Thread: Immigration reform could kill the housing boom

Immigration reform could kill the housing boom

Up to 40% of home building is done by undocumented aliens. But no one's talking about what a crackdown could do to real estate prices.

FORTUNE Magazine
By Jon Birger and Jenny Mero, FORTUNE
May 31, 2006: 12:20 PM EDT

(FORTUNE Magazine) - For the home building industry, the immigration debate raging in Washington is anything but abstract. It's the biggest issue nobody wants to talk about.

Frank Fuentes, president of the Hispanic Contractors Association, queried his 20 largest member firms about speaking with FORTUNE, and not one was willing.

http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/ ... /index.htm

"They're scared to death of being raided," says Fuentes.

By FORTUNE's estimate, up to 40 percent of new-home construction in the U.S. is being done wholly or partly by undocumented immigrants. Fuentes suspects the percentage in his home state of Texas is closer to 80 percent.

According to a study by the Pew Hispanic Center, 36 percent of insulation workers, 29 percent of roofers, and 28 percent of drywall installers are "unauthorized workers."

Big builders don't employ construction workers, legal or illegal. They hire subcontractors that in turn hire the workers who do the actual sawing and hammering.

"The entire home building business is outsourced," says A.G. Edwards analyst Greg Gieber. It's unclear whether this setup will protect builders should the feds start enforcing immigration laws more vigorously.

In May, Fischer Homes, a leading builder in Kentucky and Indiana, was raided by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and four Fischer supervisors were charged with harboring illegal aliens.

Court papers filed by ICE accuse Fischer of using subcontractors "to provide a layer" between it and some 75 illegal workers. That layer, the feds contend, "does not relieve Fischer of the responsibility to ensure that their contractors are employing a legal work force."

A crackdown on undocumented workers would shrivel an already tight construction labor market. Lee Wetherington of Lee Wetherington Homes in Sarasota, Fla., estimates that 70 percent of the workers employed by his subcontractors are Hispanic immigrants.

"If for any reason we lose that work force, you're going to see the time required to build a house double or triple and the cost of new homes increase 30 to 40 percent," Wetherington says.

He insists that there just aren't enough native-born workers available to meet demand and points to Sarasota County's 2.3 percent unemployment rate.

His company built 300 homes last year. Without immigrant workers, "we'd have been lucky to build 75," he says.

Wetherington does not know how many of those workers are undocumented, but he suspects it's the majority. He recalls an incident last year when the arrival of workers' comp officials spooked laborers into thinking an immigration raid was underway.

"Everyone scattered," he says. "The entire site just cleared out."

Get ready for a looong summer of dire threats from those who benefit the most from illegal immigration.

Good, kill the boom. We do not need more houses. Pretty stupid to be building things we dont need and then finding 3rd world peasants to hyper inflate the housing consumer market while violating the public trust, existing laws etc..

W

I would expect with 12,000,000 people deported and 11,000 a day no longer crossing our border that we really do not need that many new houses anyway.

I hope that nobody falls for this line of bull.

Yep, and after they are all deported, that'll reduce rents and home prices so much so that my kids can get a decent job (maybe in construction?), and move out! Can't wait 'till I can finally have my den and exercise room back

Originally Posted by dlm1968

I would expect with 12,000,000 people deported and 11,000 a day no longer crossing our border that we really do not need that many new houses anyway.

I hope that nobody falls for this line of bull.

It's obvious that the open borders strategy is going to be to target the fears of the middle class. The profit margin that large builders have is huge, so I hope people don't think that any savings they make on labor is being returned to the buyer. It doesn't work that way.

I am looking forward to the housing market to drop, then we could finally (at 38 and 55) have our own house and not have to pay the outrageous rent prices.

There are all too many rentals out there, owned by big corporations or real estate companies, too little of my own family can own, we all have had to rent.

Besides I am tired of seeing all our beautiful farmland destroyed for McMansions!!

Contractors make more money for THEMSELVES by hiring illegals. My husband does cornice on new homes. The going rate is $1.25 ft. Illegals do it for .50cents a ft. The contractors pocket alot more money when he can get it done by illegals. Alot of black and white men are out of work because the contrators hire illegals. The bottom line is the dollar sign. The home owner will still pay the same amount no matter who builds it. The only price that will change is what the contractors pocket.



quote="CountFloyd"]Immigration reform could kill the housing boom

Up to 40% of home building is done by undocumented aliens. But no one's talking about what a crackdown could do to real estate prices.

FORTUNE Magazine
By Jon Birger and Jenny Mero, FORTUNE
May 31, 2006: 12:20 PM EDT

(FORTUNE Magazine) - For the home building industry, the immigration debate raging in Washington is anything but abstract. It's the biggest issue nobody wants to talk about.

Frank Fuentes, president of the Hispanic Contractors Association, queried his 20 largest member firms about speaking with FORTUNE, and not one was willing.

http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/ ... /index.htm

"They're scared to death of being raided," says Fuentes.

By FORTUNE's estimate, up to 40 percent of new-home construction in the U.S. is being done wholly or partly by undocumented immigrants. Fuentes suspects the percentage in his home state of Texas is closer to 80 percent.

According to a study by the Pew Hispanic Center, 36 percent of insulation workers, 29 percent of roofers, and 28 percent of drywall installers are "unauthorized workers."

Big builders don't employ construction workers, legal or illegal. They hire subcontractors that in turn hire the workers who do the actual sawing and hammering.

"The entire home building business is outsourced," says A.G. Edwards analyst Greg Gieber. It's unclear whether this setup will protect builders should the feds start enforcing immigration laws more vigorously.

In May, Fischer Homes, a leading builder in Kentucky and Indiana, was raided by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and four Fischer supervisors were charged with harboring illegal aliens.

Court papers filed by ICE accuse Fischer of using subcontractors "to provide a layer" between it and some 75 illegal workers. That layer, the feds contend, "does not relieve Fischer of the responsibility to ensure that their contractors are employing a legal work force."

A crackdown on undocumented workers would shrivel an already tight construction labor market. Lee Wetherington of Lee Wetherington Homes in Sarasota, Fla., estimates that 70 percent of the workers employed by his subcontractors are Hispanic immigrants.

"If for any reason we lose that work force, you're going to see the time required to build a house double or triple and the cost of new homes increase 30 to 40 percent," Wetherington says.

He insists that there just aren't enough native-born workers available to meet demand and points to Sarasota County's 2.3 percent unemployment rate.

His company built 300 homes last year. Without immigrant workers, "we'd have been lucky to build 75," he says.

Wetherington does not know how many of those workers are undocumented, but he suspects it's the majority. He recalls an incident last year when the arrival of workers' comp officials spooked laborers into thinking an immigration raid was underway.

"Everyone scattered," he says. "The entire site just cleared out."[/quote]

Alot of black and white men are out of work because the contrators hire illegals. The bottom line is the dollar sign.

Right, the illegals are ONLY doing work that Americans won't do.

Remember the Hererra video?

http://www.forthecause.us/ftc-video-raymondherrera.wmv

I'll try to remember where I saw the link to the story about African-American constructions workers who were let go, 'when the Mexicans' arrived in post-Katrina New Orleans. Will post on this thread.

Boy, do I need a file in my head!!!!!

This article below makes my blood boil!




Arrival of aliens ousts U.S. workers

By Jerry Seper
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
April 10, 2006

An Alabama employment agency that sent 70 laborers and construction workers to job sites in that state in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina says the men were sent home after just two weeks on the job by employers who told them "the Mexicans had arrived" and were willing to work for less.
Linda Swope, who operates Complete Employment Services Inc. in Mobile, Ala., told The Washington Times last week that the workers -- whom she described as U.S. citizens, residents of Alabama and predominantly black -- had been "urgently requested" by contractors hired to rebuild and clear devastated areas of the state, but were told to leave three job sites when the foreign workers showed up.
"After Katrina, our company had 70 workers on the job the first day, but the companies decided they didn't need them anymore because the Mexicans had arrived," Mrs. Swope said. "I assure you it is not true that Americans don't want to work.
"We had been told that 270 jobs might be available, and we could have filled every one of them with men from this area, most of whom lost their jobs because of the hurricane," she said. "When we told the guys they would not be needed, they actually cried ... and we cried with them. This is
a shame."
Mrs. Swope said employment agencies throughout Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi faced similar problems, when thousands of men from Mexico and several Central and South American countries -- many in crowded buses and trucks -- came into the three states after Katrina,
looking for employment and willing to work for less money.
The number of foreign workers who flooded the area after the hurricane has been estimated at more than 30,000. Many of them have been identified by law-enforcement authorities and others as illegal aliens.
The Gulf Coast Latin American Association noted in a report that whether those workers will remain after the cleanup work is completed is not clear, but the longer those jobs last, the more likely it is that the workers will settle permanently. After Hurricane Andrew hit southeastern
Florida in 1992, the association said, the construction boom attracted large numbers of Hispanic immigrants to several areas, including Homestead, Fla., where the Latino population doubled during the 1990s.
Many of the illegal aliens came into the Gulf Coast states not only from south of the border but also from California, Arizona and Texas, responding to the demand for workers. U.S. Border Patrol officials in the three states have reported an increase in the number of illegals
apprehended.
Some of the migrants who did get jobs in the Gulf states also were mistreated, records show.

Two class-action lawsuits are pending in federal court in New Orleans in which thousands of migrant workers said they never were paid, although many worked 12-hour shifts, seven days a week and were required to remove toxic contamination from hurricane-ravaged buildings.
Some of the named companies were working on contracts from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and other government agencies.
Government estimates put at 400,000 the number of jobs lost in the Gulf region as a result of

Katrina, which displaced more than 1.5 million people, and many of those workers left the area to seek employment elsewhere because available construction, laborer and cleanup jobs in Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi had been filled by foreign workers, including illegal aliens.
President Bush last week signed the Katrina Emergency Assistance Act of 2006, which extended for 13 weeks unemployment compensation benefits to more than 140,000 residents of the Gulf states who were displaced from their jobs by Katrina. Their benefits, funded by FEMA,
had expired March 4.
Would-be employers in Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi, awash in cleanup and reconstruction jobs, faced little in the way of legal problems in hiring the illegal aliens after Katrina because the Department of Homeland Security temporarily suspended the sanctioning of employers who hired workers unable to document their citizenship.
Mr. Bush also had suspended the Davis-Bacon Act, which requires local contractors to pay "prevailing" wages, in the areas hit by Katrina to encourage reconstruction and cleanup.
"The men we sent to jobs in Alabama were local fellows looking for work, men who needed jobs," Mrs. Swope said. "After driving 50 miles to the work sites where they had been promised $10 an hour, they discovered the employers had found substitutes who were willing to work for less."

















ote="CountFloyd"]Immigration reform could kill the housing boom

Up to 40% of home building is done by undocumented aliens. But no one's talking about what a crackdown could do to real estate prices.

FORTUNE Magazine
By Jon Birger and Jenny Mero, FORTUNE
May 31, 2006: 12:20 PM EDT

(FORTUNE Magazine) - For the home building industry, the immigration debate raging in Washington is anything but abstract. It's the biggest issue nobody wants to talk about.

Frank Fuentes, president of the Hispanic Contractors Association, queried his 20 largest member firms about speaking with FORTUNE, and not one was willing.

http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/ ... /index.htm

"They're scared to death of being raided," says Fuentes.

By FORTUNE's estimate, up to 40 percent of new-home construction in the U.S. is being done wholly or partly by undocumented immigrants. Fuentes suspects the percentage in his home state of Texas is closer to 80 percent.

According to a study by the Pew Hispanic Center, 36 percent of insulation workers, 29 percent of roofers, and 28 percent of drywall installers are "unauthorized workers."

Big builders don't employ construction workers, legal or illegal. They hire subcontractors that in turn hire the workers who do the actual sawing and hammering.

"The entire home building business is outsourced," says A.G. Edwards analyst Greg Gieber. It's unclear whether this setup will protect builders should the feds start enforcing immigration laws more vigorously.

In May, Fischer Homes, a leading builder in Kentucky and Indiana, was raided by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and four Fischer supervisors were charged with harboring illegal aliens.

Court papers filed by ICE accuse Fischer of using subcontractors "to provide a layer" between it and some 75 illegal workers. That layer, the feds contend, "does not relieve Fischer of the responsibility to ensure that their contractors are employing a legal work force."

A crackdown on undocumented workers would shrivel an already tight construction labor market. Lee Wetherington of Lee Wetherington Homes in Sarasota, Fla., estimates that 70 percent of the workers employed by his subcontractors are Hispanic immigrants.

"If for any reason we lose that work force, you're going to see the time required to build a house double or triple and the cost of new homes increase 30 to 40 percent," Wetherington says.

He insists that there just aren't enough native-born workers available to meet demand and points to Sarasota County's 2.3 percent unemployment rate.

His company built 300 homes last year. Without immigrant workers, "we'd have been lucky to build 75," he says.

Wetherington does not know how many of those workers are undocumented, but he suspects it's the majority. He recalls an incident last year when the arrival of workers' comp officials spooked laborers into thinking an immigration raid was underway.

"Everyone scattered," he says. "The entire site just cleared out."[/quote]