LA raids rattle California homebuilding industry, where 41% of workforce are immigrants – San Bernardino Sun

California’s homebuilding industry is growing jittery over Southern California’s immigration raids and what they might mean to an industry already facing labor shortages.

The state is home to 1.8 million undocumented workers, the highest concentration in the U.S.  Roughly 41% of the construction workforce is foreign-born and employed in homebuilding.

Also see: LA wildfire rebuilding faces construction worker shortage

Multiple homebuilders with projects in Southern California — Lennar, The Olson Co., Patterson Custom Homes, Toll Brothers and TRI Pointe Homes — did not respond to requests for comment on how raids sweeping the region by Immigration and Customs Enforcement might affect their projects.

With some fearful of the wrath of the Trump administration and its tariff policies, behind the scenes, trade organizations are offering guidance on what to do if immigration agents show up on a job site.

Jim Tobin, chief executive officer of the National Association of Home Builders in Washington, D.C., said Tuesday that the raids are troubling.

“I think the labor market is tight for our industry already. Whether this adds to it or not (the raids), we will see,” Tobin said. “We’re watching all of the developments very carefully and making sure we’re looking to the future to train workers and get a comprehensive immigration policy that allows people who want to work in our industry to come into it really easily.”

Tobin suggested that while immigration reform is needed to secure the borders, a construction industry-specific visa is necessary to allow foreign workers into the U.S. — just as seasonal workers do in the agriculture field. “It would be great to help them come out of the shadows and provide them some legal status in this country,” he said.

In the Los Angeles metro area, housing building permits have been in a two-year lull, but rebuilding from devastating January wildfires that destroyed some 13,000 homes is sure to add pressure to the labor pool.

“Immigration raids will likely have at least a marginal impact on the homebuilding industry in Southern California … [but] it will depend on the breadth and length of the raids,” said Tim Kawahara, executive director of the UCLA Ziman Center for Real Estate. “Some of that workforce is undocumented and may face deportation.”

Richard Green, director of the USC Lusk Center for Real Estate, pointed to recent U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data showing some 250,000 construction job openings in the United States.

“To the extent that you put a chill on people who might be part of those workers, it doesn’t help,” Green said. “It’s been hard for a while to find construction labor. The raids don’t help.”

ICE began its raids June 6 in downtown Los Angeles’ fashion district before spreading on Saturday to Paramount, a heavily Latino city south of the city, and neighboring Compton.

On Sunday, tensions again rose in Los Angeles as protesters took to the streets after President Donald Trump deployed California’s National Guard. On Monday, clashes spread to Orange County as an anti-immigration rally in Santa Ana grew heated following ICE activity at local businesses. Meanwhile, 700 Marines from Twentynine Palms deployed to support the guard in LA.

A movement to deport

Trump has vowed to deport undocumented immigrants — and the greatest concentration of them live and work in California.

The Pew Research Center estimates that 1.8 million immigrants in California were undocumented in 2022, down 17% from 2.8 million in 2007, according to the latest available data.

Kawahara said California’s homebuilding industry has a lot at stake if the raids continue over a long period of time.

He cited an analysis of “immigrant workers in the construction labor force” by the national homebuilders group, which shows more than half of the three million construction workers in the U.S. live in California, Texas, Florida and New York.

California and Texas have over half-a-million foreign-born construction workers each. Combined, these two states account for more than a third of all immigrant construction workers. Florida and New York combined account for an additional 18%.

Kawahara said the ICE the raids may cause undocumented workers to avoid reporting to work sites in fear of being detained.

“The construction labor market is already very tight,” he said.  “This is a particularly challenging issue for the wildfire recovery efforts in Los Angeles, where thousands of homes need to be rebuilt.”

Green noted that he’d prefer if Congress passed an immigration reform bill that legalized a lot of the people who are already here, and made it easier for others to come.

“We, as a country, are getting old pretty quickly, and if we don’t do some sort of immigration reform, 60-year-olds aren’t going to be doing construction labor,” he said. “We need to fix immigration law so that it conforms to the realities of the labor market. But I’m not holding my breath.”