Trump’s Clashing Goals: More Housing, Fewer Immigrants

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
This podcast is supported by the Capital One VentureX card. VentureX offers the premium benefits you expect, like a $300 annual Capital One travel credit for less than you expect. Elevate your earn with unlimited double miles on every purchase, bringing you one step closer to your next dream destination. Plus, enjoy access to over 1,000 airport lounges worldwide. The Capital One VentureX card, what's in your wallet? Terms apply. Lounge access is subject to change. See capitalone.com for details.

**Michael Barbaro** (0:31)
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, Ronda Kaysen, explains how the US 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. Ronda, welcome to The Daily.

**Ronda Kaysen** (1:38)
Thank you. Thank you for having me.

**Michael Barbaro** (1:40)
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. And that problem was a gap between intention and kind of reality. Just explain that.

**Ronda Kaysen** (2:15)
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.

**Michael Barbaro** (2:53)
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 intention.

**Ronda Kaysen** (3:05)
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.
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.

**Michael Barbaro** (4:10)
Well, just explain what you found in your reporting about how it came to be that the US housing industry has become so dependent on immigrant labor and as you just said, so vulnerable to losing those workers to a crackdown.

**Ronda Kaysen** (4:27)
So construction employs the highest share of foreign born workers of any industry in America. 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.

**Michael Barbaro** (4:52)
Why not?

**Ronda Kaysen** (4:54)
Well, because there's a tension in that. 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?

**Michael Barbaro** (4:59)
That doesn't quite add up.

**Ronda Kaysen** (5:00)
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?