A report published by Business Insider highlighted the former president’s pledge Trump He led a mass deportation campaign once he was elected, anticipating that this would lead to a significant workforce shortage for builders, increasing wages and costs. The report reviewed how Trump’s plans could affect the labor market and make homes more expensive for buyers.
The report indicated that deportation could include up to 1.2 million people, although up to 11 million undocumented residents live in the country, according to estimates.
He stated that while there is still room for debate about the feasibility of this plan, a common view suggests that a sudden dump of the immigrant workforce could significantly hinder construction in the United States, exacerbating the problem of housing unaffordability.
Business Insider quoted National Building Association CEO Jim Tobin as saying:
- If we see mass firings, I think it will have a chilling effect on the labor market.
- Immigrants are a vital component of the industry, helping to alleviate a significant shortage of skilled workers.
The Home Building Institute reports that foreign-born workers, who represent up to a third of the sector’s workforce, are often concentrated in specific trades required to build homes, such as formwork and dry assemblies, the report noted.
“We constantly see government data that shows we are short between 200,000 and 400,000 workers in our industry, and that shortage of skilled workers slows the pace of construction, increases labor costs, which ultimately leads to higher home prices and a slower pace of home construction,” Tobin said.
How did the Trump campaign respond?
The Trump campaign responded to this; In a recent interview with the New York Times, vice presidential candidate J. D. Vance, there are enough American workers capable of filling these opportunities.
“This is one of the crazy things that I think illegal immigration does to our society, is it makes us think that we can only build houses with illegal immigrants,” he noted.
Results of studies
The report indicated that a study by the George Bush Institute in 2022 found that urban areas in the United States that witnessed the highest growth in the immigrant population recorded the lowest construction costs.
- Historical experience suggests that in the absence of these workers, housing costs would likely rise.
- According to a study released earlier this year, home prices rose in counties affected by evictions from 2008 to 2014, as the Secure Communities Program evicted more than 300 undocumented immigrants during that period.
While the Trump campaign suggests that tightening immigration will help alleviate the problem of housing unaffordability by removing one source of demand.
Immigration is not the reason
While the Center for American Progress argues that Americans’ difficulty in finding affordable housing is not due to immigration. If this difficulty were immigration-based, we would expect large increases in housing costs to be positively associated with increases in the number of foreign-born workers in the labor force, because income is needed to pay for housing.
But this link does not exist. While the number of foreign-born workers has trended upward since 2014, it has not kept pace with changes in housing costs. This is evident from data comparing house price growth with changes in the number of foreign-born workers in the labor force, published by the Foundation.
- After the 2020 recession, housing prices rose dramatically, while the number of foreign-born workers declined.
- The number of foreign-born workers only returned to its pre-recession level in November 2021, after rapid price increases began.
- In April 2022, the growth rate of housing prices began to decline sharply, even though the number of foreign-born workers continued to rise.
- As the number of foreign-born workers rises by 2024, the rate of increase in home prices will fall below levels seen since 2014, when the number of foreign-born workers was much lower.
Definitions
In a related context, the Business Insider report stated that at the same time, Trump’s platform is also pushing another policy initiative that is unlikely to help reduce housing costs, namely tariffs, as the candidate promised to raise duties on all imports into the United States, which may Up to 60 percent on Chinese imports.
“If you were to add tariffs on building materials, that cost would simply be passed on to the homeowner or renter,” the report quoted Tobin as saying, noting that there was no evidence that tariffs would significantly increase production in the United States.
The most affected sectors
For his part, a member of the Democratic Party, Mehdi Afifi, said in exclusive statements to the “Eqtisad Sky News Arabia” website that former President Donald Trump’s campaign on immigration and immigrants is not new, suggesting that its goal is to attract a certain group of Americans, and to export an image that immigrants are taking Places and opportunities for Americans.
He pointed out that there was a draft law to improve the lives of immigrants and legalize their conditions, but after the House of Representatives approved this draft, Trump supported his supporters in the Senate and the House of Representatives to stop this draft law, stressing that there are many sectors within the United States of America that do not work without immigrants and are harmed. them, including for example:
- The agricultural sector, especially since collecting agricultural crops requires a lot of labor, especially in states such as Texas, California, and Florida, where this sector relies heavily on immigrants, especially since Americans do not work there as required.
- Service industries in hotels and restaurants, for example in New York City, rely heavily on immigrants from South America.
- The information technology sector is not only limited to immigrants, but there are a large number of visas that are issued and granted to this sector every year to attract minds, whether from India or elsewhere.
He explained that Trump’s pledge to lead the largest expulsion campaign in the history of the United States if he is re-elected will not happen in practice, explaining that he is trying to use such calls in his own election campaign only, describing the matter as a purely electoral speech that has no connection to reality.
While he ruled out the construction sector being affected and paying the price for Trump’s campaign on immigration, he explained that this sector is perhaps the least affected by immigrants, and that this sector usually has many American craftsmen and people with other specializations, stressing that it is a very organized sector in the United States.
He noted that over the decades these groups of immigrants come to United States of America She assesses that the Democrats are always working to legalize the status of these immigrants, especially since once their status is legalized, they pay taxes, while if it is not legalized, they take advantage of all services without paying taxes, and they become a burden on the health system in the United States.
Production affected
Financial risk expert from the United States, Mohieddin Kassar, explained in exclusive statements to the “Eqtisad Sky News Arabia” website that Donald Trump’s election campaign is based on intimidating Americans from foreigners, and thus intimidating the American working class from competing with the foreign worker.
He described Trump’s calls as an unreal whirlwind, explaining that immigrant workers are usually poorly trained, and that America needs those with high experience, stressing that these are not competitors except in professions such as agriculture and construction, which are professions that American workers do not originally work in.
He expected that closing immigration, if implemented in this way, would affect production in certain sectors that depend on the migrant workforce, such as the construction sector, which could lead to an increase in housing costs.
He ruled out that Trump would be able to implement this, stressing that it is merely “an electoral game played on the national projects of the American working class” and that closing the American borders will put pressure on labor and lead to raising prices and thus affect real salaries, which is what the capitalist class, which needs this labor, will not allow. To reduce the increase in salaries.
