Trump’s immigration and tariff policies complicate disaster response ahead of hurricane season

This article was originally published by The Emancipator.

After Hurricane Helene barreled through the Gulf Coast and hit North Carolina and the eastern Tennessee mountain region in September, devastating the region and killing 249 people, immigrant workers hauled wood and debris to help salvage hard-hit communities.

In some areas of the region, Helene dumped as much as 2 feet of water, which when combined with the region’s elevation, sheared homes off of their foundations, collapsed reservoirs, and washed out roads, some of which remain impassible six months later. Across the region, roughly 100,000 homes were damaged or destroyed by Helene. 

There are a lot of homes that need to be repaired and rebuilt, and in the United States, construction generally, and post-disaster recovery in particular, is heavily dependent on immigrant labor. 

However, the Trump administration’s deportation of immigrant workers — who are disproportionately employed in the construction industry, coupled with increased tariffs on foreign-sourced building materials, means rebuilding will likely be a longer, and costly journey.  

During Donald Trump’s first State of the Union, “he talked about rebuilding the infrastructure and all the beautiful bridges, blah, blah, blah going to be built by American hands,” said Jim Witte, the director of the Institute for Immigration Research at George Mason University. “No, they’re not. If they’re going to be built, they’re going to be built by newcomers to the United States.”

The brutal calculus of post-flood rebuilding

As soon as a house is flooded the clock starts ticking.  For homeowners with flood insurance, policies often require anything that floodwaters touched, including furniture, flooring, and sheetrock, to be gutted — often down to the studs — within 72 hours after the water retreats. Those without flood insurance are racing against a similar microbial clock —  mold invasion.  Mold thrives in the damp environments that floods create, posing severe risks not only to human health but to the structure of the home itself. If left unmitigated, mold damage could quickly relegate a home to be torn down that could have otherwise been salvaged.  

“Because of the mold, it is urgent that the remediation begin immediately,” said Nik Theodore, who has studied the rebuilding process in hurricane zones since 2005’s Hurricane Katrina and is the director of the Center for Urban Economic Development at the University of Illinois Chicago.   

But, within a disaster zone, the need for workers typically outstrips the number of workers that are locally available. So, volunteers and contractors from outside of the region, many from out of state, often arrive en masse into the disaster zone.   

“These contractors are largely employing an immigrant workforce to tarp the roof and to haul out the debris, to demolish unstable structures, and so on,” Theodore said.  

In some cases, immigrants may already live in the region, but increasingly, in recent years there’s been a rise in what Theodore calls labor brokers. They connect out-of-state labor with local needs. After one hurricane, he recalls meeting a labor broker, originally from Guatemala, in a Louisiana Home Depot parking lot who was using social media to recruit workers from as far away as South Carolina and Illinois.  

“His role was to find people who needed tarping done on their roof or other recovery efforts,” Theodore said. He would then put out the call on social media and through social networks and recruit people to the area with the promise of housing and jobs. 

Rebuilding companies are highly dependent on immigrant workers because the construction industry is dependent on immigrants. Nationwide, roughly one-third of all construction laborers are immigrants, said Marissa Kiss, a post-doctoral research fellow at the Institute for Immigration Research at George Mason University.  

Kiss’ numbers come from census data, which does not delineate a worker’s citizenship status, but an analysis by The Emancipator of those figures and research from the Center of American Progress suggests that, of those workers who were not born in the U.S., at least one quarter are undocumented. 

Those workers, most of whom come from Mexico and Central America, account for 10% of the nation’s construction workforce, according to the Center of American Progress data. 

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, between 2016 and 2020, there were an estimated 7.2 million people working in construction. If President Trump were to succeed in his pledge of deporting every single undocumented person in the United States, this could result in a loss of roughly 720,000 construction workers.  

This would come at a time when “the industry is short, about 275,000 workers,” said Robert Dietz the chief economist and senior vice president for economics and housing policy for the National Association of Home Builders.   

 Building on exploited immigrant labor

Worker shortages lead to both delays in rebuilding and additional pressures on remaining workers already doing risky work.  And much of the work immigrants do post-disaster is incredibly risky. The work requires hopping onto unstable rooftops, hauling materials that have been swimming in toxic waters, and navigating around debris, frequently without correct personal protective equipment such as protective masks, helmets, and clothing in an industry where wage theft is common and workers are treated as disposable.   

Stefanía Arteaga, co-founder of the Carolina Migrant Network, was sending resources to hurricane-affected areas in western North Carolina from their offices in Raleigh, when “I received a call from a volunteer who had found a worker who was thrown on the side of the road. They thankfully picked him up and were able to bring [him] to one of the community groups to receive aid.” 

One day, as  Theodore spoke with a labor broker in a Louisiana parking lot, “a truck came flying in and we sort of had to jump out of the way,” he said. “They weren’t trying to hit me with the truck, but I don’t think they would have minded.”

It turns out that the truck’s occupants were workers the broker had recruited from Dallas some 500 miles away to put tarps on homes in New Orleans after a recent hurricane. He promised them a place to stay, but because of the hurricane, accommodations were scarce. He’d placed them in an abandoned house and left them there. They were working their way back to Dallas when they happened to run across him in the parking lot. “He didn’t pay them, they had no place to live, and he disappeared on them,” Theodore said. 

Many construction managers and engineers that oversee one-site workers are also originally from abroad.   

It’s “at both ends of the labor market pipeline — very high skill, perhaps unskilled, and all the way in between [that] the U.S. is dependent on foreign workers,” said Witte of George Mason University.

In Miami-Dade County for example, 17% of construction managers are foreign born, compared to 14% of the U.S. population, according to Witte — so even in these high-skilled positions such workers are overrepresented.  

In North Carolina, “the Republican legislature actually took advantage of Helene funding to pass an anti-immigrant bill,” Arteaga said. That bill, HB 10, essentially mandated that the state’s sheriffs have to cooperate with ICE. When Florida passed SB 1718 in 2023, which among other things banned undocumented immigrants from being able to secure driver’s licenses and penalized employers for hiring undocumented immigrants, those people — including those who worked in construction, farming, and landscape —  left the state.  

“Many of these immigrants are great at shingling and drywall. That’s a significant human-involved piece of labor,” said Kevin King, the executive director of Mennonite Disaster Service, a faith-based organization in Lititz, Pennsylvania, that works with volunteers to repair and rebuild disaster-impacted homes.  

His organization helps people rebuild homes after disasters at little to no cost to them primarily by using volunteer labor. But for some aspects of home rebuilding —  like shingling and dry walling —  they often rely on “subs” or subcontractors. And those subs are typically immigrants. When it comes to helping communities in western North Carolina rebuild, “Will we be able to find those subs? I’m not sure. It may be something that our volunteers will have to keep doing, and then it takes longer,” King said.

New Trump policies create costly complications for recovery

It already takes a long time to rebuild after a disaster. A 2019 analysis of a specific kind of government grant typically earmarked to help communities recover, found that housing rehab efforts took on average 3.7 years to complete. Housing construction and programs designed to help renters took closer to 4.5 years. Trump’s assault on immigration will likely extend that further, which will also increase costs if for no other reason than every day their home is not rebuilt is another day where residents have to cover the costs of living elsewhere.  

And it’s not the only way in which Trump’s policies are causing rebuilding prices to go up. Required supplies, many of which are sourced from overseas, are difficult to manage under the Trump administration’s chaotic approach to tariffs. 

Twenty-five percent of lumber used in construction in the U.S. comes from Canada. For reasons unrelated to Trump, the lumber is already tariffed at 14.5%, according to Dietz from the National Association of Home Builders, and is expected to go up to 34% in a few months.  

All of this is separate from the 25% tariff on Canadian goods that Trump implemented and then “paused” earlier this year. The lumber should, in theory, be exempt from those tariffs as a United States-Mexico-Canada free trade agreement compliant good, but given Trump’s tendency to govern by tweet, “if you add all these different risks, you can easily end up with a combined duty tariff rate of above 50%,” Dietz said.

“The expectation is that lumber costs are going to go up. And it’s not just raw building materials that are at risk. Something like a third of appliances that are consumed in the United States are manufactured outside the U.S. A huge share of refrigerators is manufactured in Mexico.” 

And these increased costs are layered atop the elevated homebuilding costs since the beginning of the COVID-19 epidemic caused by a combination of inflation and supply chain issues.  

“Pre-COVID, we could build a house 1,100 square foot, three bedrooms, two baths, no garage. Had a porch and egress in the back. We could build it for probably $75,000,” King said. “Now we’re looking at 150. It’s doubled.” Nationwide on average there’s been a 35% rise in building material costs.  

The already high building costs coupled with tariff whiplash has led to deep uncertainty. 

“How do you price construction of a new single-family home or an apartment building when you don’t know over the next three months what the cost of these materials are going to be? How do you price repairs?”  Dietz said. “That’s a real challenge and that can produce delays and that kind of wait-and-see effect.”  

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