Many Latino Americans who showed up at the polls for the 2024 election voted for President Donald Trump. The Associated Press projected that 43% of the block voted for Trump, who ran on a platform that included mass deportation as a primary policy.
“We wanted [Trump] to come up with a solution,” said George Carrillo, co-founder and CEO of the Hispanic Construction Council, a nonprofit organization designed to advance policy goals and improve the landscape for Hispanic construction workers and companies.
Many Hispanic U.S. citizens are generations removed from their families’ arrival in the country, Carrillo said, meaning they don’t personally share the immigrant experience. Nonetheless, he said that policies such as mass deportation are unrealistic and potentially damaging to the economy and to Hispanic Americans, who may have family members who are undocumented.
Here, Carrillo talks with Construction Dive about the impact of Hispanic Americans on construction and the need for realistic, commonsense immigration reform.
The following has been edited for brevity and clarity
CONSTRUCTION DIVE: You said Hispanic Americans want the president to come up with a solution to immigration. What kind of solutions are there?
GEORGE CARRILLO: The solution cannot be mass deportation because one, we cannot afford it, nor do we have the logistical resources to mass deport 11 million people. It’s just not possible. I think Obama deported around 400,000 people in one year. That’s not anywhere close to 11 million people. Trump can’t supersede that. He can’t keep up that pace either.
So let’s talk about practical solutions. For example, how do we fix our workforce visas? The construction industry and the agriculture industry do not have enough work visas.
George Carrillo
Permission granted by Hispanic Construction Council
I calculate about 700,000 to 900,000 individuals in construction that are undocumented. There’s not enough work visas to bring them back if they are deported. And we have a deficit right now of almost 500,000 people in the U.S. in construction. That’s not a practical solution.
So, let’s acknowledge that not everybody wants to be a U.S. citizen. Not everybody wants to stay. Some people want to come, work and go home. But right now, we can’t afford that. They’re not going to go back home, cross through a border, put themselves in more danger, right? And that’s a failure of a simple process, which is to open up the workforce visas to be equitable to the needs of the industry.
Is improving workforce visas a realistic policy goal?
Absolutely. Rep. Maria Salazar from Miami, she’s a Republican and congresswoman, she created a bill called the Dignity Act of 2023. I believe they need to make some minor adjustments to that bill, but put it on the floor, let’s get it voted on.
It addresses border security. It addresses the workforce visa issues. It addressed the Dreamers. It’s a full comprehensive immigration reform packet.
That 700,00 to 900,000 estimate of unauthorized workers is a critical mass of the construction workforce. What have you heard in terms of employers’ hopes for policy reform?
It’s been very different depending on the industry. A general contractor that works on federal contracts, typically they’re like, “We don’t have an opinion. It doesn’t really bother us.” Because of the regulations all of their employees have to go through background checks that are performed by the federal government. So do they have an issue with having an undocumented person on their payroll? Probably not.
When we think about large, residential home builders and developers, they don’t necessarily worry about it as much, but they know that it affects their industry because they’re not self-performing their own work. They’re all over the U.S. and they have subcontractors.
Those subcontractors, they’re the ones that care because they’re trying to meet the contract obligations. They’re the most worried and concerned. We have 70,000 business owners that are Hispanic in the construction industry. So who do you think their workforce is? It’s their family members and some of their family members are probably undocumented.
So are they worried? Absolutely. They don’t want to bring too much attention to their company or to their family because they don’t want them to get deported either. They’re good people and they need them in order to work, in order to meet the contract obligations with their GC. And so on the general contractor level, they’re worried because they know the effect that it has on their subcontractor community.
