Duewight Garcia overstayed his tourist visa to the US in 2019 after he said run-ins with gangs and his student activism in Honduras made him feel it was unsafe to return.
Since then, Garcia, who is in his mid-30s, has worked in sheet rock and framing in the New York City area. It’s hard work, and it can be dangerous, Garcia told CNN in an interview translated from Spanish. “We do the work no one else wants to do.”
Garcia is one of many undocumented people in America who earn their living in construction. He and millions of others now face the prospect of mass deportations during President-elect Donald Trump’s term.
Trump has said that undocumented immigrants share the blame for America’s once-in-a-generation home affordability crisis, but the president-elect’s deportation plans may backfire, driving up the cost of homebuying even further.
Immigrants’ impact on the housing market has taken on new urgency as homebuying has become much more expensive, said Riordan Frost, a senior research analyst at the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University.
Frost said that an influx of immigrants, documented or not, adds to housing demand, potentially increasing competition for homes in certain parts of the US. However, they also help expand the supply of homes, given their outsize role in the construction industry.
“It is important to acknowledge that immigrants play a role in household growth, and often a substantial role,” Frost said. “But what’s really defined the affordability crisis that we have had since the late 2010s and the pandemic has been native-born household growth.”
The National Association of Home Builders estimates that at least 1.5 million homes need to be built to meet growing demand.
There is a need for more construction workers, as well: There were 282,000 construction jobs open as of September, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Jim Tobin, the CEO of the NAHB, told CNN that immigrant labor has helped fill those job gaps.
“Immigrant labor is really important for our ability to continue to build homes affordably,” said Tobin. “Anything that would have an impact on the labor supply, and, in this case, the immigrant labor supply, does give us concern about our ability to meet the housing needs of the country.”
Shocks to the housing market?
On Monday, Trump confirmed in a post on Truth Social that he is prepared to declare a national emergency and use “military assets” to deport potentially millions of undocumented immigrants when he takes office.
There were approximately 11 million unauthorized immigrants living in the US as of 2022, according to Pew Research Center estimates.
More than one-third of construction workers in the labor force are foreign-born, according to the US Census Bureau’s 2023 American Community Survey. In some states, that share is much higher: In California, New Jersey and Texas, more than half of construction workers are immigrants. In New York, where Garcia works, 46% of construction workers are foreign-born.
“The majority of employees in construction are Hispanic and most don’t have documents,” Garcia said of his experience working in construction.
The American Community Survey does not directly ask about an immigrant’s legal status, but the National Immigration Forum, an organization that advocates for immigration reform, estimated that undocumented workers make up nearly a quarter of the construction workforce in America.
“If you went from 10% to 5% of a workforce, that’s one thing. But if you’re going from 50%, which it is in places like California and Texas, to a much lower share, that could have really big shocks to the housing market,” Frost said.
But any deportations under Trump would likely take time. Edward Pinto, the co-director of the Housing Center at the center-right think tank American Enterprise Institute, believes their overall impact on housing might be overstated.
“Labor we find is not a huge driver of the volatility in home construction and the cost of home construction,” Pinto said. “From our perspective, we think the impact of this deportation is going to be relatively minimal, particularly at the levels it will start at.”
Combating a labor shortage
The construction industry has a hard time finding workers as it is.
Home builders surveyed at the end of last year ranked the skilled labor shortage as the top challenge they faced in 2023 and the top expected challenge for 2024, according to the NAHB/Wells Fargo Housing Market Index.
Stan Marek, CEO of MAREK, a construction company in Houston, said it’s a struggle to find legal employees to fill open roles at his firm.
“We have to rely on immigrant labor, but we need legal labor, otherwise this workforce shortage is going to get worse and worse,” Marek said.
In an October interview with The New York Times, Trump’s running mate, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, argued that deportations wouldn’t disrupt the housing market if more Americans moved into the industry.
“People say Americans won’t do those jobs. Americans won’t do those jobs for below-the-table wages, they won’t do those jobs for non-living wages,” Vance said. “But people will do those jobs. They will just do those jobs at certain wages.”
But for the time being, there is a labor and skills mismatch that would make it difficult to fill some construction jobs with Americans, said Frost.
“The kind of skilled trade school funnel into these trades is not as strong as it needs to be, which is why the construction industry is relying more on foreign-born labor for those positions,” said Frost.
Marek attributed the labor shortage in construction to an aging American-born workforce and a lack of vocational training in high schools.
“Even if the kids today had vocational training, they’re probably still not going to go into the trades, because they have too many options that are easier,” he said. “The only people who want to do this work are immigrants.”
Marek said he believes in securing the southern border, but he disagrees that Trump’s plan of mass deportations is a workable solution. “Deporting people would decimate the residential housing business,” Marek said.
Many construction companies rely on the H-2B visa to legally bring in seasonal and temporary workers from outside the country. Still, there is a strict cap of 66,000 per fiscal year on the number of visas awarded, making the process competitive and challenging. This year, the US made allowances for an additional 64,716 visas.
Garcia believes he could have been granted asylum had he applied in time, which would have allowed him to legally work in the US.
“I was told by my lawyers that it wasn’t possible because the deadline had passed, so I decided to stay, continue working, pay taxes and see what happens,” he said.
Ripple effects of deportations
While proponents of mass deportations argue that undocumented immigrants hurt the job prospects for American workers, a recent study found that, in construction, that may not be the case.
“Evidence suggests that undocumented labor is a complement to domestic labor: an indirect outcome of deporting undocumented construction workers is net job loss for US-born workers, especially in higher-skilled occupations,” according to a study published by three housing economists that was released in March.
Jennie Murray, CEO of the National Immigration Forum, said a policy of mass deportations would be “short-sighted.”
“People who went to the polls cared about the economy and immigration. But those two are inherently linked,” she said.
As for Garcia, he said that when the president-elect takes office, he hopes Trump will consider the ways undocumented immigrants contribute to the economy.
“If they deport a million workers, construction will slow and housing prices will rise. We’re helping keep the economy balanced,” he said. “That’s why we get up every morning to work hard. That’s the American dream. If the country is fine, we’re fine.”
CNN’s Tami Luhby contributed reporting.
