While some contractors dismiss the plan as political rhetoric, many say they can’t afford to lose more people from an aging, immigrant-dependent workforce still short of nearly 400,000 people.
Both presidential candidates promise to build more homes. One promises to deport hundreds of thousands of people who build them.
Former President Donald Trump’s pledge to “launch the largest deportation operation in the history of our country” would hamstring construction firms already facing labor shortages and push record home prices higher, say industry leaders, contractors and economists.
“It would be detrimental to the construction industry and our labor supply and exacerbate our housing affordability problems,” said Jim Tobin, CEO of the National Association of Home Builders. The trade group considers foreign-born workers, regardless of legal status, “a vital and flexible source of labor” to builders, estimating they fill 30% of trade jobs like carpentry, plastering, masonry and electrical roles.
People simply don’t care. The amount of times people talk about fleeing the country vs even changing their local government is completely out of whack. People don’t try, expect to move somewhere else and not try and not have their problems follow them.
People have an instinctual flight or fight response to danger. And it’s rational for an individual to consider flight in the face of the most powerful military in the world. Discussions about safety are important. Most discussions I’ve seen qualify the need to flee based on Trump taking power. Most of the people who participate in them are explicit in their intentions to vote for Kamala and the Democratic Party in general.
I for one would like to see more discussion about changing governments. However the issue is less a lack of caring or lack of trying.
It’s more as this gets to, a lack of perspective. People are thinking in terms of their own self-interest. Specifically themselves and the people they care about in their immediate social spheres. This is human behavior in a nut shell. People are not considering the broader context, in part because we’ve never had fascism at a global scale before. Even in WWII there were limits to the reach of fascist nation states, some continents saw little to no direct conflict at home.
What we are seeing now is unprecedented in history. If the US becomes a christo-fascist dictatorship we are going to see the world completely divided into sphere’s of influence. Dictatorships will become completely unchecked as the US switches from maintaining the world order to expanding it’s sphere of influence in the western hemisphere. A war with Mexico is not out of the question in this scenario. Neither is Canada falling to it’s own far right.
The rise of the far-right isn’t unique to the US, it’s been happening in India with Modi, Milei in Argentina, and in the Philippines with Bongbong Marcos. The far right is taking power and entrenching themselves all over the world. Modi and friends in India are buying news outlets to keep them toeing the party line and spewing propaganda. But unless a person is a political news junkie they can easily miss all of this broader context. People aren’t being informed about the global rise of fascism, so they aren’t discussing strategies that reflect that.