Trump’s Clashing Goals: More Housing, Fewer Immigrants

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It's your place, your life, to love, to dream, to change, it's your world, to understand. The New York Times, find up more in ytimes.com/yourworld. To confront America's acute shortage of housing, Congress just passed a historic piece of legislation designed to encourage the construction of new homes.

The problem is that President Trump's crackdown on immigrants is taking direct aim at

the workforce required to build those homes. Today, my colleague, Rhonda Cason, explains how the U.S. housing industry became so dependent on immigrant labor, and how that reliance could end up undermining a once-in-a-generation housing law. It's Wednesday, July 22nd.

Rhonda, welcome to the daily. Thank you. Thank you for having me. So, let me just set the stage.

“By the time that Congress decided to pass this landmark housing bill, which has now become”

law, and it's supposed to make it a lot easier and faster to construct new homes in this

country, you had finished a line of reporting into the workers who actually build those houses, and that reporting allowed you to see more clearly than most of us that there was a little bit of a problem here, and that problem was a gap between intention and kind of reality. Just explain that.

So if we look at the law specifically, this new law that was passed has all sorts of tools in it to get housing built, all sorts of different ways that you can encourage developers to make it easier for them to build, encourage them to want to build, but somebody has to actually build those homes, and we already had this labor shortage. We've been short, 300,000 workers for a long time, and Trump has another policy, which is

separate of this industry, which is to have a mass deportation policy and no industry is more reliant on immigrant labor than construction. Right.

“The two goals that the president has and has articulated at various points, a cheaper housing”

market, and a major crackdown on illegal immigration, you're saying those are profoundly intention. Right. The core of the housing crisis is that we haven't built enough housing. We really haven't built enough housing in decades, and one of the reasons is that we don't

have enough workers to build a housing, and so labor costs are high, which makes it expensive. And construction relies on labor and relies on immigrant labor, and Trump has been actively deporting that population. And so Congress passes landmark legislation that's a first time in more than 30 years that the federal government has said we want to build housing.

But at the same time, the federal government is also saying we want to deport the immigrant workforce and build that. Who builds the houses? And so you could end up with a situation where there's all sorts of builders ready to go, and they don't have the workers to do the work.

So I wanted to know how did the construction industry become so reliant on an immigrant workforce,

so that it's now so vulnerable to losing its workers, because the country wasn't always

this way. That this was not always an immigrant job. Well, just explain what you found in your reporting about how it came to be that the US housing industry has become so dependent on immigrant labor. And as you just said, so vulnerable to losing those workers to a crackdown.

So construction employees, the highest share of foreign workers of any industry in America. And to explain how we got to this point. We usually hear one of these two stories. We either hear that immigrants stole American's jobs, or we hear that Americans were too lazy to do these jobs.

But these two narratives put together don't make a lot of sense. They can't both be true. Why not? Well, because there's attention in that. So one is I don't want the job and the other one is I'm stealing a job you'd want.

So which one doesn't it quite add up?

And so my colleague Rob Gabeloff and I really wanted to know why did American workers

“leave this industry and why did the immigrant workers come into it?”

And what did you actually find? So what we found is the story starts in the 1970s. And back then homes were built almost exclusively by American workers. There was about maybe 5% of the industry was foreign born. And union membership at this time was not at all time high.

It was like 40% of all construction workers were unionized, which was like higher than other industries. So if you were getting a house built in the US in the 1970s, it was almost assuredly going to be built by American born unionized workers. Certainly for a new construction and for the larger projects.

Yeah, these were union jobs. And they were good jobs. So union construction workers earned $1.71 for every dollar the average American worker. Wow. You had health insurance, you had a pension, you had vacations and it was a job.

You didn't have to have a college degree for it. And one of the construction workers I met from that era was Matt Moore.

“So, how do you start born to county originally?”

No, I was actually born in LA California, England. He was really emblematic of the type of workers who were working in the industry at that time. Koso. Well, he graduated from high school in Southern California in 1975.

He doesn't really know what to do with his life. My father told me one thing when I was growing up, because after I graduated with high school, I wanted to go to college. And he looked at me and he said there's two kinds of human. He goes, two kinds of man, there's a man with a strong mind, man with a strong back.

God blessed you with a strong back. Go to work. He decides to work at a parts department at a Volkswagen dealership. And one afternoon, his high school buddy comes in and says, hey, I just started ruffin. He goes, and it's great, he goes, you can get $2 more an hour.

I was making $2 an hour, I doubled my money, starting ruffin. He went to the union shop, went to the hall, signed the paperwork, and that was it.

“And he goes to the union hall, he fills out his union card.”

He gets a pair of hot boots, which are the boots you wear on a roof, and he's up on a roof that day. I so want to know what a pair of hot boots looks like. I saw them. They're just like boots, but they guess they don't melt.

So suddenly he's an apprentice. And he absolutely loves it. He's out in the Southern California sunshine, he's throwing up roost from the ocean to the mountains in Orange County. He's building tracks of homes in California.

If we were workin' by the coast, we'd brought our surfboards. And everybody went surfing afterwards, surf, a glass off at night. And he's going surfing in the afternoon. What a life. Yeah.

And he is happy as a clown. Work would dry up. But it wasn't a big deal. You just go to the hall, and then he'd say, hey, who wants to go here. And they would pull it off the list and give his slip and you'd go to the next shop.

So he's getting paid while he's 19 years old. And he meets a girl as one does. The girl I was dating which became my wife. She looked in my bank account and said, what you can do with this money. And I said, I'm going to go buy a dot, struck.

So he's got $10,000 in the bank, and he wants to buy a car. $10,000 on the bank in 1976 by now. That's real money. So he's got real money. And she said, no, you're going to go buy a house.

His parents never owned a house.

So I said, okay, I'll go buy a house, said. That's how much was it? 48,000. So he buys a house and he's 20 years old all from making money as a roof. Right, not old enough to drink, but old enough to buy home.

And he's only been putting on room for two years. So this is quite lucrative and it sounds like things are going pretty swimmingly from app. Right, from app, this is gravy train he's on. And in the 1970s, the unions had locked in really, really strong contracts, partly because

they've been on war. There was less workers. Like they had gotten these great contracts. But then you've got this period where there's high inflation, high interest rate. Right, this is the 70s.

So the late 70s and the home builders and corporate America decides that it's time to start

fighting back against unions that have been incredibly powerful for decades.

And they form a lobbying group. And one of their goals was to weaken labor laws and to sort of break the stranglehold that unions had on industry and construction was in the center of this. So they start introducing non union crews into unionized job sites. It happened very slowly.

What happened was a lot of non union started coming up.

workers union goes on strike and the real heart of the strike is not about wages, but

“is about whether non union shops can come into any job or there's a carbon reunion.”

Got it. They think they're going to win on this, but instead the strike drags on for four months. Wow. And they're not working during this period. They're not working during this period.

They're losing money.

They've basically underestimated how to term in the home builders would be, meanwhile,

other local unions have gotten involved. Because we were fighting other trades at that period and not fighting or not fighting the where we should have been fighting. There's a lot of infighting and the coalition starts to break down and they have to make a deal.

And in the end, the unions concede to the home builders and let non union crews on residential sites where there's a unionized carbon. Basically, they lose on the marquee issue of the strike itself. Exactly. But at the time, it doesn't seem like that big of a deal.

Why not? Because while they were letting non union workers come into unionized residential projects, the union still had a lock on the commercialized work in the construction industry. We had so much what they called a commercial work. We had so much work.

California is building a lot and they're building a lot of commercial.

They're building hotels, they're building hospitals, they're building strip malls. It was just flowing out of the cracks with so much. So the unions say, it's fine. We'll just go do commercial. I brought it up more than once.

They said, oh, we had too much, don't worry about it. There's too much commercial. Good work. So if they seed some of their work in the residential sector, they'll be okay. They'll be okay.

We'll make up for the residential. Right. No big deal. Okay.

“Do you think it was a mistake seeing things that turned away, didn't worry about residential?”

I do. Why? Because it eliminated a whole section of our industry. I honestly think when we lost residential, it changed my trajectory in the industry. Tell me.

Like so. Matt immediately notices a change.

The first thing you see is he goes into the union hall where he's supposed to see his

jobs. Just far fewer residential jobs available. They're just less of them in the ones that are available are a lot smaller. They're just like, they're not building 60, 80 tracks of homes, maybe it's 10. That's when two gates started coming up.

We had a union gate and a non union gate. And when he goes to the job sites, he starts seeing two gates, one for union crews and one for non union crews. And they're keeping those workers separate.

“So remember though, this time, in the early 1980s, both the unionized and non unionized”

workers were still American-born workers. That's just the demographics of this workforce. That's the demographics of America at the time. But in the early 1980s, was the beginning of Reaganism and he was very pro-business, but he was also a very pro-immigrant.

He had a huge amnesty program. And his successor, George A.W. Bush, saw an even bigger wave of immigrants. And he expanded Reagan's amnesty programs. And he ends up signing the immigration act of 1990, which is this major piece of legislation that created the TPS program, H1B visas, and these a lottery program.

He does, you know, also add in some border protections and tried to reduce the legal immigration. But overall, this is a time where the borders are porous. And it was not the hard border that we think of today. And so all these immigrants were looking for work.

And many of them are coming in without documentation. And many of them also are coming in either already knowing how to build homes. Or they come and join family members who've already gotten jobs in construction. And so construction becomes a natural place for immigrants to find work. And for the American worker, these home construction jobs are becoming less appealing as

non-union work grows in the sector. And these non-union jobs don't have those good benefits. And so Matt starts seeing the labor force changing. Suddenly there's more Spanish being spoken on the job sites. A few years later, the foreman are often Spanish speaking.

I literally was working one day and I turned around on the roof and I happened to be the oldest guy and the widest guy on the roof. But I wonder what happened to all the white guys. I really did. They all went different places, nobody wanted to do it anymore. So just to be clear about the sequence of events here,

home builders decide to challenge the unions hold over the construction of housing. They say we want non-union workers. They fight the unionized workers to get that to happen.

And they are being introduced, especially to this non-union world of home construction,

“which it sounds like is very open to hiring them.”

Exactly. It almost like a parallel experience is happening. Because while Matt is noticing that the folks who look like him on the job site are disappearing, I spoke with a lot of immigrants who arrived during that time period. And they tell almost a similar story to what Matt's youth was like. So one guy I spoke with was named Mariano Martinez.

So where were you born? Mohawkamehiko. And he's also a roofer. And he arrived in the United States. He was 19. He came to the late 1980s from Mohawkamexico.

He walked across the bar and it was easy and then. Back into the years, it was like not even half hour. Did it cost a lot of money here?

“No, it was like under 10 dollars to think.”

It crosses the border with the help of a coyote. He's initially working at a gardening center. And he's not making very much money. He got laid off and like Matt, a friend tells him about roofering. I'm going to quite literally, it is a parallel story.

It is parallel story. And so what did your friends say about roofering? Well, he said it was a hard work, but if you like it, it's a good job. So when you, so when you, so he doesn't speak any English, he shows up on a job site. They put him on a roof.

He's got a rip off an old roof. It's horrible work. He absolutely hates it.

He thinks he's never going to do this again.

But I really need the job, so I act like I really know what I'm doing, but definitely then. The money's a lot better and he comes back the next day anyway. And in a few months, he's making $100 a day cash. So the money's good, but there's no benefits.

And then did you ever have health insurance? No, not on that time. No, no. It's no paid vacation, but it's more money than he's ever seen. And his friends actually tell him, you know, there is union work you can get, but it's not worth it because it's not steady.

There's all this work in the non-union work. There's so much to be had. The union work, there's all these rules and you may be at a work sometimes.

So he never even bothers to consider union work.

And he doesn't have to. - It doesn't have to. - It doesn't have to. Because the contracts no longer require it. Right. And for Marianne of the money is so good that by the late '90s, he's also married and he has enough money to buy a house, also in Southern California. I'm really curious, as immigrants like Mariano are starting to take these non-union home construction jobs. What is happening to people like Matt? Clearly he's looking around and the world is changing, but I presume that he's still getting plenty of union construction work.

Right. He's not even looking at the jobs that Marianne is looking at. So remember, he's still looking at the jobs on the union hall. So he's not seeing Marianne's jobs. Unionized workers have just shift increasingly into commercial work. - Right. As they kind of predict it.

“As they predicted, so which sounds like what was the difference in a job as a job or roof as a roof?”

Commercial work did you go and do high rises? - Yes. - Why, how was that? Was that hard? - Yeah, it was hard. Was it harder than residential or something? - Oh, yes. Oh, yeah. Yeah. But putting a roof on a two-story house in the Orange County suburbs

is a lot different than putting a roof on a 30-story tower. These are multi-million-dollar projects.

There's a lot of pressure to get them built very fast. You're up on steel beams. You can get seriously injured. It's very hard hard work. The hours are much longer. Like then, trying to get the trash off. We put these big giant tubes up and you would throw the trash in the tube from the roof and if it got stuck, you had to send the smallest guy down on a rope inside the tube. - No. - Yeah. - And, you know, Mattel stories of just intense physical labor

and real danger with real injuries. - Oh, I broke my back twice. I ripped off this arm, ripped off this wrist, ripped off this elbow. - It fell off a roof and ripped his arm off his body and had a reattached. It showed me the scars. - My knee is completely wiped out. I've broken both my ankle several times. I've broken my pelvis. - Friends, your ribs. - How do you bring that? - But even despite how difficult the job was, Matt and other commercial roofers still had

enough work and had decent salary and benefits to hang on and to build a good solid life. But then something happens that no one anticipated that makes American born unionized workers like Matt feel even more left behind.

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“- So what happens that makes life and work even worse for folks like Matt?”

- The housing boom. - If not not in tune, but I know you're going to explain. - Right, if you all remember in the early 2000s, there was this huge housing boom fueled by subprime mortgages. And Americans start building millions of new homes. And also, they're not just building anywhere, they're building in the sunbell. States like Arizona, Nevada, Texas, and California, where there's a lot of immigrants because these are border states and many of these states are right to work

states. So they have a very, very weak union representation. And so where the construction industry is growing is increasingly non-union, and they have this enormous workforce that is moving across the border, eager and willing to take these jobs that are not particularly attractive to a worker who's born in the United States. - Got it. So I'm intuitive from what you're saying that this is boom time for non-union foreign-born construction workers. - It is. And if you look at the

share of foreign-born workers in the construction industry, it is just skyrocketing during this period. But what's also happening simultaneously is the union membership for both foreign-born workers

and American-born workers is falling from this peak of 40 percent. It's just falling off a cliff.

And while that's happening, wages for both union workers and non-union workers aren't keeping up with everyone else's wages. - Why? Well, because if you think of union workers as like the standard of what you're supposed to be paid, then even if you're hiring for a non-union job, you're kind of matching that a bit. So is there's fewer workers and unions? There's fewer jobs to be had, wages start to shrink, and then the non-union wages sort of fall in concert.

- Because if the standard starts to go away, then the non-standard pay can start faster. - Exactly. So in some ways, union work, even if you're not unionized, keeps your standard of living a little bit higher for everyone. And that standard is now falling. And at the same time, we're seeing this huge wave of immigration that is really transforming the construction industry.

“Remember, in 1973, about 5 percent of construction workers were foreign-born. - Right, tiny percent.”

- But so during the housing boom, the percent continues to just soar. And now in California, they make up half of all construction workers. In some parts of the construction industry,

like drywall, roofing, they're like 80, 90 percent of the workers are now foreign-born.

And also, the unions provided huge apprenticeship programs. Matt came in and was trained on day one. He went through a long apprenticeship program where he got trained to do a union roof. When Mariano came, there was no apprenticeship program. He was just trained by his friends. So you don't have that apprenticeship program that was a pipeline to train a new workforce, because the unions don't exist. And so young people graduating from high school are no longer

putting on their hot boots and getting on a roof. - So even before the housing boom inevitably yields

“to a housing crash that we all remember, the entire infrastructure that encourages”

American-born workers to go into construction is eroding. On top of the fact that the wage advantages of entering this industry are starting to evaporate as well. - Right, and all these things are happening together. So the pathways to get into construction for an American-born worker are rapidly disappearing because the unions are disappearing because the construction that's happening is happening in places where there's no unions and they're building

His friend tells him about this job. He brings cousins and got them jobs in construction in Southern California as immigrants. And that becomes the new pathway into construction. - So what

“happens when this housing boom inevitably becomes a housing bust in 2007, 2008, 2009?”

- It's a complete disaster for the construction industry. No industry faced more job losses than construction. Almost 2 million workers lost their jobs. That's one in four construction workers. - Wow. - For workers like Matt, they were staring down the barrel of a very bleak future. It had already become a pretty hostile environment for them. So Matt is 51 and he walks away. - He quits the construction industry in the middle of the housing crisis. - He retires.

He gets his pension and he walks away. And he is one of millions of workers who did the same thing.

And so as the industry starts to turn again and starts to rebuild, it never reaches the levels

it did in 2000s, which is what is sort of setting us up for where we are today. Homebuilders are not building at scale. They're not building the number of houses Americans need. And there's a

“labor force that was just never recovered. We're short 300,000 workers because they left and they”

retired and they didn't come back. And we don't have the pipeline of new young American born workers to fill those jobs. So now we have a workforce that is incredibly dependent on the immigrant workers who have been here and have been working in building homes for years in this country. And they're being deported. They're being deported from job sites and they're being deported from home depots and they're being deported from their homes. And if they aren't being deported,

they're afraid to come to work. It can't have escaped the awareness of the president and those around him that at this moment when America desperately needs a lot more housing and faces a shortage of workers to build it that this deportation campaign is at odds with the goal of getting more housing and more affordable housing. And I wonder if the Trump administration assumed believed that if it was deporting all these foreign-born workers who were building these houses that it might bring

“the American-born workforce back somehow? Yeah, I think that is the vision. Is that wages will rise”

because now you'll have to pay them again the good wages that you once had. I think that's Jady Advance's argument for sure. Homebuilders will have to pay more and American workers will

come and take these jobs and that the problem is, again, that immigrants have taken their jobs.

And if you remove the immigrants from the equation, the Americans will fill the void. Is there any evidence that that's starting to happen? There's actually evidence that it's not. So researchers found that in communities where there was a high-level deportation, employment dropped for immigrant workers. Right. But here's what's kind of surprising. Employment also fell for American-born workers. Huh. And what does the study say is the

causality there or why? Well, you would think that contractors would raise wages because they're short on workers. But that's not really the way the industry works. American-born workers and foreign-born workers aren't evenly split across the industry. You have a concentration of foreign-born workers who maybe build the foundations. So let's say you're crew that builds a foundation doesn't show up because they've all been deported or they're afraid to go to work.

So you don't build a foundation. So then when you call in the carpenter, they're like, what am I supposed to build on? There's no foundation. So you don't need the carpenter. So you just don't hire him. You know, in my reporting, I spoke with a number of contractors who said jobs that were taking three months to build. Now take five months to build because there's just fewer workers to get each stage of the project done. And they're not paying their workers any more money.

They're just taking longer to get the job done. And this housing bill doesn't address the labor force. It doesn't provide a pathway to a trade school or any requirements to hire a unionized labor. So it provides no avenues to expand an American-born workforce. There is one place in the bill that does speak to a potential future. And that is the factory build housing. So the bill

makes the first major changes to manufactured housing, which means that now we can build lots of

different types of factory build housing. That kind of housing requires less labor. You don't need as many workers. I'm not sure if that's an upside. But it's an upside for housing, but not for construction workers. Exactly. So what I want to end by returning to where we began this conversation, which is with these prevailing narratives around why the U.S. home construction industry became so relying on foreign board workers. One of those myths is that foreign workers took those

do those jobs anymore. But obviously, it's much more complicated than those simple stories.

“Yes, and I think it's a provocative thing to say, but what we learned through the reporting”

is that there's an elements of truth in both these threads. Yes, immigrants replaced Americans in the jobs they used to hold, right? But it was because they had an opportunity to do so where they couldn't before. The government allowed them in, and the unions no longer had a lock on the jobs, and businesses wanted to hire them, and they made a choice to do that. Right. They wanted this cheaper labor. That was non-union. They pushed for it, and the Americans presented themselves

as that cheaper labor. Exactly. So you had this partnership between government and business

to really decide together to erode what was a really solid American job. And as young American

“born workers entered the workforce during this period, they looked at this back-breaking manual”

labor that maybe their fathers had done, and it didn't feel worth it to them. There were other opportunities where the wages were higher, where the protections were safer, where their health benefits were maybe there was air conditioning in an office. And the industry no longer appealed to a new generation of American born workers. And in its place, it opened an opportunity for a generation of people coming to this country looking for work, but they didn't exactly

take jobs from people who wanted them anymore. I mean, one of the things that strikes me is that almost everyone in the story you have told here did act in a pretty economically rational way. Right. U.S. born workers started to walk away from an industry when the work became less lucrative. Immigrant workers still flocked to it because it was lucrative enough for them. And builders saw cheaper and cheaper labor in a system that didn't require them to work with just unionized

workers. So in a system where everyone's acting rationally, and we end up in a place where there's more and more foreign-born workers at the center of the industry, and then the government decides that a lot of those workers need to leave the country, and we have a huge housing shortage, and none of the workers to build, in that scenario where lots of people have been acting naturally, and it's not working. It feels like the only solution is for something unnatural to happen,

and I wonder what you, as someone quite expert in this area, think that perhaps unnatural thing now needs to be. What is going to fix the American housing crisis? If there aren't enough American -born workers who want to do the work, and increasingly there are foreign-born workers who are being asked to leave. I mean, one option obviously is to rethink the deportation policy, and another option is to really have meaningful training programs. If it is a priority for this

administration to have a domestic workforce, then there needs to be quality training programs,

“and quality wages for workers across the board. You need to decide to have a policy”

that would actually rebuild the ranks of the workforce, and absent that you're just sort of have hazardly removing an already fragile workforce that just makes it harder to get the job done.

Thank you very much. Here's what else you need to know today. The governor of New Jersey,

Democrat Mikey Cheryl said that about 400 non-citizens voted in the state after they were improperly registered in 2023 and 2024. The voting was the result of a software error at the New Jersey Department of Motor Vehicles, which put more than 6,000 non-citizens on the voter rolls, even after they had disclosed their immigration status. New Jersey said that the voting had no impact on any elections, and that all of the non-citizens have been removed from the state's voter

rolls. We'd never seen an outbreak this large for this parasite in the U.S.

people, my colleague, Alice Kellyanne, has been looking into the central question raised by the

“outbreak. For cyclospora, the parasite only survives in humans, so as far as we know, it has to”

come from human species. How did a parasite that only grows in the human gut? Somehow get into our

food system on such a large scale? So usually what that means is there's a situation on farms where

their septic system maybe has a leak in it or they have outhouses next to the field and somehow

“the waste gets into the water supply that's then used to irrigate the crop. So far, government”

agencies have linked the current outbreak to iceberg lettuce grown in Mexico that a company called

Taylor Farms supplied to taco bell locations in multiple states. Taylor Farms has now recalled iceberg lettuce from 27 states, and the U.S. government is stepping up its screening of lettuce coming from Mexico. That's another thing about this bug is that alcohol-based hand sanitizer don't work to kill it so you really need soap and water and full-hand washing to get rid of it. Today's episode was produced by Nina Feldman and Chris Benderer, with help from Stella Tan and Shannon

Lynn. It was edited by Lisa Chow and contains music by Mary Lasano, Diane Wong, and Dan Powell. Our theme music is by Wonderley. This episode was engineered by Chris Wood, special thanks to Robert Gabeloff. That's it for the daily. I'm Michael Borrow. See you tomorrow.

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