What About? Answering Common Questions & Myths

Got questions? So do we. This page tackles the “What about…?” objections we hear most often about immigrant labor, construction, and design. We walk through the facts, the history, and why design still demands labor—no matter where that worker was born.

Anti‑immigrant talking points show up everywhere—from neighborhood meetings to national politics. Here we answer the most common “What about…?” questions with data, history, and what we see on real job sites.

What about people who “did it the right way”?

Many U.S. families have a story about a grandparent who “stood in line” and came legally. The line they stood in barely exists today. For most low‑wage workers in construction, landscaping, caregiving, and food service, there is no realistic visa category and no usable”line” to join.

Past waves of European immigrants came under a system with no numerical caps, no modern visa screening, and far fewer barriers. Today’s workers are blamed for “cheating” while trying to do the same thing: find work, support families, and contribute to the communities that hire them.

What about immigrants “taking jobs”?

Construction, landscape, and maintenance firms across the country report chronic labor shortages. The work is hard, seasonal, and increasingly unappealing to native‑born workers. Immigrant workers are filling gaps, not displacing a long line of citizens waiting for these jobs.

Where wages, safety, and training improve, both immigrant and U.S.‑born workers benefit. The real competition isn’t between workers at the bottom; it’s between business models that invest in a skilled workforce and those that rely on churn and exploitation.

What about wages and “cheap labor”?

Wages are driven down when employers can treat people as disposable. That is true whether workers were born in Virginia or Veracruz. The problem is not immigrant workers themselves, but systems that keep them afraid to speak up, organize, or leave unsafe jobs.

When immigrant workers have status, protections, and bargaining power, they stop being”cheap labor” and start being what they already are: skilled tradespeople who can demand fair pay. Raising the floor for them raises the floor for everyone in the industry.

WHAT ABOUT IMMIGRANT VOTER FRAUD?

The claim that immigrants—especially undocumented immigrants—are voting in large numbers is a talking point, not a fact. Every serious review of voter rolls and election results shows the same pattern: noncitizen voting is extremely rare, caught at tiny fractions of a percent, and nowhere near large enough to sway national elections[9][10][11][12].

Over the last few decades, audits of hundreds of millions of ballots and registrations have turned up only scattered cases of noncitizens on the rolls or casting a ballot—often by mistake, through DMV or paperwork errors, not organized fraud[9][10][11][13]. One large database built by a conservative think tank to prove the opposite found just 68 proven cases of noncitizens voting across roughly forty years—less than 0.0001 percent of all votes cast in that period[9]. Within that, only about ten cases involved undocumented immigrants[9].

When states run high‑profile sweeps of their voter rolls, the big, scary numbers almost always shrink on closer inspection. Florida’s 180,000 “suspected noncitizen” voters dwindled to just 207—about 0.001 percent of the state’s 11.4 million registered voters—once officials checked the data[11]. In Ohio, 126 noncitizens were found to have voted out of about 8 million registrations—again, a tiny fraction[10]. Reviews in other states routinely end the same way: a handful of cases, often tied to confusion about eligibility or clerical error, not a hidden army of “illegal voters”[13][14][15].

Despite this, immigrant communities are being targeted with aggressive investigations and threats over a problem the government’s own reviews keep calling “isolated” and “rare”[13][14][16]. Dragging immigration enforcement into routine election administration doesn’t protect democracy; it makes naturalized citizens and mixed‑status families afraid to participate at all.

What about immigrants not paying taxes?

There’s a stubborn myth that immigrants “don’t pay taxes” and just drain public services. In reality, immigrant workers are woven into the tax system at every level—federal, state, and local. They pay income taxes (often using ITINs), payroll taxes taken out of their checks, sales tax on every purchase, and property taxes through rent or mortgages.

Undocumented immigrants alone paid about 96.7 billion dollars in federal, state, and local taxes in 2022—roughly 8,889 dollars per person[1][2][3]. That includes:

• About 25.7 billion dollars into Social Security
• About 6.4 billion dollars into Medicare
• About 1.8 billion dollars into unemployment insurance
• Roughly 37.3 billion dollars to state and local governments (sales, property, and income taxes)

Most of those social insurance dollars support programs that undocumented workers are barred from using—meaning they are literally subsidizing benefits they cannot claim[1][4][5]. One national analysis finds that in 40 states, undocumented immigrants pay a higher effective state and local tax rate than the top 1 percent of households[1][6].

When you zoom out to all immigrants (regardless of status), their combined federal, state, and local tax contributions are in the hundreds of billions each year[7][8]. They are not standing outside the system—they are funding Social Security, Medicare, schools, and infrastructure alongside everyone else.

What about Crime and Safety?

The stereotype of the “criminal immigrant” is powerful—and wrong. Most people targeted for detention and deportation have no violent criminal record. A large share have no U.S.criminal conviction at all, or only minor traffic or immigration‑related offenses.

On actual sites, the safety crisis is not “dangerous workers”; it’s dangerous conditions: cuts to training, pressure to rush, weak enforcement of existing safety rules. When we invest in safer working conditions and training, everyone on the project benefits.

What about schools, hospitals, and “burdens”?

Immigrant families use schools and services because they live here, work here, and pay taxes here. Local budgets feel strained when we build our economy on low‑wage work but refuse to update how we fund and plan schools, transportation, and housing.

The design world understands this: you don’t blame the building when the client under‑funds maintenance. The answer is smart, inclusive planning—not treating the workers who build and maintain our communities as the problem.

What about waiting for “the right time”?

“Now isn’t the time” is a familiar refrain, but the economy has already been running on immigrant labor for decades. Our infrastructure bills, climate goals, and housing plans assume crews will be there to pour concrete, plant trees, and hang drywall.

Deferring regularization and reform just keeps a big share of the workforce in limbo. That makes planning harder, not easier. If design must be proactive, so must labor and immigration policy.

Whataboutism or real questions?

Some “What about…?” questions are honest concerns. Others are meant to distract—from gutted labor standards, chronic under‑investment, and political choices that keep the workforce precarious.

Design Demands Labor is interested in real questions. If you have one we haven’t covered here, we invite you to ask it directly. We’ll keep updating this page with thoughtful responses grounded in history, data, and what we see in the field.