Awaiting immigration crackdown, some homebuilders wonder who’ll build the homes

At Joppa Crossing, a new housing development in suburban Baltimore, a crew of 10 or so men were framing a row of future townhouses. Most of the workers were immigrants, including Marlon Garcia, who’s originally from El Salvador.

“These guys are from Mexico,” Garcia said, pointing to his co-workers. “Another guy is from Guatemala, and some of them are from Honduras.”

Garcia’s mom, seeking a better life, brought him to the U.S. as a teenager, he said. Now he has four kids of his own and said this job pays well. He found it through a family connection.

“Because my wife is the daughter [of] my boss,” he said. 

Garcia’s immigrant background is common in this industry. The latest Construction Market Labor Report from the Home Builders Institute estimated that foreign-born workers now make up a quarter of the overall construction workforce, a new high.

“When you kind of get down to the subcontractors that work in the residential space in particular, you’re talking about a full third of the workers are immigrants,” said Jim Tobin, CEO of the National Association of Home Builders.

The workforce is still recovering from the housing crash that triggered the Great Recession in the 2000s, Tobin said. Many workers left the industry and never came back. As skilled tradespeople have aged and come closer to retirement, fewer young people have entered the pipeline.

“Immigrant labor makes up that shortfall in the labor pool that we don’t have because we’re not either attracting domestic workers or training enough domestic workers to fill the roles that we need,” Tobin said. 

The longstanding labor shortage in the construction industry has been easing. The latest Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey from the Labor Department showed just under 250,000 unfilled construction jobs in October, down from more than 400,00 a year earlier. But it’s still a shortage at a time when experts estimate the U.S. is short at least 1.5 million homes.

Because of the lack of labor, Tobin said, homebuilders are concerned about the incoming Donald Trump administration’s immigration policies. The president-elect has promised mass deportations of unauthorized immigrants. The Pew Research Center estimates 13% of construction workers are in that category.

Even the threat, Tobin said, could have a chilling effect. “Just even talking about mass deportations could take people, you know, off of job sites and melting back into the shadows.”

Tobin said his association has been pushing for a new visa program for construction workers.

“We need to build more housing, which means we need more workers, which means we need to find a way to bring more people into this country legally in order to work in the industry,” he said. 

Programs that protect some migrants from deportation could also be at risk.

“There’s also fears around what could happen to programs that exist now that provide temporary immigration protections and work authorization to immigrants in the country currently, and Trump attempting to end those programs,” said Marisa Diaz, director of the Immigrant Worker Justice Program at the National Employment Law Project. 

They include the Temporary Protected Status program, which covers migrants from certain countries that are experiencing armed conflict or other crises, and Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, which allows some noncitizens brought to the U.S. as children to live and work in the country temporarily. Trump tried to end both programs during his first term, though legal challenges blocked those efforts.

In this year’s election, the Trump campaign blamed demand from immigrants for driving up housing costs. But stricter immigration policy has an economic price too, said Ali Wolf, chief economist at the housing data and consulting firm Zonda.

“More people means more housing demand means higher prices, but if you’re going to also cut the labor force, that means fewer people to build homes,” Wolf said. “If we find that we see a more severe labor shortage and that ends up increasing the cost to build homes, that cost is simply going to get passed on to consumers.”

A recent study from the University of Utah and the University of Wisconsin found that the deportation of more than 300,000 unauthorized immigrants between 2008 and 2013, during the Barack Obama administration, was associated with a slowdown in homebuilding and an increase in housing prices.

At Joppa Crossing, cost was top of mind for Earl Robinson, president of the developer Ward Communities. He said he’s had no trouble finding workers, so he’s not worried about Trump’s immigration policies. But in this tight labor market, his vendors — the framers and roofers and carpet installers — are charging a lot more.

“It is strictly labor,” Robinson said. “They have to pay a little bit more, but it’s also, they have an opportunity to charge more, and they do.”

Robinson welcomes what he hopes will be less regulation under a Trump administration, but he said there’s another unknown that could add to his costs: the threat of new tariffs on building materials.