Commentary: Construction’s Immigrant Dependence Is a Choice—America Must End It
Prioritizing citizen labor means short-term pain for contractors addicted to illegal workers. The alternative is ceasing to be a real country.
Roughly a third of construction trades workers are immigrants, according to the National Association of Home Builders, with some specialties reaching 61 percent. That's not organic labor-market evolution. It's the predictable result of open-border policies that treated American blue-collar wages and job availability as secondary to cheap, pliable labor.
This has not only harmed existing and potential American construction workers, but has also weakened the building industry by keeping it reliant on immigrant labor. Ken Simonson, the Associated General Contractors of America's chief economist, notes that because of an immigration reduction under President Donald Trump, the "construction inflow of potential workers has been turned off." Many illegal workers who entered under previous administrations are already failing to show up, self-deporting, or avoiding jobsites out of fear of heightened Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) activity.
The more this hurts the industry, the more construction lobbyists will inevitably push for ICE to back off or focus on illegal aliens in other industries. In fact, they have already begun to do so.
Americans Face a Binary Choice on Immigration
American voters must decide. Do they want blue-collar jobs for American citizens, or not?
If the answer is no, then they don't have a real country. They are instead a conglomeration of elites who use foreign workers—many of them illegal and effectively captive to their employers—to build insular colonies while sidelining American workers.
If the answer is yes, then voters and policymakers must accept taking a sledgehammer to the construction industry that has built its model on illegal or mass immigrant labor. That means hard-working small-business owners—many of whom support conservative policies because Republicans cut regulations and enable faster growth—will face higher costs, delays, thinner margins, or bankruptcy until the industry retools around mostly citizen labor.
Complaints from contractors about the labor scarcity are real; they are also the necessary consequence of ending a subsidy that previous administrations handed them at the expense of citizens. Higher bids, slower project starts, and pressure to train or recruit domestically are the price of making America great again.
This Is a Moral Issue
Republicans often hunt for the most grotesque crime imaginable, committed by some illegal alien, to drum up support for mass deportations. As the Trump administration has learned, it doesn't take long for ICE to run out of criminal aliens to deport.
Instead, conservatives should make the more obvious moral case that deporting illegal workers moves American citizens to the front of the line in the competition for jobs. American workers should have to compete primarily against each other. That doesn't mean legal immigrant labor will become nonexistent. But legal limits exist for a reason, and it has nothing to do with preventing immigrants from committing grotesque crimes. It's entirely about protecting the American workforce.
Construction-site deportations must accelerate. The quicker unauthorized labor is cleared from jobsites, the faster the industry can adjust through higher citizen wages, training, and realistic project pacing. Construction, like every other sector, should prioritize citizens.
Pro-Illegal Alien Contractors Can Go Pound Nails
Many general contractors will abandon support for the Republican Party because they prioritize cheap labor over long-term macroeconomic health and national cohesion. The Republican Party should let them go. Their votes are expendable. The votes of the children of their illegal alien employees, however, are another matter.
Birthright citizenship is still the law of the land. Even setting aside noncitizen voting, their children born on U.S. soil will be eligible to vote in 18 years. Are those anchor babies likelier to support the policies of a political party that wants to deport their parents or one that wants to let more immigrants like their parents in?
Supporting long-term workforce growth for Americans—especially those passed over for lower-cost immigrant labor—is the ultimate America First immigration and labor policy. In the end, the Republican Party gains by delivering tangible jobs and rising opportunities to those citizens, rather than perpetuating dependence on an imported workforce that depresses wages and entrenches elite comfort. In America, Americans should make up almost all the workers in any sector, especially something as important as construction.
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