Ronda Kaysen

speaker

330 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 22 Jul

Ronda Kaysen’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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The Daily · Trump’s Clashing Goals: More Housing, Fewer Immigrants · 22 Jul 2026 podcast

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.

This was not always an immigrant job.

So construction employs the highest share of foreign-born workers of any industry in America.

Huh.

And to explain how we got to this point, we usually hear one of these two stories.

We either hear that immigrants stole Americans' 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 a tension in that.

Like, 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 is it?

So it doesn't add up to me.

And so my colleague Rob Gebeloff and I really wanted to know why did American workers leave this industry and why did the immigrant workers come into it?

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 at an all-time high.

It was like 40% of all construction workers were unionized, which was like higher than other industries.

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