You assume that middle class Americans are willing, available and able to do those jobs when paid higher wages and benefits. In my many years I have yet to find “Americans” doing roofing jobs for example.
Most people screaming about how 'Americans' won't do jobs like farming or construction will look at a company named Salazar and assume that Salazar uses undocumented labor. These people will also drive by construct sites, count the number of white workers, and use that as a proxy for how many Americans are working on that job.
In 2015 when my grandparent's home was being torn down and rebuilt, our construction company used Peruvian and Portuguese undocumented labor, supervised by citizen foremen. We had to use our own electrical and plumbing to ensure it would pass city inspection (rather than have delays with corrections during intermediary visits) and complete on time.
And that's before we factor in that the over-the-table employee also costs SS, Medicare, unemployment insurance, overhead costs to administer all this because they clearly don't only have one employee, the list goes on.
One would have to assume that eventually, when roofers are paid as much as those of us who are sitting here reading hackernews, there will be a steady stream of workers inclined to fill these positions. I feel like this is the sort of textbook example taught in Econ 101, and if the "free market" can't even solve even this sort of basic problem without a serf class of undocumented immigrants, it would imply that American-style capitalism itself is a failed experiment.
If you pay roofers enough and make the job site as safe as possible they’ll do the job. But these companies would prefer to get easy, subservient labor with minimal safety equipment who can’t complain because they’ll get deported.
Artificially underpaying entire industries by turning a blind eye to labor laws or making up industry-specific below market value rules (like agricultural migrant labor visa programs) isn’t really a solution to the problem, in my opinion.
If every undocumented roofer was given a social security card and permission to work, they’d wonder why they’re risking their life on a roof when they’d get better pay, benefits, job security, and guaranteed retirement driving a bus for the city.
This 'Americans are too lazy' narrative is used as justification for suppressing wages below what previous generations of Americans had gotten enshrined in law as fair compensation for a certain level of risk and discomfort.
Landscaping, too.
I never understood this from an economic perspective. The USA has rules in place for hiring non-citizens to come the country and fill jobs in landscaping. There are X slots a year.
Locally, the landscaping companies were complaining they couldn't do the work without those slots since they couldn't find workers due to the administration cutting the available non-citizen slots. They would come on the radio, complain to a host about hiring college kids to work, but they would leave after a few days.
The landscaping companies weren't raising the wage paid to attract and keep the people who would stay, though. They did raise the wage slightly, but not enough to move the needle.
Shouldn't the wage raise until you attract those people willing to do the work and stay? In turn, the cost of landscaping would rise to the customers.
"X" is effectively zero. A few people get in legally via refugee status or family relationships, but in practice the number of green cards issued is a tiny, tiny fraction the number of jobs that are actually done by immigrant workers.
And it seems like covid isn't adjusting this much. Newly-unemployed legal workers are not rushing into fill gaps in, say, farm worker employment that were previously held by undocumented people. The "Americans won't do these jobs" theory seems to be holding.
If farm workers payed fair wages and provided good living conditions and proper safety and ergonomic tools then sure more workers work be citizens but the disconnect is so large farms would have to double or triple wage costs so it’s easy to claim that they raised wages a buck or 2 and there were still no takers.
Utterances like "Americans won't take these jobs," "We can't find people for this req," are incomplete. The complete characterization is "Americans won't take these job FOR THIS PAY." I did think that for a time, that if everyone was willing to pay a premium for, say, landscaping service, any kind of service really, the premium would pay for the value-added, and the entire industry would slowly be pulled up. I was willing to pay a premium for landscaping, to a company that paid good wages, that hired ethically, and purportedly did excellent work. I paid the premium and got shitty service all the same. This has happened so frequently (tried to be a conscientious consumer, paid the premium, got shitty work that engendered more work for me to fix) it eroded this thinking in me. How do I adequately price X when X+premium still gets me substandard X? The safe action is to default to market price, and the gig economy wage is sliding downward. I don't know how I can individually influence this.
Most of them would be relocated. And Americans will definitely work in restaurants, they do everywhere else. Somehow all of Europe and Canada manage to have crops as well - granted - there may need to be migrant worker program for harvest, but that would be reasonable actually, if it were done legally.
Consumer prices would rise no doubt.