Trump’s Clashing Goals: More Housing, Fewer Immigrants

What It Covers

NYT reporter Ronda Kaysen examines how Congress's landmark 2025 housing bill conflicts with Trump's mass deportation policy. Construction employs the highest share of foreign-born workers of any U.S. industry, and a 300,000-worker shortage already exists, meaning deportations directly undermine the legislation's goal of building more affordable homes.

Key Questions Answered

• •Union collapse timeline: In 1973, foreign-born workers represented only 5% of the construction workforce, with 40% of all construction workers unionized and earning $1.71 for every dollar the average American made. By the 1983 California carpenters' strike, union concessions on residential sites began a structural collapse that took decades to fully materialize across the industry.
• •Deportation backfire effect: Research on high-deportation communities shows employment dropped for both immigrant and American-born construction workers simultaneously. When immigrant crews handling foundational work disappear, downstream trades like carpentry have nothing to build on, so contractors simply delay or cancel projects rather than raise wages to attract replacement workers.
• •Labor pipeline destruction: The union apprenticeship system that trained workers like Matt Moore — who bought a house at age 20 after two years of roofing — no longer exists at scale. Without formal training pipelines, high school graduates have no structured entry point into construction trades, leaving immigrant social networks as the primary recruitment channel.
• •Sunbelt concentration amplifies risk: The housing boom of the early 2000s concentrated new residential construction in Arizona, Nevada, Texas, and California — right-to-work states with porous borders and minimal union presence. These regions now have foreign-born workers comprising up to 90% of specific trades like drywall and roofing, making them acutely vulnerable to enforcement actions.
• •Policy gap in the housing bill: The 2025 housing legislation contains no workforce development provisions — no trade school pathways, no apprenticeship funding, no union labor requirements. The one labor-relevant provision expands factory-built manufactured housing, which requires fewer workers per unit, but does nothing to rebuild the domestic construction labor pipeline that collapsed after the 2008 housing crash.