For all the talk about a housing shortage, there’s proportionately little attention paid to how the U.S. government is aggravating the situation by kicking out the workers who want to trade and build homes in America.
Shortages are caused by government regulations that prevent, discourage, or make it too onerous for people to build. With a housing market already strangled by government controls, and a construction industry composed of 30% immigrant labor nationwide and 41% in California (with many workers illegally present), the Trump administration’s “mass deportations” agenda means an aggravated housing shortage.
Construction companies have long struggled to find and retain workers, and Trump’s immigration agenda is making this worse: not only is the administration targeting construction sites for immigration raids, but raids and threats to immigrants are notorious for having a chilling effect on workers. “Whole crews are not coming to work because they’re fearful of a raid,” the president of the National Association of Home Builders told ABC News in June.
While the administration claims that it’s focusing its enforcement efforts on “criminal aliens,” the truth is that, according to recent data, it’s mostly detaining peaceful illegal immigrants (as of September 5, 70% of detainees had no criminal convictions), and detaining and scaring even legal ones. Anyone here unlawfully is fair game for deportation, no matter how peaceful, given our draconian immigration controls. But the prioritization of workers for deportation, and the targeting of workplaces for raids, does nothing to “make America safe.” It, in fact, exacerbates the detrimental impact of existing government controls in the construction industry.
America’s atrocious immigration system prevents workers from immigrating legally to work in the construction industry. As many have explained before, it is nearly impossible for most workers to immigrate to America legally. Even the visa program designed to attract construction and other temporary workers, the H-2B visa, places severe restrictions on sponsors, making hiring extremely burdensome. This is partly because this program is capped at 66,000 visas annually for the entire country – less than a 1/10th of the estimated average number of job openings in the industry, 723,000 (according to the National Association of Home Builders).
While the government has authorized extra visas in the past, construction companies continue to plead with the government to create more avenues for international workers to come build in America — so far unsuccessfully. A recently introduced bipartisan bill, the Essential Workers for Economic Advancement Act, aims to address the workforce problems in the construction industry by creating a new visa. But this bill also introduces caps (65,000 annually) which is part of the problem with the H-2B, along with more constraints on employers.
Because of the lack of legal workers, builders often hire illegal immigrants to fulfill the open positions in their companies.
The shortage caused by this pre-existing, anti-business system is now aggravated by indiscriminate enforcement, and it will cripple builders’ plans. The American Immigration Council estimates that President Trump’s deportation agenda could remove 1.5 million workers from the construction industry, causing unprecedented delays and damage to construction businesses and their customers. All due to arbitrary restrictions on work.
Homes in America will go unbuilt, rooms will go unpainted, plumbing will go unrepaired. Fewer workers will mean increased prices, longer wait times, and fewer maintenance services available for homes in the U.S. It will mean that homeowners won’t be able to promptly find a handyman to repair water damage and avoid further harm; and fewer houses and rising rent prices that will push people to leave their cities or remain renters indefinitely.
The federal government should protect the individual rights of everyone on American soil and keep out foreign threats, in part by having a strong and secure border. But keeping residents from hiring a contractor to fix their roof is not a protection of their rights — it’s a violation of them. Peaceful immigrant workers are here to make money and build a life by engaging in trade. Attacks on these workers are also attacks on the individuals seeking to trade with them for their services.
Instead of spending billions of dollars deporting workers, the federal government should push legislation to expand the avenues for them to come here legally and allow employers and employees to come together in America.
Agustina Vergara Cid is a columnist for the Southern California News Group and a Young Voices contributor. You can follow her on X at @agustinavcid