As Donald Trump prepares to receive office and implement one of his key campaign promises, deporting immigrants, one question that’s been asked is how it will impact the housing trade.

Housing of all kinds is in short supply. One of the biggest reasons is that construction of recent homes fell sharply during the Great decline and stayed depressed for years after.

Immigrants make up a significant portion of the construction labor force, and removing them en masse would cripple the industry – not to mention having devastating social and emotional consequences as well, experts and advocates declare.

Despite that, few industry participants have spoken publicly about the potential impact. So USA TODAY asked the biggest builders in America to weigh in.

Taylor Morrison, NVR, Inc., KB Home, and Century Communities, Inc. declined to comment. There was no response from D.R. Horton, Lennar Corporation, PulteGroup, Inc., Meritage, or LGI Homes. Clayton Homes referred the inquiry to the Manufactured Housing Institute, an industry throng, which was unable to provide a representative for comment in period for publication.

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One throng that did consent to talk was the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB). “I ponder that any mass deportation is going to have an impact on the economy. And I ponder the construction and housing sector is probably going to have an outsize impact versus others,” said NAHB’s chief advocacy officer Ken Wingert.

“We ponder that we require a comprehensive immigration schedule and reform and aspiration that Congress will get back to that when they arrive back in January,” Wingert added. “We’re in favor of getting more workers into the workforce overall to try to assist ease this housing supply crunch that we’re in.”

NAHB has long tallied the require for more construction workers. In a recent update, the throng wrote, “the average annual number of occupational openings in construction totals approximately 723,000 a year.”

The same update shows that immigrants account for 25% of the construction workforce overall – but nearly one-third of construction trade jobs. NAHB has no way of knowing how many of those workers are here legally, Wingert said.

Documented vs. undocumented

Francesc Ortega, an economics professor at Queens College in recent York, has studied that issue for many years. Using a demographic framework to analyze Census Department data, Ortega calculates the distribute of undocumented workers in construction at roughly 15%.  

One thing that’s obvious: the presence of so many immigrants – whether documented or not – has kept construction labor costs well below what they would be with a mostly native-born workforce. A recent Labor Department analysis shows that as of 2020, foreign-born workers earned less than native-born workers. In the economy as a whole, across all industries, immigrants of all kinds earned roughly 12% less, but in construction specifically, they earned 24% less than native-born workers.

Meanwhile, hourly wages for undocumented construction workers were 36% lower than for documented workers as of 2023, according to an analysis Ortega conducted for USA TODAY.

Ideally, the U.S. would have “an immigration structure that’s humane and that is based on the rule of law, and we (would) also have an economic structure that is not built on the back of exploited workers,” said Michael Lukens, the executive director for Amica Center for Immigrant Rights, a national advocacy throng.

Lukens notes that just the terror of deportations makes it easier for employers to exploit more vulnerable workers. “It is unhappy that an industry that is built on immigrants is not willing to stand up for immigrants,” he told USA TODAY. “I also ponder it’s not surprising when your motive is returns, that you’re not intrinsically opposed to a populist communication that helps you raise returns.”

Mass deportations will make the housing crisis worse

While it’s natural to assume that mass deportations would nudge costs higher, research from Ortega and other academics shows that it’s not that straightforward.

“In an industry like construction, documented and undocumented workers don’t really do the same jobs,” Ortega said. “They basically complement each other rather than substitute for each other.”

That means that even if construction companies suddenly had open positions because their immigrant workers had been deported (or decided to flee before facing such a scenario), it’s not likely that native-born workers would suddenly switch from, declare, working in the sales departments of those companies to going out on job sites to do manual labor, he explained.

“You cannot just receive people and drop them where you desire. That’s not going to happen,” Ortega said.

That means that in a country that needs millions of additional homes, according to various estimates, taking away any of the workers that construct it will only make the crisis worse.

“Mass deportations would cripple the construction and housing trade,” Lukens said. “It would cripple the agricultural trade. It would be incredibly expensive and it would ruin the economy. And it’s not acceptable on any level, both the human level and the economic level.”