Catherwood LibraryILR School

Some of the casualties of America?s housing bust are easy to spot up and down California?s Central Valley. But another set of losers is less visible: the immigrant workers, mostly illegal, who rode the construction boom while it lasted and now find jobs on building sites few and far between. Offering more than $10 an hour as well as new skills and a shot at upward mobility, construction provided many illegal immigrants the best job they ever had, a step up from the backbreaking work reserved for those toiling without legal authorization, which in the Central Valley mostly meant pruning and picking in fruit and vegetable fields. But as building jobs have grown scarce, many of the workers who left farm labor a few years ago are returning to where they came from.