Trump’s Clashing Goals: More Housing, Fewer Immigrants
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From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. 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 Kaysen 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 is 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, right? 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.
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 in tension.
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 the 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 passed this landmark legislation that's the first time in more than 30 years that the federal government has said, we want to build housing. At the same time, the federal government's also saying, we want to deport the immigrant workforce.
How does the new federal housing law aim to increase home construction?
Who builds the houses. 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. This was not always an immigrant job.
Right.
Well, just explain what you found in your reporting about how it came to be that the U.S. 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 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.
How could Trump’s immigration crackdowns conflict with housing goals?
We either hear that immigrants stole Americans' jobs, or we hear that Americans were too lazy to do these jobs.
Hmm.
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.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:01–3:44
2
How does the new federal housing law aim to increase home construction?
3:44–4:40
3
How could Trump’s immigration crackdowns conflict with housing goals?
4:40–14:46
4
Why did the U.S. construction industry become so reliant on immigrant labor?
14:46–19:25
5
How did union decline and non‑union growth reshape construction since the 1970s?
19:25–38:04