¡Viva Riesgo Calculado!

Blitzer,

Thats just about an impossible feat. The townhomes you mentioned illustrate the problem perfectly.

The cost of the house is usually land and building. Each house is on a different sized and located piece of property.

The townhomes for example dont actually own any land, most likely. The association owns the land.

To compound the problem the price of the land is dependent on the sale of the house. To find the price of the land one takes the costs to develop and build the house and subtracts them from the sale price and thats the value of the land. IE they are mutually dependent. Re-Sale houses are even more convoluted.

So to answer your question he cant really! To many unknows and unique variables.

In SoCal there are a bunch of trades where residential and commerical cross.

I've never seen so many masons in my life!

I don't see any contradiction - on the way up, the jobs were filled by illegals, so they are missed both going up and going down.

Don I think that both illegals and legals grew during the boom. The illegals are the first to go. (All speculation)

How about this news from AP for a change ?

AZ legislator wants McCain to hear Sept. 11 suspicions

Why would illegals return to Mexico or wherever else they are from? Work? Better un- or under-employed in the US than working in a Third-world paradise.

Umm, 'cause they want money to remit home? You think they came all the way here just to bang yer daughter or what?

Sort of like California, Phoenix, Vegas...?

I know you're kidding, but Mexico is far worse. At least our rich are at least forced to support some safety net. There even rudimentary schooling is not a given.

My guess is that quite a few of the illegals are leaving Phoenix. Taxable sales in AZ are down 25% from Q107: Ariz. taxable sales down by $4 billion

No doubt fewer hours per worker is a large factor. Also the average house size is currently larger since there is very little new construction at the bottom end of the market.

But, the Deutsche Bank reasoning makes sense to me. There were roughly 3,500,000 'documented' residential construction workers at the peak of residential construction. There were probably another 3,500,000 'undocumented' construction workers, for a total of 7,000,000 documented and undocumented residential construction workers. A 50% drop in residential construction would result in about a 35%, or a 2,450,000 drop in total residential construction workers. 500,000 of that 2,450,000 drop is from 'documented' workers (14 %unemployment), 1,950,000 of that 2,450,000 drop is from 'undocumented' workers (55% unemployment). note: I don't like the term undocumented, I prefer the term illegal, it just seemed to fit better here.

As some others have said, the discrepancy is most probably due to illegal alien workers in the construction industry (or the more PC term "undocumented workers"). They weren't counted when they were working, and they aren't counted when they are not working. Also, since they are here illegally, they are probably the first to be fired.

Maybe undocumented workers is actually an accurate term since their presence is undocumented. Also, they are paid in cash and there is no documentation of the transaction. There are no taxes and Social Security deducted.

Hence, when you look at "official" employment and unemployment numbers they don't make sense. That's the problem with a large shadow economy (presently estimated to be more than $1 Trillion).

"No work....crime will escalate."

Maybe not in the US, since the illegals probably went back to Mexico when they became unemployed. Cheaper to live there than in the US.

The construction industry probably didn't count them either on the way up or the way down since they generally are subcontractors, i.e. framers, concrete workers, roofers.

In Arizona we have seen the impact even if the official BLS numbers don't show it. Vacancy rates in B and C apartments have gone through the roof. Most anectodal evidence says they didn't go back to Mexico but simply migrated to Texas where the construction industry still has legs.

Arizona has also implemented some of the toughest employment verification laws in the nation (probably ill advised in my opinion) that have exacerbated the problem.

Another statistic that would be skewed (or maybe screwed?) by the shadow economy is the productivity numbers. If there are a really large number of undocumented workers that aren't being counted in a particular industry, then the productivity being reported (output per man-hour) is artificially high for that industry.

Maybe the productivity numbers being crowed about by the Gov't are just as phony as the other numbers (CPI, inflation, etc).

Yeah, I actually tend to agree, at the same time I'd like to see if we get $5 lettuce or not, and am concerned about the potential stress to the health and educational system. I'd just like to see the government back-up why they've just allowed this problem to balloon for the past 22 years.

Anyways, I think that more states will follow Arizona, and then maybe the people can decide rather than having a de facto decision forced down their throats. Afterall, de facto government forcedowns aren't only limited to things like inflation, and the printing press... representative democracy my butt...

I think its mostly the hours worked. The BLS weekly hours index for construction is down about 7% over the past 18 months. This would correspond to about 400-500 thousand less workers if hours remained unchanged.

In Response To YSLP:

Ahem. Fixed it. If every state does what Arizona did than we could actually get real immigration reform and debate from Congress, as opposed to the whole "shadow debate" we get now.

Let me drop some science on you that you are welcome to accept or reject. I imagine you'll reject it but I wouldn't want you to just be guilty of ignorance.

Immigration is about where the people are coming from. If you want a real immigration solution, change conditions at the source of the migration. Change things here, you incur a massive outlay, social repercussions, and the problem changes into a new problem. Typically they come in armies instead of starvelings.

The military solution is to put whole nations to the sword, but if you don't expand into the space yourself, someone else will. Since mature empires are at some limit(s) of their administrative means, you have a worse hand than aggressive states competing with you to exploit the space, and the fact that migration occurs suggests a context of stress and competition virtually guarantees there will be aggressive competitiors.

Do you want to solve the immigration problem rather than spending more money your state doesn't have to run around and establish a police state that has all the administrative mechanism in place for mass roundups and total population surveillance? Help your neighbors establish vast prosperity. Nothing drives down birthrates and sticks people to the land better than education and prosperity. I would say something about the unintended consequences and budgetary realities of your approach, but I'm sure you're untroubled by such irrelevancies.

Instead of saying, "this will happen if we crack down..." those who want a reasonable immigration policy will actually see what the harm is. As it is we've got defacto "amnesty" for illegal employers!

Stop, thief! That's the public property "reasonable" that you're making off with to decorate your plans! Reasonable is something both parties agree on, not something you proclaim unilaterally in an attempt to brand your argument as a moderate viewpoint. Is this the "debate" you want?

Sorry if you think I'm handling you a little roughly, but tricks like this are both amateurish and obstructive of finding good policy solutions. If your argument needs dishonesty to sell it, how good is it? QED; how many other right wing policies have been pushed with this degree of intellectual dishonesty that then turned out to be total recipes for failure? All of them? Maybe you should stop having good ideas for a while, the Republic can't take many more strokes of anxious white guy genius.

Please don't think I'm some kind of liberal you can just dismiss. I wholeheartedly support English as the official language of state. We're a disparate people, economical administration dictates a court language and it benefits the universalist, humanist scope of the American charter for us all to speak together.

I wholeheartedly support finding a solution to the waves of migration before independent communities spring up and demand unification with their homeland.

The part where it's yet another excuse to indulge infantile Republican fantasies of men in mirror sunglasses goose-stepping in xenophobic unison while the actual crisis goes unmet, that is where we part ways. Found your police state on your own dime, we need to plant grass to stabilize the dunes of Mexico and points south.

Too bad someone threw away all the money and political to meet this urgent need try and "flip" a few states in the Persian Gulf. What, he's not chained to you, you're chained to him? What an unfortunate turnabout, whocoodanode. Don't come crying to me that all the money's spent and it's Hannibal ad portas. I could have told you before Iraq War II: The Profiteering Boogaloo that even if Hussein had nukes, the cost to imperial hegemony and policy flexibility made the war one best unfought.

Yeah, I actually tend to agree, at the same time I'd like to see if we get $5 lettuce or not, and am concerned about the potential stress to the health and educational system. I'd just like to see the government back-up why they've just allowed this problem to balloon for the past 22 years.

Vested interests? Popular unwillingness to engage in the kind of hardcore nation-building and cultural partnerships we'd need to fully pacify these regions? Desire to turn our attention to "sexy" places farther away like China and the Middle East? General inability to frame problems effectively and implement meaningful policy in response due to an ignorant citizenry and a dysfunctional state apparatus probably covers most of it, I think.

Anyways, I think that more states will follow Arizona, and then maybe the people can decide rather than having a de facto decision forced down their throats. Afterall, de facto government forcedowns aren't only limited to things like inflation, and the printing press... representative democracy my butt...

I would say you have definitely gotten the government you deserve.

Oh, now it's back, that's not good.

Jorod:

We should begin to see a large increase in crime.

Poor people lead to crime. Ignorant people lead to crime. Poorly socialized people lead to crime. People who want to find crime to benefit their ulterior motives lead to crime.

America has done a very fine job of creating all the above and a very poor job at fighting the root causes of crime; mostly because the point was sating the bloodlust of a bunch of threatened white geezers.

If you want to point at the segment of crime comitted by immigrants, illegal or otherwise, and say that's the real problem, I can't stop you. This isn't an actual discussion, you are just working a straw man to gain political credibility with people who feel threatened. You'll pick whatever measures look expedient and discard them when they become inconvenient.

If you want to actually solve the problem, you better start fighting the migration and not the migrants.

1. Secure borders.

Rhetorical theatrics. Making it a short statement doesn't make it any less ludicrously absolute. I suppose we will be balancing the costs of security against the notional costs of a nuclear bomb that hasn't exploded yet and that can thus be subject to Enron-style book-as-needed accounting, and not against alternative policies?

"Secure" is a meaningless term without an objective measure. Show me a cost-per-head and make yourself liable for it when the number you cite is just some imaginary crap written on the first slice of the salami. The most secure border is the one that needs no defense. All other types are inferior.

2. Mexico must institute economic reforms and abolish its monopolies, and secure ITS border.

Agreed. And we must make that happen.

3. We need an intelligent guest worker program.

Disagree. I'm an economic nationalist. If you have a job an American won't do, you either need to develop better capital goods, change your location, increase your rate of pay or otherwise make yourself able to attract workers.

Gastarbeiters are an economic crutch that does nothing to strengthen the Republic by giving its people jobs, it only makes the politically connected rich, richer. Plow the money into making jobs for Americans and staunching the tide of migrants at its source.