Construction bosses based primarily in Texas are complaining that President-Elect Donald Trump and Vice President-elect JD Vance will stop them from hiring and continuing to employ hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens in industry jobs.
Trump and Vance have vowed to carry out the nation’s largest deportation program in American history, spearheaded by former Acting Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Director Thomas Homan, whom Trump has named “border czar.”
“We’re going to go do the job. President Trump has a mandate from the American people,” Homan said recently. “We’ve got to secure this country. We’ve got to save American lives.”
In interviews with National Public Radio (NPR), construction mogul Stan Marek and economic consultant Ray Perryman complained that Trump’s mass deportation program “would devastate” the construction industry, suggesting that “we wouldn’t finish our highways, we wouldn’t finish our schools.”
Estimates from 2022 indicate that the construction industry in Texas employs more than half a million foreign-born workers — 6 in 10 of whom are illegal aliens with no legal basis to be holding jobs in the United States.
Perryman claims it is unsustainable to not employ illegal aliens in construction jobs.
“It’s not remotely practical to round up and deport everybody. … And, we simply don’t have an economic structure that can sustain that,” Perryman told NPR. “There are more undocumented people working in Texas right now than there are unemployed people in Texas.”
Instead, Marek said the Trump-Vance administration ought to pass amnesty for the 11 to 22 million illegal aliens living across the United States. Trump, Vance, and Homan have all vowed that the administration will consider no such amnesty plans.
Throughout his first term, Trump’s fierce enforcement of federal immigration laws helped tighten the labor market — particularly in blue-collar industries.
In return, wages surged for construction workers and construction jobs opened up for women as employers had to fight for employees rather than having a flooded labor market tilted to employers.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.
