While some contractors dismiss the plan as political rhetoric, many say they can’t afford to lose more people from an aging, immigrant-dependent workforce still short of nearly 400,000 people.
Both presidential candidates promise to build more homes. One promises to deport hundreds of thousands of people who build them.
Former President Donald Trump’s pledge to “launch the largest deportation operation in the history of our country” would hamstring construction firms already facing labor shortages and push record home prices higher, say industry leaders, contractors and economists.
“It would be detrimental to the construction industry and our labor supply and exacerbate our housing affordability problems,” said Jim Tobin, CEO of the National Association of Home Builders. The trade group considers foreign-born workers, regardless of legal status, “a vital and flexible source of labor” to builders, estimating they fill 30% of trade jobs like carpentry, plastering, masonry and electrical roles.
Americans aren’t lining up to do these jobs at low wages, without proper worker protections. Creating a society that depends on a lower tier of people that have fewer rights is seriously fucked up and is not something we should be embracing.
Siding with the rich business owners who are taking advantage of illegal immigrants is extra weird.
Thank you. I’ve always thought it was fucked people used this line of argument. If we can’t build our buildings and clear our own trash? We need an endless stream of low paid poorly treated brown folk to do all those troublesome chores? Seems kinda fucked to me
I’ve always thought it was fucked people used this line of argument.
Nobody is arguing that this is a good arrangement, they’re just saying it’s an arrangement that benefits (typically) conservative business owners who utilize undocumented immigrant labor. Which means mass deportations are probably just Trump pandering to his base and not something he would really do - although there’s no guarantee of that.
Industrial facilities, particularly in the food processing industry generally have decent wages and worker protections (safety does however vary wildly from plant to plant) but still rely on immigrant labor because those are often the only people willing to work these jobs, so they end up being the only workplaces that cater to hiring immigrants by having the knowledge of how to legally hire a non-citizen or just having Spanish language documentation and translators on hand.
I know this because I currently manage some databases for a contract industrial cleaning company, so I’ve seen the hard data. It’s not a challenge of pay and benefits, but a challenge of “who’s willing to work third shift cleaning cow guts off of a factory floor for $20-25/hr in bumblefuck Kansas?” And the answer is simply people who don’t have better options, and they’re usually either immigrants or felons. The work itself sucks donkeyballs (and would literally if it’s a plant processing donkey meat) so nobody wants to do it
