ICE’s construction site raids threaten a sector dependent on immigration

Half of the 200 people who were working on a student residence hall near Florida State University last Thursday did not return home. They were arrested in an operation involving ICE immigration authorities, the Florida Highway Patrol, and other federal and state agencies. It is not the first time this has happened. Just a few days earlier, 31 workers were arrested at two construction sites in Laredo, Texas, and another 33 suffered the same fate in Wildwood, Florida. These raids, in addition to the personal and family tragedies for those arrested, are hitting a key sector of the economy — housing — that is already in crisis over a shortage of supply.

These arrests send a loud and clear message about the risk faced by undocumented immigrants working in a sector where one in four workers are immigrants and, according to the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB), 31% are Latino. A large number of those arrested in Florida hail from Mexico, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Honduras, and El Salvador. Betsey Stevenson, a professor of public policy and economics at the University of Michigan, believes it’s reasonable to assume that half of them are undocumented. This estimate is also shared by the Urban Institute in a study, which shows that around 54% of these foreign-born construction workers lack legal status.

“When a major source of labor is affected, the possibility of growing or maintaining the housing supply is affected,” says Jorge González-Hermoso, a researcher and co-author of the study. “These raids will remove many workers from the construction sites,” either through arrests or through fear that could spread even to immigrants legally in the country, says this expert.

Stevenson believes that many workers, even those legally present in the country, may be concerned about going to work and encountering ICE agents. “The current administration is detaining and deporting people without due process, so workers need to be cautious about exposing themselves to situations where they could risk deportation for themselves or a family member,” she adds.

González-Hermoso calls it the “chill effect,” which can lead people who shouldn’t be affected by ICE to look for jobs that have less exposure to raids.

Research from the Urban Institute estimates that more than 42% of construction workers are engaged in residential construction. Immigrant labor plays a significant role in states where the sector is already under severe pressure due to supply falling far short of demand, particularly in California, Texas, Nevada, New York, Florida, Maryland, and New Jersey.

Workplace raids, including in construction, occurred during the George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump administrations, but under Joe Biden, Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas issued a memorandum in 2021 halting such raids. These directives were immediately rescinded during Trump’s second term.

For the Urban Institute researcher, the risk isn’t so much that construction projects will run out of workers, but that projects will be delayed. “Contractors will look for other workers, but they’ll have to find them and will have to raise wages to attract them.” Coupled with changes in financing and other areas — in the form of tariffs on construction materials, for example — housing construction will become more expensive, which will not help lower either sales prices or rent.

Finding more workers isn’t easy because, as Michael Bellaman, president and CEO of the Association of Builders and Contractors (ABC), explains via email, there’s a shortage of 439,000 workers in the sector. “This underscores the critical need to reform our broken immigration system,” Bellaman notes. “Foreign-born workers who are here legally need the assurance that they can continue to do their jobs without fear of retaliation.”

Arturo Castellanos, policy and lobbying manager for the National Immigration Forum, is urging legislators from both parties to make changes to address the problem of the labor shortage in many sectors due to the lack of local population growth. Castellanos explains that the visas used to legally work in the country, not just in construction — the H-2B and EB-3 — do not compensate for the shortage of personnel in this sector.

“We need to increase the number of visas because they’re filling up quickly,” he says. For H-2B visas, for example, there’s a limit of 66,000 per year. Castellanos recalls that the last major immigration reform was in 1986, and those were different times: “A different country, a different economy, it was the Cold War… now we need to address other needs in the United States.”

The expert recalls that, to a large extent, immigrants, both documented and undocumented, were the ones who rebuilt buildings after Hurricanes Helene and Milton in Florida: “Who’s going to rebuild when the next disaster hits?”

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