We see lots of photos of robots on factory floors , where the machines weld and assemble 24/7 with no coffee breaks. But construction workers shouldn’t think that their jobs are safe because they are outdoors and not as repetitious as some. New robots and techniques are being developed that are revolutionizing the construction process. One new skill being invented for robots’ metallic claws is bricklaying. (Above, the Hadrian bricklaying robot on the right is named for the famous wall .)

We can see a robot that looks like Sawyer working as a mason in the video following where it helps a human bricklayer in building barracks in Fort Lee Virginia. It doesn’t move very quickly, but then it doesn’t stop for lunch.

The robot bricklayer is just one example of the fundamental changes via automation that are occurring in the building sector of the jobs economy. In Amsterdam, a Dutch team is creating the world’s first 3-D printed house. The house is experimental, but the direction of building is clear — more machines and fewer humans, just like the rest of the economy.

One lesson to be gleaned is that America doesn’t need to import millions of low-skilled immigrants from the third world to build our houses and buildings.

Construction once supplied a decent living for blue-collar citizens, before elites engineered mass immigration to drive down wages. In 2003, house framer William Ennis described how his career was ruined: “I started out making $800 to $1,200 a week here for a 40-hour week. It got to where I was having to work seven days a week, 12 hours a day, just to make $600 a week. And that’s just in the past three or four years.”

A 2013 report from the Center for Immigration Studies found that 66 percent of construction workers were America born, which means that 34 percent were foreigners. Certainly the percentage in California is higher, judging from the Spanish one hears on work sites.

The purpose-built robot bricklayer comes from Australia. And its inventor says bricklaying is a job Australians don’t want to do any more. Right.