Fewer Illegal Aliens Could Mean Fewer Homes Or Something

Once again, the Credentialed Media has conflated legal immigrants and migrant workers with those who are unlawfully present

Fewer immigrants could mean fewer new homes

For Stephan Sardone, owner of a Dallas-based home remodeling company, “a day without immigrants” last month meant a day without one of his subcontractors on a job in the city’s affluent Preston Hollow neighborhood.

Every one of the subcontractor’s employees skipped work on Feb. 16 to take part in an informal nationwide strike designed to highlight the importance of foreign-born workers to the U.S. economy and protest President Trump’s immigration agenda. The strike caused a minor inconvenience for Sardone, but its message certainly wasn’t lost on him.

Perhaps that subcontractor should be investigated for potentially employing illegal aliens.

That’s because homebuilders, remodelers and subcontractors rely heavily on foreign-born workers and are already coping with a long-running labor shortage. The lack of labor has depressed construction levels throughout the housing recovery, contributing to an imbalance between supply and demand for homes and thus driving up prices.

Well, gee, there are millions of Americans out of work. They could certainly do the job, could they not?

Tighter controls on immigration, whether legal or illegal, under President Trump may only exacerbate the homebuilding industry’s labor shortfall.

But, Trump is not talking about legals: he’s talking about illegals.

Foreign-born workers represent nearly 30 percent of those employed in construction trades, according to a study by the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) that analyzed Census data. The share of immigrants is particularly high in some trades that are crucial to homebuilding (such as carpentry, painting and drywall installation) and don’t require much formal training.

It’s an open secret that many unauthorized immigrants work in the construction industry. While they represented a 5 percent share of the U.S. civilian labor force in 2014, they made up about 13 percent of workers in the construction sector that year, according to a Pew Research Center study. In a ranking of industries with high shares of unauthorized immigrant workers, agriculture came in first, followed by construction.

Those are disturbing stats: 5% of the civilian workforce and 13% of those in the construction sector are unlawfully present and taking jobs away from legal citizens and those who are here on visas. Much of the rest of the article does its best to mix legal with illegal immigration.