The growth is from the demand side - people are buying more right now.
You say that as if the jobs taken by illegals exist in some alternate universe where simple economic principles don't apply.
If an illegal immigrant's job is vacant (because he couldn't enter the country) and a would-be manufacturing worker fills that job, that obviously has a direct impact on the manufacturer's ability to hire that worker. He's no longer looking for a job because he filled a vacancy left by an illegal immigrant.
If your business model relies on wages being suppressed by those illegal workers, then maybe your business deserves to go bankrupt when the supply dries up and Americans start demanding $15/hour.
Undocumented workers take the jobs because there is no financial incentive for an owner to risk breaking the law unless they are getting cash back. The worker is basically paying their employer to break the law.
Interesting hypothesis... I was under the impression that many farmers operate on thin margins these days.
In other words: you can fill part of your staff with interchangeable workers, but not all of it.
Most traditional manufacturing jobs require being able to read/write the native language. Also, manufacturing companies are sometimes audited by standard bodies that involve interviews with workers (mainly to see if they understand quality control).
>In some industries the labour shortage seems acute. Now is not a good time for Americans to remodel their bathrooms: tile and terrazzo contractors earn 11% more per hour than a year ago (and fully one-third more than in 2014).
This is exactly the type of jobs that have been flooded by immigrants from Latin America - both illegal and legal - for decades. I speak Spanish and often talk with immigrants at bars or wherever, and they work in numerous industries.
The one thing that changed my view of the whole system was realizing that absolutely no company gives a shit about the laws. Guys who had been here a year or less, couldn't speak any English, were hired for government contracting jobs on roads and the metro paying tons of overtime at near-union wages.
Also, labor markets are fluid. If a citizen can make more in construction, he might quit his shitty manufacturing job.
But, hey, anything to continue with the absurd narrative that massive immigration hasn't been a very major part of wage destruction for both blue-collar and also white-collar jobs via H1Bs, OPT, L1, etc.
This breaks the HN guidelines outright. We ban accounts that make a habit of that, so please read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and don't.