Subhead: Industry leaders: mass deportation is driving away workers and customers, raising prices and pushing operations out of business
“We’re seeing home health agencies just not able to take new clients. We’ve seen nursing homes that have closed beds and closed wings.”
“We have builders who are our employees who might have a Latino or Hispanic background, and they’re afraid to go to the job site.”
“Food doesn’t cook itself. Restaurants don’t run on ideas. They run on people. And right now, that balance is off, like way off.”
Voices from home health, construction and hospitality industries are being loud and clear: the Trump administration’s unsparing mass deportation agenda targeting nursing aides, builders and cooks is taking a sledgehammer to their hard-earned businesses, worsening an already unstable workforce and hurting patients and customers alike. Anti-immigrant policies have a price – and we’re all paying for it.
‘WE DON’T HAVE A SORT OF READY SUPPLY OF U.S.-BORN INDIVIDUALS WHO ARE CLAMMORING TO WORK IN AGING SERVICES’
The healthcare industry needs immigrant workers, period. For example, as of 2021, approximately 103,000 Haitian immigrants worked in occupations including nursing and home health aides. But industry leaders say that patients will suffer under Trump and Stephen Miller’s mass deportation obsession, which has included targeting thousands of Haitian healthcare workers who have been needlessly delegalized and stripped of their work permits.
Home health aide shortages are nothing new, Ideal Home Care Services CEO Nicole Laborde told Newsday. But the administration’s targeting of essential workers is only going to make this worse. “Earlier this year, she had to let go 20 to 25 employees — all originally from Haiti — out of a total workforce of a little over 100 before it was known that their TPS would end on July 27,” Newsday said. The Supreme Court eventually green-lit the administration’s desire to end Haitian immigrants’ relief, in a move that will prove catastrophic to patients, essential workers and industry leaders alike.
“We care for vulnerable seniors and some of them are concerned,” said Laborde, who is herself originally from Haiti. “The client gets used to their aide and now you’re having to tell them, ‘I’m sorry but we have to replace the aide’ without going into details. The client feels like they’re losing an extension of their family.”
TEXAS BUILDER: ‘ICE IS BECOMING A VERY LARGE ISSUE AND CAUSING LABOR SHORTAGE’
Look to similar distress when it comes to finding affordable housing. Like in healthcare, the construction industry depends on the labor and skills of immigrant workers. And, like in healthcare, this industry has been hemorrhaging workers and halting construction projects dead in their tracks. Just listen to Florida, Texas and Virginia builders interviewed as part of a survey conducted by a firm that regularly asks homebuilders about market conditions, Axios reported.
“ICE has had significant impacts to vendors throughout Virginia/Maryland in the last 90 days,” said the Virginia builder. “This has had a major impact on cycle times and the ability to start new houses.” In Florida, one builder said that mass deportation efforts in the region “are causing a strain on both the labor force, labor costs and cycle times.” The state has been “besieged by heightened levels of aggressive immigration enforcement” thanks to local police collaboration with ICE, as Truthout reports. And in Houston – where construction business owner Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was killed by ICE while on his way to work – one builder said the agency “is becoming a very large issue and causing labor shortages.”
In the five states most reliant on immigrant labor, construction employment fell 1.3 percent while the rest of the country grew 3.3 percent, according to the recent “End the ICE Tax” report from America’s Voice. In just one sign of how much distress mass deportation is causing to the industry, the surveyed builders brought up their concerns completely unprompted, the firm said. “All we asked about on the topic in our survey was construction cycle times,” said Rick Palacios, director of research at John Burns Research and Consulting. “The comments on ‘ICE and immigration’ were completely unsolicited.”
‘WE’RE FEELING LIKE OUR BUSINESS IS SLIPPING AWAY SO QUICKLY,’ SAID ONE RESTAURATEUR
Beloved chef and author Anthony Bourdain, who died in 2018, famously said that without immigrant workers, “our entire service economy – the restaurant business as we know it – in most American cities, would collapse overnight.” Under the administration’s mass deportation agenda, restaurateurs say that’s exactly what’s happening to some establishments in their industry.
“I haven’t had to close my restaurant’s doors yet, but I know several restaurant owners who have had to do so on certain days because so many of their staff were too scared to show up to work,” said Andrew Volk, owner of Maine cocktail bar Hunt & Alpine. “These are people who are legally allowed to be in the United States. These are people with no criminal history. And they are petrified to go to work.” In Texas, the state restaurant association found that “36% of operators said they have lost employees because of immigration enforcement, while 28% said they are seeing fewer job applicants or fewer people accepting job offers,” KVUE reported. In New Jersey, restaurateur Lou Smith said he witnessed an ICE abduction outside a wholesale food supply store that left him shaken – and worried about his industry and the valued workers who help keep it alive.
“Food doesn’t cook itself. Restaurants don’t run on ideas,” he said. “They run on people. And right now, that balance is off, like way off.”
MASS DEPORTATION IS LIKE POISON, DISRUPTING OUR COMMUNITIES, DRIVING UP PRICES, RUINING OUR BUSINESSES
Of course, it’s not just healthcare, construction and restaurants that are worried sick about this self-inflicted crisis. Cattle groups in Texas, Kansas, and Oklahoma warned that ICE abductions are having a “massive chilling effect” on the essential workers. Businesses that make drugs, vitamins, food and beverages are also being heavily impacted, as Newsday noted. Thomas Cook, CEO and managing director of the international trade consulting firm Blue Tiger International, told the outlet that these businesses will likely have to uproot, which is going to hurt all U.S. workers no matter their legal immigration status.
“‘They’re going to start losing people’ in entry-level production, shipping, receiving and warehousing jobs, he said. ‘These people aren’t easily replaced because white Americans just aren’t interested in these jobs.’”
And just like that, Trump and Miller’s mass deportation machine increases social instability, decreases affordability and hurts American families.
