Builders warn Trump’s mass deportation plan would drive up home costs

Rhetoric or reality?

Trump did not elaborate on how his proposed “whole of government” effort to remove Up to 20 million people — more than the undocumented population — would work, but he turned it into the center of an apartment plaza. The Republican candidate claims mass deportations will free up homes for US citizens and lower prices. few economists agree. According to some analysts, the idea is also logistically questionable its costs would be “astronomical.”

There are also doubts among home builders that Trump will fulfill his promise.

“They don’t think it’s going to happen,” Stan Marek, CEO of the Marek Family of Companies, a Texas-based specialty subcontracting firm, said of his industry peers. “You’d lose so many people you couldn’t get a crew to frame a house.”

Bryan Dunn, Arizona-based senior vice president of Big-D Construction, a major Southwest firm, called the idea “that they could actually move that many people out of the country” “almost laughable.” The proposal leaves those in the industry “trying to figure out how much political fear there is,” he said.

But Trump has a history of floating outlandish ideas without seriously pursuing them Buy Greenland – he adopted other policies that were once radical restore the terms of political debate despite fierce criticism and litigation. This is especially true with immigration, where he has leadership He diverted the Pentagon’s money construction of a border wall, travel bans from several Muslim-majority countries, and separated migrant children from their parents.

Trump emphasized the deportation pitch on the stump, sometimes using racist rhetoric. claims that thousands of immigrants commit crimes because “it’s in their genes.” This month, he accused immigrant gangs of “invading and conquering” cities like Aurora, Colorado. local authorities denybut saying that they need federal aid I don’t want any parts in mass deportations. still, final vote There is widespread support for deporting people who come to the United States illegally.

“President Trump’s mass deportation of illegal immigrants will not only make our communities safer, but will save Americans from footing the bill for years to come,” said Taylor Rogers, a spokeswoman for the campaign’s Republican National Committee, referring to undocumented people. use of taxpayer-funded social services and other federal programs.

Trump campaign press secretary Caroline Leavitt said in a statement that the former president’s comments about genetics “clearly refer to murderers, not immigrants.”

Tobin said the NAHB had real concerns about the deportation proposal, but was engaged in both campaigns. This called for politicians “Let the builders build” by easing zoning and other regulatory barriers and improving developers’ access to financing.

“The rhetoric on immigration, at 11,” Tobin said. “We need to have a serious conversation about immigration policy and reform in this country, and we can’t delay it any longer.”

Marek, who defended for a long time for more ways for undocumented people to work legally in construction, said reforms are decades overdue. As an employer, though the industry’s hunger for low-cost labor creates a shadow economy, “I do everything I can to make sure everyone is legal,” he said. he says he often exploits depends on undocumented workers.

“We need them. They build our houses – they have been built for 30 years,” he said. “Losing workers would destroy our companies, our industry and our economy.”

“The math just isn’t there”

There is evidence that foreign-born construction workers help keep the housing market under control. Moment Analysis published in December 2022 The George W. Bush Institute and Southern Methodist University found that metro areas in the United States with the fastest growing immigrant populations have the lowest construction costs.

“In Sun Belt metros such as Raleigh, Nashville, Houston, and San Antonio, immigrant construction workers have helped these cities maintain a housing cost advantage over coastal cities despite rapid growth in housing demand,” the authors wrote.

But builders need more workers as they are. “The math just isn’t there” to sustain the blow from mass deportations, said Ron Hetrick, chief labor economist at workforce analytics firm Lightcast. “It would be incredibly disruptive” and “would have a very, very significant hit to home building,” he said.

Work has been added over the last ten years with private employers in the field the employment rate now exceeds 8 millionmore than 1 million since the pandemic, according to payroll processor ADP. But as Hetrick points out, “the high school student isn’t eager to do the job” and the existing workforce is aging — the average homebuilder 57 years old.

Even though many have been in the U.S. for more than a decade, Hetrick said undocumented workers would flee before any national deportation efforts. He expects such a policy to also cause people with legal permits to flee.

“That’s what happened in Florida,” he said.

Past as prologue

Last year, the state’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, passed the law a series restrictions and penalties prevent the employment of undocumented workers. A lot immigrant workers left the state in a hurry before the policies went into effect, with social media videos showing some of them construction sites sit empty.

“These laws show they have no idea what we’re doing,” said Luciano, a carpenter originally from Mexico who has worked on residential buildings throughout South Florida for the past decade.

“Nobody else is going to work in the conditions that we’re not going to work in,” the 40-year-old said in Spanish because he has lived in the United States for more than 20 years but does not have legal immigration status. Workers at the workplace “have time in but no time out,” he said, often logging 70-hour weeks in rain and extreme heat.

Taylor recalled Florida builders panicking over the crackdown in the state, but calmed them down, saying, “Look, give it six months. “We don’t have enough people to enforce it, so they keep coming back.”

State Rep. Rick Roth, a Republican who voted for the measure, later acknowledged that Florida was not ready for the destabilization it would cause. called the immigrant residents Not getting away with saying the law is “not as bad as you’ve heard.”

Some employees returned after realizing the policies weren’t being strictly enforced, Taylor said: “Of course, things are more normal now.”

DeSantis’ office did not respond to a request for comment.

In 2010, Dunn was working as a construction management executive in Tempe when Arizona enacted some of the strictest immigration restrictions in the country at the time. As the legislation spread, he said, “a lot of people moved away and never came back.”

When much of the law was repealed in 2012, he said, “Arizona got a bad rap” compared to other states that were “more open and had less barriers to getting to work.”

Dunn, a Democrat, said he “absolutely” supports Vice President Kamala Harris, but other construction leaders sounded more divided. Marek, a “lifelong Republican,” declined to share how he voted, but noted that “a lot of Republicans are not voting for Trump.”

Taylor also did not say which candidate he supported, but praised Trump’s ability to “get things done.”

“There are many other issues related to the economy that we struggle with every day that have nothing to do with immigration reform,” he said. “I am not the only politician”