How Trump’s Mass Deportation Plan Could Impact Construction

On the campaign trail, Republican presidential nominee and former President Donald Trump has repeatedly put forward the idea of a mass deportation of the country’s unauthorized immigrants.

Such an effort could impact an estimated 11 million workers living in the U.S., and while neither Trump nor his campaign has released details on how such an effort would work, the threat alone has set the country’s immigrants on edge — and that’s becoming palpable for those occupying the U.S. construction industry.

Immigrants lacking permanent legal status are estimated to number in the hundreds of thousands in the nation’s construction workforce. The sudden removal of those workers would have stark impacts on an industry already coping with an entrenched labor shortage, the burden of building in a changing property market, and an uncertain economic future.

“Logistically, it's something between impossible and not possible,” Associated General Contractors Vice President of Public Affairs Brian Turmail said of a mass deportation. “And from an economic point of view, it's somewhere between economic suicide and a recipe for putting inflation on steroids.”

Bisnow reached out to more than a dozen major construction and commercial real estate players who said they support Trump’s bid for reelection to get their take on this issue, and all but one either didn’t reply or declined to answer questions. Many of his fellow developers have told Bisnow Trump is “better for business,” had the economy “at an all-time high” during his administration and remains “our only hope.” 

Immigration is a longstanding flashpoint in U.S. politics and has intensified in recent years as the share of illegal immigration has increased. Attempts to reach a reform agreement in Congress, including a recent bipartisan bill, have repeatedly failed. The United States is also becoming a much more diverse nation, with the population of foreign-born Americans at 13.8%, nearly in line with the historical high point of 14.8% in 1890. 

The former president and his allies have also talked about ending or curtailing temporary protected status, a federal immigration designation given to people from countries where conditions temporarily prevent them from returning safely, such as armed conflicts or environmental disasters. Project 2025, which Trump has disavowed but which has extensive connections to Trump allies and often reflects policy decisions during his first term, explicitly advocates for revoking TPS.

According to a 2017 analysis by The Center for Migration Studies, roughly 1 in 6 of the 325,000 workers with this immigration status work in construction. In Texas alone, there are nearly 8,300 such construction workers from El Salvador and Honduras, according to a 2019 analysis by the American Immigration Council. 

Since those studies, the nation’s population of immigrants has grown, and the U.S. extended TPS protection to half a million Venezuelans alone in 2023. In markets like Washington, D.C., the construction workforce includes a significant number of Salvadorians on TPS. Nationwide, approximately 36,900 Salvadorians on TPS work in construction.

Immigration scholars and immigrant rights groups say a move like a mass deportation or truncating TPS would alarm unauthorized immigrants, potentially impact immigration and shrink the workforce in the country.  

“There's no question that mass deportation would impact certain industries severely, and in Texas, that would possibly most detrimentally impact the construction industry,” said Christine Bolaños, communications director for the ​​Texas-based Workers Defense Project. “It's a reality that native-born Texans don't traditionally opt for physically intense and outdoor jobs like construction, and so it would be difficult to offset these potential job openings with native-born Texans.”

The degree to which mass deportation would impact the construction industry and commercial real estate comes from analysis of data that by its nature isn’t precise.

There is widespread agreement in the construction industry that there is a labor shortage. Associated Builders and Contractors President and CEO Michael Bellaman told Bisnow the U.S. construction industry faces a shortfall of more than half a million people in 2024 alone. 

For at least one Trump supporter, though, the former president’s broader economic policies would outweigh any damage caused by mass deportations. 

Gregory Laskody, principal of Boca Raton, Florida-based capital markets brokerage firm Haute CRE, told Bisnow he believes such a policy could “greatly impact the construction sector as it relates to laborers,” especially less-skilled positions like landscapers or those pouring concrete. He also thinks that impact and worker shortfalls could be more than offset by Trump’s other economic policies, which he believes will bring about a “healthier economy, lower interest rates and a higher degree of capital flowing to real estate.”

“The ability to close projects will happen faster,” he said. “Maybe the supply of laborers isn't that great, but because the interest rates are lower and the economy is better, developers and contractors can afford to pay higher wages to those that are in those jobs.”

He foresees any labor disruptions sorting themselves out over time.

“Overall, long term, I would be less concerned about a mass deportation than I would be about a significant decrease in the number of projects that get developed across the board,” Laskody added. 

Stephen Miller, a senior policy adviser in the Trump White House who helped draft Trump’s first-term immigration policies, told The New York Times he believes enacting this policy “will be a labor-market disruption celebrated by American workers, who will now be offered higher wages with better benefits to fill these jobs.”

There aren’t fully accurate accounts of the number of immigrants lacking permanent legal status working in various construction fields, but the limited evidence and research available suggests there would be noticeable impacts if those workers vanished. Laura Collins, director of the Bush Institute-SMU Economic Growth Initiative, which focuses on immigration, and her colleagues estimate the total unauthorized workforce in the U.S. represents about 6% of the country’s workforce and about $1T in GDP. 

The National Association of Home Builders, which focuses on residential work, found in a report this year that 1 in 4 workers were immigrants and made up a majority or nearly a majority of key trades like masonry, roofing and drywall installation.

A study published earlier this year by the Universities of Utah and Wisconsin-Madison underscored that analysis, arguing that immigration restrictions in different states and regions of the U.S. directly contributed to housing shortages by shrinking the available pool of workers. The Workers Defense Project estimates at least half the construction workforce in Texas lacks permanent legal status, and it argues that figure might be as high as 70% due to underreporting.  

These workers provide $1.21 in revenue for every $1 spent on public services, even factoring in state costs for the undocumented, according to an accounting of the economic impact of Texas’ unauthorized immigrant population by Rice University researcher José Iván Rodríguez-Sánchez. The analysis used 2018 data and an estimated population of 1.6 million residents lacking permanent legal status. It also found that roughly a quarter of this population worked in construction. 

Trump’s campaign didn't respond to multiple requests for comment from Bisnow, and it hasn’t released specific information about how an operation would be conducted or what it would cost. 

The ability for a second Trump administration to carry out this operation has been questioned, including by Republican members of Congress, due to the potential economic and social costs of so much dislocation, including arrests, detention and family separation. Trump has provided broad outlines of an effort that would divert military personnel and spending, open camps across the country, and ramp up federal involvement and orders around immigration. 

He doubled down on the idea at a campaign rally in Wisconsin Saturday, telling supporters, “Getting them out will be a bloody story.” 

“They should never have been allowed to come into our country,” he added. “Nobody checked them.”

He didn't provide details at Tuesday's debate against Vice President Kamala Harris.

Collins said estimates of the cost of such an operation from a decade ago have topped half a trillion dollars. She believes it is “impossible” to do something on that scale today, due to a shortage of agents, judges and detention facilities. 

“Threats of deportation of this scale would obviously be very, very anxiety-inducing to the population that would be targeted, so I want to treat that seriously,” she said. “However, we know that a mass deportation of that sort of scale, even though we have seen in U.S. history attempts to undertake mass deportations before, like Operation Wetback, would be very hard to do today given the modern American legal system.”

Despite the logistical and legal unlikelihood of mass deportation occurring, Trump has a track record of cracking down on immigration and has made it clear that the border would be a major focus of a second term.

At the least, it seems likely he would target TPS, as his administration tried to do in his first term, according to Madeline Zavodny, a professor of economics at the University of North Florida.

According to Bolaños, the threat of mass deportation has made the immigrant community feel “disheartened, worried, outraged, but at the same time compelled to action.” She added members of the Workers Defense Project “are making plans for deportation.”

Turmail said the mass deportation idea is symptomatic of the fact that people are frustrated by an inability to control the border. The AGC advocates for solutions to what it sees as a long bipartisan failure to solve the nation’s immigration challenges.

The trade association suggests better border enforcement, so the country doesn’t have a large group of unauthorized workers who can be exploited to underbid responsible contractors, and more legal immigration to allow workers to fill shortages in vital fields like construction while the domestic labor pool is expanded and trained. 

“To some extent, the whole question of immigration has become a four-letter word because people are upset about the status quo,” Turmail said. “We appreciate that. But we also need to appreciate that there is a real economic development potential, right? There are states around the country that just don't have enough of a population for them to be able to meet their economic development needs without allowing people to lawfully come to the country and work in certain fields. We need to harness that frustration into some kind of a meaningful solution that doesn't involve things that are logistically impossible and economically suicidal.” 

The ABC has a similar policy stance, according to Bellaman, who argued there are few legal avenues for properly vetted people to come to the U.S. and work. The ABC has supported the Essential Workers for Economic Advancement Act, introduced by Rep. Lloyd Smucker, a Pennsylvania Republican, which aims to create a new visa program to help address the workforce needs of the construction industry by providing critical access to temporary workers.

“ABC strongly believes that legal immigration reform is equally crucial for strengthening border security, fostering economic prosperity and providing high-demand industries like construction with market- and merit-based solutions to workforce shortages,” Bellaman said.

But Turmail said trying to solve this complicated issue with a mass deportation policy would create an economic shock.

“If you are worried about high prices, if you're worried about inflation, removing a large number of people from our workforce isn't going to improve the supply of housing, isn't going to make groceries less expensive and isn't going to make the cost of infrastructure more affordable,” Turmail said. “In fact, it will do the exact opposite.”