re: If there are millions of illegals providing cheap labor why have prices continued to soar?

I am a contractor(sort of). I am a licensed homebuilder but am usually building and doing renovations for my own properties.

Contractors and subcontractors(if hired directly) for the most part use a cost-plus method of charging for jobs meaning they add a percentage to the total cost of labor/materials as their profit...something like 10%

Even with illegals, there is a huge deficit of trades workers. Where I am, there are ZERO white framing crews anymore. The few subs out there get steady work from the big contractors, so when they get calls from homeowners, they know they can give a F U price...and some will actually pay it.

This is a direct result of every teacher and every school for decades, bagging on trades/construction as if that is some kind of low level work and sending kids into the diploma mill universities to get dumb degrees and mountains of debt.

The illegals didnt help because it masked the problem. The reason that you only encounter mostly scumbags when you call in someone to work is the same concept of a pretty girl being smug. She(the trade guy) has unlimited options...and your option is a lot of work. They also are the ones with all the connections to all the good Mexican laborers, and they arent sharing them with you. You cant just call Juan to frame your deck(even though hed do a good job) because you(the typical homeowner) dont know Juan exists.

Couple that with crazy inflation of materials and we have the insane prices we have today. Not long ago, you could build a house for 100/sq foot. Its now minimum 160-200/sq ft