ICE agents are shutting down low-tech car wash companies in Los Angeles that profit from the city’s huge population of desperate migrants.
The police actions are pressuring the car wash companies to hire Americans at better wages and to invest in labor-saving automated car wash stations. An upgrade from manual labor to technology would reduce the need for the city’s taxpayers to help feed and house the illegal and underpaid workforce in the industry.
The left-wing Prospect reported some of the inspections:
Jasmine Delgado, a member of Westside Rapid Response, a community network that attempts to send witnesses to ICE workplace raids as they’re occurring, arrived at the car wash on Sunday just as ICE was throwing people into unmarked vans. The only ones left after the raid were children of one of the workers, who were working with their father on site. “It’s quick. They show up, grab people, whoever they can, and then leave,” she said. “They don’t want to make a scene, they don’t want to stay too long. And from what I’m hearing they’re trying to make quotas.”
White-collar progressives and manual-labor unions are increasingly siding with illegal migrants and their market-cheating employers. So, the Prospect’s editor describes the removal of black-market labor as a “catastrophe … for families, communities, the local economy, and the fabric of the city.”
Twitter is providing many videos of the operations and the shuttered car wash sites, and of people protesting or blocking ICE:
John Sandweg, who was in charge of ICE under President Barack Obama, told the Washington Post that ICE is under unprecedented pressure to raise deportation rates, and is going to “low-wage jobs where it’s likely you’re going to find people who are undocumented — that means car washes, Home Depot parking lots, anywhere you have low-skill, low-wage labor.”
ICE is also hitting car wash stations in other states, including Connecticut, Illinois, and Pennsylvania.
ICE’s pressure will shift more customers from companies to skilled legal experts who do custom work for better wages.
But the ICE pressure is also forcing U.S. companies to invest in more wage-boosting automation.
That automation trend is pushing operators in other states and countries to develop labor-saving, automated car wash services.
The damaging impact of migration on technology, productivity, and wages is evident in the United Kingdom, where the massive wave of illegal migrants halved the number of automated car wash centers. In 2015, the Daily Mail reported:
[Petrol Retailers Association] chairman Brian Madderson said: ‘Over the last 10 years, this has almost killed off the mechanical rollover car wash. About 70 per cent of all retail washes are now done by hand and the great majority of these people are completely unregulated.
‘They’re using all kinds of horrible chemicals, particularly to clean alloy wheels, and there’s very little done to stop this stuff just being flushed into the local waterways.’
Figures from one car wash manufacturer indicated that the number of petrol filling stations has declined from about 14,000 to 8,600 since 2000.
The BBC reported in January:
Mohamed Hamza, 34, of Granville Road, Peterborough, hired the workers from Syria and Egypt to work at M&H Car Wash on Enterprise Way in Pinchbeck, near Spalding.
The business was fined £20,000 after the two workers, a man in his 20s and a man in his 30s, were discovered during an immigration enforcement visit in 2022.
In recent months, the U.K.’s far-left government has promised to enforce the laws, so restoring the economic incentive to use modern technology instead of low-caste migrants.
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