The crew had just poured a concrete base in a vacant lot in Altadena when I stopped the other day. Two workers were loading equipment in trucks and a third was driving the fresh cement that will sit under a new house.
I asked him how things were going, and if there was any problem to find enough workers due to the ongoing immigration raids.
“Oh yes,” said a worker, shaking his head. “Everyone is worried.”
The other said that when fresh concrete is poured into such a large job, you need a crew of 10 or more, but that has been difficult to achieve.
“We are still working,” he said. “But as you can see, it is only very slowly.”
Eight months after thousands of houses were destroyed by forest fires, Altadena is still far from any important reconstruction, and so is Pacific Palisades. But immigration The raids have hammered California's economyincluding the construction industry. And the decision of the United States Supreme Court this week Racial profiles of green lights The new fears has increased that “deportations exhaust the construction workforce”, as forecasts the prognosis of UCLA Anderson He warned us in March.
There was already a Work shortage In the construction industry, in which 25% to 40% of workers are immigrants, according to several estimates. As deportations slow down the construction, and rates and trade wars make supplies more scarce and more expensive, housing shortages becomes an even deeper crisis.
And they are not only deportations that matter, but their threat, says Jerry Nickelsburg, the main economist of Anderson forecast. If undocumented people are afraid to present themselves to install plaster panels, Nickelsburg told me, “it means that you finish the houses much more slowly, and that means that fewer people are used.”
Now look, I am not an economist, but it seems to me that after President Trump promised the entire country that we headed to a “golden age” of American prosperity, it might not have been the best to quell the state with the largest economy in the nation.
Especially when many National economic indicators are not exactly pinkWhen we have not seen the promised decrease in the price of edible more gloomy jobs numbers A month later.
I only had one class of economy at the university, but I do not remember a section on the value of deporting construction workers, car washing machines, elderly care workers, housewives, babysitters, gardeners and other people whose only crimes, unlike violent criminals, we were supposed to round, it is a desire to present themselves to work.
Now here, let me give you my email address. Is [email protected].
And why am I telling you that?
Because I know from experience that some of you are foam, foam and bite to get and tell me how illegal it means illegal.
So go ahead and send me an email if necessary, but here is my answer:
We have been living a lie for decades.
People meet the border because we want them to do it. We all pray that they do it. And for us, I mean any number of industries, many of them led by conservatives and Trump supporters, including agribusiness, hospitality, construction and medical care.
Why do you think so many Employers avoid using the Federal Electronic Verification System To eliminate undocumented workers? Because they don't want to admit that many of their employees are undocumented.
In Texas, Republican legislators cannot stop demonizing immigrants, and cannot fail to introduce dozen bills to demand a broader use of E-Verify. But The most recent, like all the previous ones, has just died.
Because?
Because the hard talk is a lie and there is no shame in hypocrisy. It is a climate of corruption in which no one has the integrity of admitting what is clear: that the Texas economy is supported by an undocumented workforce.
At least in California, Six republican legislators He almost begged Trump in June to relieve in the raids, which affected business in farms and construction sites and in restaurants and hotels. Do an honest job on immigration reform, begged, so that we can meet our work needs in a more practical and human way.
It makes sense, but politically, it does not play as well as television ads that recruit ice commands to assault the streets and arrest the Tamale vendors, even when the barbarians who looted the Capitol and beat the police enjoy their time as presidential forgiven patriots.
Small businesses, restaurants and mother and pops are particularly affected, says Maria Salinas, Executive Director of the Chamber of Commerce of the Los Angeles Area. Those who survived the pandemic were noted again by the raids.
With the ruling of the Supreme Court, Salinas told me: “I think there is a lot of fear that this will make it harder than before.”
From a broader economic perspective, mass deportations make no sense, especially when it is clear that The vast majority of attacked people They are not the violent criminals that Trump keeps talking.
Giovanni Peri, director of the UC Davis Global Migration Center, said we are in the midst of a demographic transformation, very similar to that of Japan, which deals with the challenges of a population that ages and restrictive immigration policies.
“We lose almost a million Americans of working age every year in the next decade only for aging,” said peri. “We will have a very large elderly population and that will require many services in … home medical care [and other industries]But there will be fewer and fewer workers to do this type of jobs. “
Dowell Myers, a USC demograph, He has been studying these trends for years.
“The numbers are simple and easy to read,” said Myers. Every year, the working / retirement relationship decreases, and will continue to do so. This means that we head to a critical shortage of working people who pay in Social Security and Medicare, even as the number of retired balloons.
If we really wanted to stop immigration, said Myers, we should “send all ice workers to the border. But it takes people who have been here 10 and 20 years and uproot them, there is an extreme social cost and also an economic cost.”
To the Pasadena Home Depot, Where the workers of the day still meet despite the risk of raids, three men had hope of work. Two of them told me they had legal status. “But there is very little work,” said Gavino Domínguez.
The third, who said he is undocumented, left to surround the parking lot and offer his services to contractors.
Umberto Andrade, a general contractor, was carrying concrete and other supplies in his truck. He told me that he lost a fearful employee for a week, and another for two weeks. They returned because they are desperate and need to pay their invoices.
“Housing scarcity in California was already terrible before fires, and now it's 10 times worse,” he said Brock Harris real estate agent, who represents a developer whose Altadena reconstruction project slowed down after a visit from ICE agents in June.
With the construction permits that begin to flow, Harris said: “So that these types decrease the speed or close the work sites is more than irritating. You will see less people willing to start a project.”
Most people in a workplace have a legal status, said Harris, “but if the blades never reach the ground, the costs are in charge of all, and is slowing down the reconstruction of Los Angeles,”
Many potholes on the road to the golden age of prosperity.
