President Donald Trump’s deportation plans could jeopardize Gov. Spencer Cox’s goal of building 35,000 starter homes by 2028. It all boils down to the available labor force.
According to Department of Workforce Services data for 2023, Utah has approximately 135,000 construction workers. An estimated 12,000 of them are in the country illegally.
This is according to a study conducted by the Migration Policy Institute in Washington, which examined census data on population and income. Without those workers, construction costs may rise, making starter homes more difficult to build.
The Trump administration’s recent changes may make it easier to deport people who are in the country illegally without a criminal conviction. For starters, “collateral arrests” are now legal, according to the Associated Press.
This means that immigration enforcement officers can arrest people without legal status who they come across while searching for specific targets.
The Laken Riley Act, signed by the president on January 29, calls for the detention and deportation of people without legal status who are charged — but not convicted — of certain crimes, including nonviolent offenses such as shoplifting or minor theft.
According to Steve Waldrip, the governor’s senior advisor for housing strategy and innovation, removing Utah’s undocumented construction workers would reduce the workforce.
“I do think that there is a concern that if we lose that segment of our labor force in housing construction, that we will feel that in the pricing that is already too high,” he went on.
A recent study by economists Troup Howard of the University of Utah, Mengqi Wang of Amherst College, and Dayin Zhang of the University of Wisconsin-Madison found that deporting workers without legal status raises home prices. The paper is currently being peer reviewed.
The researchers examined changes in residential construction as US Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Secure Communities program expanded across the country from 2008 to 2013.
Under the program, the Federal Bureau of Investigation automatically shared fingerprints of people arrested in state and local jurisdictions with the Department of Homeland Security.
The fingerprints were checked against immigration databases, and if an individual was found to be in the country illegally, ICE took action.
Zhang explained that they compared housing in counties where the program had been implemented at various times.
“We found first, if you have Secure Communities, you see a shortage of supply, shortage of labor supply in the construction sector, specifically from illegal immigrants,” he said.
This resulted in less construction, a housing shortage, and an increase in new construction costs. Builders sometimes built smaller homes to compensate for rising costs. Zhang noted that the impact could vary depending on how much of a region’s workforce is in the country illegally.
The researchers discovered that large-scale deportations resulted in fewer jobs for US-born workers. According to Zhang, construction wages have not increased significantly, and many low-skilled jobs remain unfilled. As a result, there were fewer opportunities for highly skilled workers.
“If you just do not have people framing the house or install[ing] the drywall, you actually do not have the job for inspectors or electricians,” he said.
Waldrip said rising costs could make the governor’s starter home goal even more difficult to hit.
“Pricing is a part of the starter home,” he said. “If we get too high, then it is no longer a starter home.”
