughterhouses in Argentina?
In countries that DON’T have millions of illegal aliens from Mexico, who does the crappy jobs?
Do employers hire locals at a better wage than American employers offer? Do they use machinery? Do other countries have their OWN illegal aliens (from countries other than Mexico)?
I live in the Cayman Islands where about half the workforce are immigrants. There are plenty of jobs that are lower skill and Caymanians typically will not do.
Landscapers, Domestic helpers, shop clerks, waiters, hospitality workers, construction workers and many more occupations are largely filled by legal expats. Getting a legal work visa is not hard if an employer is unable to hire locally. It takes six weeks or less normally to process a work visa.
There are other occupations for which there are not enough Caymanians with the proper qualifications. Doctors, Accountants, Lawyers, and scuba instructors amongst others are also filled by expats.
Lower wage immigrants come largely from Jamaica, Honduras, Cuba, and the Phillipines. Higher skill immigrants come largely from Canada, the US, and the UK.
In a population of about 60,000 we have immigrants from more than 120 countries.
I think it’s difficult in some countries to talk about the jobs that people won’t do.
Here in the UK, minimum wage is enough for a basic standard of living. There are plenty of people around without the skills and education to get a skilled job that would be happy to do virtually anything for minimum wage (obviously they would prefer to train for something better, but that’s another point).
While there are of course illegal workers being paid under MW, I don’t think it’s a significant part of the labour market here.
So, in answer to who does the relatively low-status jobs; Brits with relatively little education or skills and legal (for the most part) immigrants from South Asia and East Europe.
Ironically, often these legal immigrants are skilled and in many cases have degrees but are only offered basic jobs in the UK, particularly if their English is not perfect.
When I spent a half year in Switzerland in 1967, a year in 1970-71, and another in 1975-76, they had imported a million Italian “Fremdarbeiter” (foreign workers) to overcome a severe labor shortage and to do jobs the Swiss wouldn’t do. They eventually realized that it helped only a bit because, guess what, those Italians spent most of what they made in Switzerland and created almost enough demand to nullify the effect of the imported workers. This is why I’ve always felt that the claim that the immigrants are taking jobs away from Americans is mostly false independent of who would do what jobs.
In Germany, I know that for a long time, Turks were imported in large numbers as “Gastarbeiter” (guest workers, clearly a euphemism for “Fremdarbeiter”).
Russian visitors used to do the crap jobs in Poland. I’m an American migrant worker in Korea, but that’s not really analogous. I visited Guam not long ago where all the bartenders seemed to be Filipino (and the “oriental masseuses,” Chinese, I’m reliably told). On a recent visit to Prague, the strippers I chatted up were from Slovakia.
In Panama, most of the illegal immigrants are from Colombia. Panama has a much higher per capita income and standard of living than Colombia. The car washers and hookers are all Colombians.
And Panamanian Indians. The Ngobe Indians of western Panama have a large “comarca” (“homeland,” equivalent to a province) but there’s almost no cash economy there. They make money as migrant farm laborers both within Panama and by migrating to Costa Rica.
I’ve spent quite a bit of time in Gabon, which has one of the highest per capita incomes in sub-Saharan Africa due to oil and a relatively low population. There were large numbers of migrant laborers from all over West Africa there (who considered the Gabonese privileged and lazy.)
Your basic premise is bad so giving you the answer you want is difficult. You have been told that the illegal immigrants in the US are doing jobs Americans refuse to do. This is false. It would be correct to say that the illegal immigrants in the US are doing jobs Americans refuse to do for the rate of pay the employers are offering. If the employers were offering the rate of pay an American could make elsewhere for equal labor then Americans would be working for them. I am an American and I have washed dishes and I have done custodial work and I have worked as a dirty laborer, and I would do that type of work again. But I will not do that labor for half minimum wage. I have no problem finding minimum wage jobs. With the national economy as it is, there are no jobs that are too low prestige that Americans will not do them.
In Helsinki at least, most public transport drivers nowadays seem to be Estonian or Russian, or alternatively somewhere from Africa. It might be that different companies have different employee bases, but I travel a lot by bus on many different lines run by many different transportation companies and most often drivers will greet each other in Russian or Estonian when changing shifts.
Lots of construction workers are also Estonian (also Latvian and Lithuanian). Maintenance work like cleaning train stations or shopping centers is also quite widely staffed with immigrants. You also won’t see too many pizza/kebab restaurants staffed with ethnic Finns; mostly Turkish and Indian/Pakistani.
Some entrepreneurs have recently been bringing in berrypickers from Thailand to work in the Finnish woods; they work here for a month or two and earn approximately 2400 euros in total (after paying for their own flights, accommodation, and food…).
For the first one - at least when I did it myself some years ago, Australian grape-picking (indeed, most seasonal agricultural work) was done by backpacking tourists on a “working holiday” visa. This is/was a 1-year visa, which can be extended to two years under some circumstances, allowing the holder to legally work someplace for up to IIRC 3 months. The whole point of said visa is to get seasonal labour such as grape-picking done. So, a tourist gets this visa, pays for the ticket to Australia, works 3-6 months as a farmhand, and typically that income pays for the rest of the year’s visit - a year’s visit to Australia can fairly easily break even or even end up in the black with enough farm work. It’s a brilliant program, I think.
Dishwashers in France - francophones from the (former) overseas territories - typically west/north Africa. At least the ones my sister knew.
Slaughterhouses in Argentina: Bolivians.
Here in Brazil, perhaps because the government-mandated minimum wage is high enough, IME there’s no problem getting people to do the crappy legal jobs. The trouble is illegal employment (labour that isn’t declared and taxed), such as in illegal mines and sweatshop factories. Generally speaking that’s also done by Bolivians, with some immigrants from other neighbouring countries and a few desperate Brazilians.
:rolleyes: But in America, an able bodied man really can’t do that, not more than very briefly.
In countries where that can be done, it generally isn’t because workers have some rights, so that even the worst jobs pay enough to be worthwhile and the working conditions are relatively decent compared to what they would be in America.
Let’s not get into a debate about what constitutes “jobs Americans won’t do.” The basic question is who does low wage and menial jobs in other countries, not why.
If you want to debate the issue, open a new thread in Great Debates.
Chinas cities pull their cheap labor from the vast, very poor ritual inland. Shanghai has a standard of living on par with the US. Rural Guizhou has a standard of living on par with Ghana. Much of China is still heartbreakingly poor.
There are internal restrictions on where a person can live, and moving from the village to the city or from a poor region to a rich one requires a process much liked immigrating to another country. Realistically, for the very poor the only change to get out of the village legally is to special skill or marry someone there.
So many poor people move illegally, and they’ve much like illegal immigrants, without access to healthcare, schooling for their kids, or other government services. Typically working age people will leave their kids with the grandparents in the village and spend years in factory dormitories, where they can often earn in a month what they’d earn in a year back home. Life can be stark, especially for older migrants. I had a student whose parents works in separate factories a four hour bus ride from each other who had one day off every two weeks when they could spend a few hours with each other. They would try to get home once a year for Chinese New Year, but it can be tough to secure tickets for the several days journey when literally a billion people are doing the same thing. For younger migrants, mostly young women, it can be a bit more fun. Even a 12 hour day on the factory floor is more freedom than an early marriage in the village.