'They're Building Our Houses': Contractors Warn Against Trump's Mass Deportation
Thomas Homan
One key plank of former President Donald Trump's second-term agenda is mass deportations of undocumented immigrants. That policy proposal is now getting heavy criticism from construction industry leaders.
According to NBC News, homebuilders in particular are coming out against the ex-president's call to deport millions of immigrants. this includes builders in Republican-dominated states like Florida and Texas. Construction business leaders are worried that an already shallow labor pool could dry up even further if Trump followed through on his signature campaign initiative.
"They don’t think it’s going to happen,” Stan Marek, CEO of the Texas-based Marek Family of Companies, said of his colleagues in the construction industry. “You’d lose so many people that you couldn’t put a crew together to frame a house.”
“We need them. They’re building our houses — have been for 30 years,” Marek added. “Losing the workers would devastate our companies, our industry and our economy.”
Tampa, Florida homebuilder Brent Taylor, who runs a five-person construction business, said building is already a "very, very difficult industry," and is only "getting worse." He told NBC that Trump's proposed deportations would have a particularly adverse impact on both his company and his clients.
Taylor said that he often subcontracts labor, and that those who provide him with workers typically don't check workers' immigration status before sending them out to construction sites. He added that Trump's deportations would mean that he hypothetically "can only do 10 jobs a year instead of 20." He then noted: “Either I make half as much money or I up my prices. And who ultimately pays for that? The homeowner.”
The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that there are roughly 370,000 open construction jobs, and that figure would likely climb even higher if migrants are rounded up and deported en masse. And according to the National Immigration Forum, roughly 30 percent of construction workers in the United States are immigrants. That share of non-native born Americans working in construction climbs up to 40 percent in larger states like California and Texas.
Trump has said he would deport as many as 20 million immigrants if he were elected to a second term. That figure is noticeably higher than the number of undocumented immigrants currently in the U.S., which is currently estimated to be around 11 million. The former president has suggested he would revoke the Temporary Protected Status granted to migrants from unstable nations reeling from political violence and war like Afghanistan, Haiti, Honduras, Somalia, Syria, Ukraine, and Yemen, among others.
The logistics of rounding up, detaining and deporting that many people would be a massive endeavor. During the National Conservatism conference in July, Tom Homan — the former director of the Trump administration's Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) — hinted that ICE would kick its operations into high gear if Trump wins the November election.
"Trump comes back in January, I’ll be on his heels coming back, and I will run the biggest deportation force this country has ever seen,” Homan said. “They ain’t seen s— yet. Wait until 2025.”
Reprinted with permission from Alternet.
