Friday, November 22, 2024

Trump says deportations will lower housing costs. The reality is complicated.

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On the campaign trail, President-elect Donald Trump blamed the housing crisis on immigration. As he tells it, millions of immigrants are pouring over the border and taking up scarce housing in a market that is already tight on supply and increasingly unaffordable for the middle class.

But housing market experts say the relationship between rising immigration and surging housing costs isn’t so clear. On one hand, immigrants, of course, need their own housing, and higher demand can make rents and home prices more expensive. On the other, immigrants disproportionately help contribute to new home supply because so much of the construction industry runs on their labor.

“When I hear about mass deportations or tighter border security, I think it could send a chilling effect through the immigrant population in the construction industry and therefore reduce the labor pool and drive labor costs up,” said Jim Tobin, president and chief executive officer of the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB), a trade group.

Ultimately, those policies can cause construction delays and make home prices higher for consumers, he added.

The NAHB estimates that immigrants make up around a third of the labor force in construction trades. In some states like California and Texas, the percentage is closer to 40%.

Read more: Why are home prices so high?

Construction workers work on the roof of a house being built in Alhambra, Calif., on Sept. 23. (Photo by Frederic J. BROWN / AFP) (Photo by FREDERIC J. BROWN/AFP via Getty Images) · FREDERIC J. BROWN via Getty Images

Ligia Guallpa, executive director of the Workers Justice Project, an organization that helps immigrant workers in New York organize and get educational training, said that many recent arrivals end up working in residential construction because it has few barriers to entry and strong labor demand. Many of those workers are living far from their job sites in cheaper parts of the city and may be sharing housing, she added.

“Very often where workers build are not places where they can afford to live,” she said. “We’re seeing communities and families coming together to be able to rent one apartment.”

Duewight García, 36, arrived in New York in 2019 from Honduras. After learning how to navigate the city’s regulations mandating that construction workers receive 40 hours of safety training before getting jobs, he found work in residential and commercial construction doing drywall installation and framing.

He said he wants to continue his education in the US but is concerned what Trump’s policies mean for immigrants.

“The policies that he has been talking about and that he’s begun to implement toward immigrants are really worrying,” García said in Spanish. “We really come here to work and contribute to the economy of this country, because we know that if this country is doing well, we’re going to do well.”

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