Deport-o-Mania 3: Houston's (Non-)Rebuilding

Trump voters ain't gonna fix this destruction.

There's an insightful op-ed in the Washington Post on why Houston's rebuilding is well off-track. Simply put, there are not enough construction workers at the current time. With Trump's various immigration-unfriendly policies in progress, things aren't going to improve anytime soon. The net result is that instead of aiding the reconstruction of the United States' fourth-largest city, Trump is putting it off indefinitely.

Actually, there's plenty of capital sitting on the sidelines but not enough labor to get the construction work going. This is one industry where automation won't be of much help for the foreseeable future:

Even before Hurricane Harvey made landfall, 69 percent of Texas contractors had trouble filling jobs. Now, it’s estimated that 200,000 Houston homes will require work or complete reconstruction. Who will build these houses? What about the commercial infrastructure and public schools, highways and bridges that also sustained so much damage?

We face an infrastructure deficit in this country totaling $2 trillion over 10 years. The storms have added tens of billions to this figure. Lawmakers focus on who’s going to pay for all of this, but they also must think about who’s going to build it [my emphasis].

This problem is one that plagues the whole nation, and it’s effectively “corked” our economy. We’re stymied. We’re stifled. Right now, the largest construction companies in America are turning away hundreds of millions of dollars in work every quarter because they don’t have enough bodies on their crews. The National Association of Homebuilders reports that 77 percent of U.S. builders can’t find enough people for their framing teams. Sixty-one percent can’t find enough drywall installation workers. The number of construction jobs available in the United States rose in June, and it increased again in July.

We go back to the same old problem: instead of ramping up immigration to help (re-)build America, the Trumpian set is busy doing the opposite:

One way to do that is to completely overhaul our broken immigration system. The last comprehensive reform was in 1986. Our visa system fails to match supply with demand. Congress must rebalance the numbers and even consider increasing legal immigration so we can attract all the workers we need — high skill, low skill and no skill. As Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) said in a recent op-ed, we can’t forget that the ability to work hard sometimes is the only skill a job requires.

The problem is that the likes of Trump and his supporters have the opposite perception: coloreds and other foreigners are "stealing" their jobs. The honest answer is, again, that gringos simply don't want to do construction work in sufficient numbers [1, 2]--otherwise you wouldn't have this problem to begin with. Ultimately, I do believe that Trump is setting the stage for lower potential US economic growth through these racist/protectionist measures.

Just wait and see as Houston remains literally underwater.