Canada

But isn’t an awful lot of construction work have a foundation of (relatively) unskilled labor? I mean, you don’t just magically learn how to plumb, you apprentice for it.

From my own anecdotal experience in a high immigration and rapidly expanding urban area in the US, lots of unskilled workers become skilled here. They then start their own roofing, plumbing, waste, whatever subcontracting businesses, which largely employ unskilled immigrant workers. And the cycle continues. But these employers are always hungry for workers.

It also leads to a crazy cycle of exploitative subcontracting and cash based employment, which means bad labor protection and tax avoidance by everybody involved (including large land developers who employ all these little subcontractors). But I digress. And I would hope that Canadian labor protection is a bit more robust, but I’m not sure.

The point I’m trying to make is that unskilled labor is often very very important, and has historically been at the helm of large entrepreneurial classes, at least in North America and Europe. I’m not so sure about how this works in Asian economies, and I think this doesn’t hold true in places like the Middle East where labor rights are absolutely atrocious.

Immigrants are under-represented in the building trades. Although immigrants make up 23 per cent of the Canadian labour market, they comprise only about 18 per cent of workers in the construction industry.

sauce

If we're prioritizing these skills, it doesn't seem to be reflected in the labour market.