Trump deportations send construction workers ‘back to the shadows'

• Decade of worker shortage filled by immigrants
• Up to a quarter of labourers may be undocumented
• Deportation crackdowns slow construction, drive up costs

WASHINGTON - As President Trump's immigration crackdown expands across the United States with more than a thousand arrests per day, some workers are starting to wonder if they should keep reporting to their job sites.

Such a response could exacerbate a housing affordability crisis that experts say needs to be fixed in part by speeding up construction and worsen a labour shortage that already threatens to delay homebuilding and raise prices.

"We definitely are hearing hesitation," said Palmira Figueroa, a long-time labour activist and communications coordinator with the National Day Laborer Organizing Network.

"In the last few days, I've been thinking a lot about this word ‘fear’. That's exactly what the administration is trying to do - create fear so they go back to the shadows," she said, referring to immigrant workers.

The network works with informal labourers, such as those dealing with site preparation, traffic control and more for the construction industry, a sector that has become increasingly reliant on foreign-born workers over the past decade.

Now Trump's crackdown is sparking concern about both the direct and indirect impacts on the industry.

The sector had 228,000 vacancies left unfilled in September.

It will need to bring in 439,000 new workers this year and a half-million next year to keep up with demand, according to a January forecast from Associated Builders and Contractors, a trade association.

"The reality is that the economy and this country really needs us and needs our work. The labour of immigrants is not just necessary but essential," Figueroa told Context.

Figueroa pointed to the situation in the Los Angeles area, where migrant day labourers are being trained to take on the hazardous work of cleaning up after the recent wildfire devastation and will make up a significant portion of the much needed workforce.

Similar labourers have cleaned up after natural disasters for years, an often dangerous and toxic job.

Since last summer in preparation for Trump's potential election, the network has been organising assemblies and so-called defence committees, "helping workers to learn their rights and prepare each other for this moment,” Figueroa said.

Beyond the construction sector, the employment of undocumented immigrants sustains multiple industries such as manufacturing, agriculture and health care.

Trump has promised an "unprecedented" immigration crackdown and mass deportation targeting the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants across the country.

Workplace immigration raids, a policy that had been discontinued, have been restarted.

Contractor associations say they are worried the impacts could reverberate for years to come in the Latino community.

"The construction industry in this region, as with most other regions in the country, is a Hispanic industry. Easily over 50% of the workers and small businesses are Hispanic-owned," said Jose Sueiro, head of the Metro D.C. Hispanic Contractors Association, which includes about 350 member businesses.

Trump's immigration crackdown, he said, is on everyone's mind.

"There's going to be pattern shifts. People in our community will stay away from certain places and will probably stay home much more," Sueiro said.

"You will paralyse our industry but others, as well, because our workforce is the workforce that builds America."

The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

‘Ripple effects'

In 2023, the latest year for which data is available, the share of immigrant labour in the construction sector reached a record high of more than a quarter of workers, the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) said in November.

In some states, the proportion is much higher, reaching up to 40% in California and in New Jersey, the group said.

"We have been persistently short hundreds of thousands of workers in the construction sector," said Jim Tobin, chief executive of the NAHB, which represents 140,000 members.

"Because of that persistent lack, we've needed to look at immigration, hence why it's critically important to this industry."

The NAHB encourages its members to employ only legal workers, but a broad immigration crackdown could still have indirect effects that could roil construction work, he said.

"When does that cause ripple effects to the other parts of the immigrant community, where people don't come to work?” he said.

"Maybe they’re here in the country (legally), but they have relatives here illegally, and they're afraid to be caught up in a raid and expose family members to deportation.”

Little research has been done on the impact of immigration crackdowns on construction, but a paper last year looked at a programme known as Secure

Communities starting in 2008 and found that counties lost nearly a year's worth of residential construction after three years of the programme’s implementation.

This affected affordability, with the prices of newly constructed homes rising nearly 20% and those of existing homes by up to 10%, said co-author Troup

Howard, an assistant professor of finance at the University of Utah.

Such findings contradict the Trump administration's view that mass deportation and other immigration-related efforts will ease pressure on housing and boost affordability, Howard said.

"If you're trying to evaluate this claim that deportations will make housing more affordable, our paper suggests that won't work very well," he said.

"You might temporarily buy a small price decline, but very quickly the fact that you are building less homes – you'll end up with prices up above what they would have been anyway.”

Fear of retaliation

While the current immigration crackdown may prove notable in scope, labour activists say it is part of a longstanding pattern of marginalising immigrant workers and allowing their document status to be a vulnerability that can be wielded against them by unscrupulous employers.

That underscores the need to safeguard workers from abuses such as wage theft and unsafe conditions, said Merle Payne, director of the Centro de Trabajadores Unidos en la Lucha (CTUL), or Center of Workers United in Struggle, in Minneapolis.

"Migration status can be one issue among others that can cause communities to be vulnerable, when your employer threatens to call immigration or the police on you for complaining about your rights," he said.

"That can make an already vulnerable population fearful of coming forward to speak about their rights."

CTUL has been helping develop a worker-driven, legally binding standard known as Building Dignity and Respect, which construction employers can sign onto with the aim of ensuring basic elements of workplace safety and fair treatment of workers.

In October, two large developers committed to signing onto the programme, and Payne said CTUL is in talks with others.

"We're seeing this as a moment to dig in," Payne said.

"More than ever, there's a need for having independent organizations that hold worker power and can ensure that workers can come forward and speak about their rights without fear of retaliation."

(Reporting by Carey L. Biron, Editing by Ellen Wulfhorst and Anastasia Moloney.)