This coming Tuesday’s election may be the closest thing America comes to a referendum on an issue of material importance to many home building business models, large and small: immigrant labor on job sites.
Here’s some factual fodder to consider as you decide how to vote for yourself come Tuesday.
Pew Research notes that 8 million unauthorized immigrants with jobs or seeking them in the U.S. (as of 2014) comprise 5% of America’s non-government workforce, as they’re likely to be of prime working age. When you look at the construction industry, however, unauthorized immigrants represent an outsized share of the workforce: 13% in construction. What’s more, unauthorized immigrants hold 15% of construction jobs. Here, per Pew Research, is the geographical story:
States with the largest number of total unauthorized immigrants in their workforces also were among those states with the largest overall populations of unauthorized immigrants. They included California, with 1.7 million unauthorized immigrant workers; Texas, with 1.1 million; and New York, with 600,000. States where unauthorized immigrants accounted for the largest share of the workforce included Nevada (10.4%); California (9.0%) and Texas (8.5%). (See the chart here for the top states.)
Importantly, though, immigrants have served as at least some small part of the solution to the labor capacity challenge that has bedeviled builders since housing’s recovery found its footing in 2014. Even though some fair share of residential construction’s immigrant workforce returned to their homelands as the deep downturn took hold eight or nine years ago, it’s hardly a secret that job sites around the country still include valued team members who are unauthorized immigrants.
Honestly, we ask:
- Are they taking our jobs?
- Are they suppressing fair wages?
- Are they a social or civic burden?
Now, you get to vote based on your beliefs around answers to those questions. It’s not BUILDER’s job to take a position on this matter. It is our job to continue to challenge you and to spotlight opportunities and potential impediments to those opportunities.
Here, for instance, is a fact-based perspective from Fivethirtyeight correspondent Ben Casselman on an issue that goes both broader and deeper than even the labor capacity issue in home building:
Immigration is the only thing keeping the U.S. from facing a Japan-style demographic cliff. At a time when aging and other factors mean that fewer Americans are working, immigrants — who tend to come to the U.S. during their working years and have a higher rate of labor-force participation than native-born Americans — play an increasingly important role in the U.S. workforce. Foreign-born U.S. residents made up 13.1 percent of the population in 2014 but 16.4 percent of the labor force, up from 10 percent two decades earlier.1 Immigrants help the economy in other ways too: They are more likely than native-born Americans to start businesses, and because they pay into Social Security but only receive benefits if they stay in the country permanently, they help ease the U.S.’s long-run fiscal burden.
Casselman goes on to mention that foreign-born Americans tend also to have higher fertility rates than non-foreign-born. Net, net, we’d have had a decline in the number of births since 1970 without foreign-born residents’ children.
So, from both the supply standpoint and the demand perspective, it would seem that immigrants–and some pathway toward legal residence and employment for the hundreds of thousands of workers currently in the residential construction workforce would be a positive.
That’s why this issue, and a host of other local, regional, and national policy items that may impact affordability, regulation, taxation, zoning, and land use are worth getting out and voting on Tuesday.
