It’s from October, but this argument from Vice President Vance against the view that nobody will build houses except illegals is worth revisiting:

“This is one of the really deranged things that I think illegal immigration does to our society is it gets us in a mind-set of saying we can only build houses with illegal immigrants, when we have seven million — just men, not even women, just men — who have completely dropped out of the labor force. People say, well, Americans won’t do those jobs. Americans won’t do those jobs for below-the-table wages. They won’t do those jobs for non-living wages. But people will do those jobs, they will just do those jobs at certain wages,” Vance said.

A necessary addition — perhaps a deeper cause — is cultural.  We need to stop giving American workers the impression that it’s good enough to be made a client for government services or to work some menial minimum-wage job that was never meant to support a family.  Instead, we need to reinvigorate the sense of the value of producing things and working hard.  Of course I needed to support my family, but the greatest compensation from my years in construction was the feeling of having worked hard and created something that hadn’t been there when I started.

Beneath it all is a character issue.  Government policy has oversimplified our thinking about employment to treat it is as merely a financial exchange, and always sufficient to support a whole family.

To the contrary, employment policy should mostly stay out of the way, but to the extent it has an effect, it should foster the human drive that moves from miniscule pay for menial tasks through rewarding exertion to success through skill and wisdom.