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Same projects in Western Europe are coming in significantly lower. Labor is cited as the main cost but it’s easy to hide corruption in labor costs.

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But Western Europe (EU) has the benefit of temporarily importing cheap East European (Romania, Poland etc) under skilled workers to do the heavy lifting.

Aren't there like 10 million illegal immigrants in the US who serve similar function?

Presumably not for public contracts.

In NYC, the labor law requires paying "prevailing wage", which NYC decided is $100k+/year. See https://comptroller.nyc.gov/services/for-the-public/nyc-wage... No wonder that all public projects are so expensive.

Western European Countries usually have a law in place that labor brought in for these contracts has to be paid the same wage as local labor.

This isn’t NYC. We outsourced to places like this before Mexico and China were options.

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