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.
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.
What action can an employer take to prepare for increased scrutiny or to ensure the future of their workforce?
There's a couple things. One is that businesses need to understand that even if they don't have anybody that's undocumented, they might be subject to audit due to their I-9 process. Maybe they don't have any undocumented workers, but have they followed the correct policies according to federal rules and regulations when it comes to I-9? There's going to be a microscope on businesses through the federal government. There's potential for risk there, even though they've never hired an undocumented person.
For others, what I'm encouraging them to do is educate, whether it's their employees or their family, to really look at what is the benefit of staying and what is the benefit of saying, “You know what? It's time for us to go back to our originating country.” It’s a hard conversation to have and some struggle with it.
You’re encouraging people to consider voluntarily leaving the U.S.?
Where I come from is a financial perspective. If I have somebody here that's been living here 20 to 30 years with no pathway of citizenship for them, they've paid into a system that will never repay that back. When it's time to retire, there is no Social Security for them. There is no Medicaid for them.
And if they were to say, “Well, I'm just going to return home to my originating country,” they’ve never paid taxes into that country either. And so you have nothing. I've seen countless individuals that have reached that age of retirement and then they have nothing.
That's a concern of mine that we need to start having in our community. What is in the best interests of our community? And as business owners, we should hopefully be providing that level of education because this workforce is incredibly skilled.
Mexico's economy 20 years ago looked very different. For that individual having all this great experience here in the U.S., how valuable are they now in Mexico that they can actually probably live even a better life? They have more skills and employment opportunities.
But also for employers, I've been asking them to start going through the process to get work visas from other countries. Let's flood the federal government with applications so that way they can see the need. But if we don't apply, why would they give it to us if there's no need? If we're not showing the need? So let's start putting in applications and let's start trying to get people through the legal route and let's see if they can fix it.
What else should people in construction be paying attention to?
I hope people see and understand that we really do need to start having more conversations about the Hispanic population because they account for such a large portion of the industry.
As a small example, Hispanics have the highest fatality rate in the construction industry, and we have the highest slips, trips and falls rate. That's a huge detriment to the progress of a job.
The cost of general liability and insurance for a business owner, we’re talking about billions of dollars. Can you imagine what it would look like if we were able to drop those by 40%? How much does that save the business owner? How much more of a healthier workforce that we have?
As a community, we've consistently been very quiet. We have our heads down and we work hard. And so these topics we need to start talking about because if we helped resolve some of these things, we're talking about billions of dollars in additional revenue and profitability in this industry that's going out the door because we're not having the right conversations.
