I think you may have taken me the wrong way. I'm agreeing with you about office work. I meant that the claim that "nobody wants to work" is absurd in that context. And I'm didn't say that immigrants doing blue-collar work are or are not getting exploited. All I'm saying is that in the US we systematically devalued manual work relative to white-collar work for about fifty years, and now we are facing a giant shortfall of skilled trades people. "To get a good job, get a good education" was the slogan, and it was part of a drive to get going to college to be the default. It's not me saying that Americans aren't showing up for careers in the trades--it's the US Department of Labor and all sorts of trade associations.