A contractor in Texas has warned that construction will suffer if Donald Trump fulfils his main campaign pledge to round up and deport millions of undocumented migrants.
Around 295,400 undocumented migrants worked in Texas construction in 2022, accounting for 23% of all construction workers in the state, according to a September report by the American Immigration Council.
Meanwhile, nationwide, the sector is facing record vacancies amid a sustained construction boom.
“It would devastate our industry, we wouldn’t finish our highways, we wouldn’t finish our schools,” Stan Marek, CEO of Marek, a Houston-based commercial and residential contractor, told NPR.
“Housing would disappear. I think they’d lose half their labour,” he added.
Economist Ray Perryman, president and CEO of Waco-based Perryman Group, also weighed in.
“It’s not remotely practical to round up and deport everybody,” he told NPR. “And, we simply don’t have an economic structure that can sustain that. There are more undocumented people working in Texas right now than there are unemployed people in Texas.”
He added: “The bottom line is if you just look across the country, our birth rates are at historic lows, our population growth is at historic lows, we just simply are not making enough people, so to speak, to sustain our economy. ”
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Further reading:
Our subs are constantly undermanned and it is worrying. We see projects slipping all the time due to lack of manpower. And yet even though everyone is aware of the problems kids are being encouraged to apply for an expensive university education, where as what they really need is vocational training.
We need to recognize the vital role immigrant labor plays in our economy!