Michael Barbaro: From New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro.

Michael Barbaro: [music] This is The Daily.

Michael Barbaro: To confront America's acute shortage of housing, Congress just passed a historic piece [music] of legislation designed to encourage the construction of new homes. The problem is that President Trump's crackdown on [music] immigrants is taking direct aim at the workforce required to build those homes. Today, my colleague, [music] Ronda Kayson, explains how the US housing industry became so dependent [music] on immigrant labor and how that reliance could end up undermining a once-in-a-generation housing law.

Michael Barbaro: It's Wednesday, July 22nd. Ronda, welcome to The Daily.

Ronda Kayson: Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Michael Barbaro: So, let me just set the stage. By the time that Congress decided to pass this landmark housing bill, which has now become law and is supposed to make it a lot easier and faster to construct new homes in this country, you had finished a line of reporting into the workers who actually build those houses. And that reporting allowed you to see, more clearly than most of us, that there was a little bit of a problem here. And that problem was a gap between intention and kind of reality. Just explain that.

Ronda Kayson: So, if we look at the law specifically, this new law that was passed has all sorts of tools in it to get housing built. All sorts of different ways that you can encourage developers to make it easier for them to build, encourage them to want to build, but somebody has to actually build those homes.

Michael Barbaro: Right.

Ronda Kayson: And we already had this labor shortage. We've been short 300,000 workers for a long time. And Trump has another policy, which is separate of this industry, which is to have a mass deportation policy. And no industry is more reliant on immigrant labor than construction.

Michael Barbaro: Right. The two goals that the president has and has [clears throat] articulated at various points, a cheaper housing market and a major crackdown on illegal immigration, you're saying those are profoundly in tension.

Ronda Kayson: Right. The core of the housing crisis is that we haven't built enough housing. We really haven't built enough housing in decades. And one of the reasons is that we don't have enough workers to build the housing. And so labor costs are high, which makes it expensive. And construction relies on labor and relies on immigrant labor. And Trump has been actively deporting that population. And so Congress passes this landmark legislation that's a first time in more than 30 years that the federal government has said we want to build housing. At the same time, the federal government's also saying we want to deport the immigrant workforce.

Michael Barbaro: Who builds the houses?

Ronda Kayson: Who builds the houses? And so you could end up with a situation where there's all sorts of builders ready to go and they don't have the workers to do the work. So I wanted to know how did the construction industry become so reliant on an immigrant workforce so that it's now so vulnerable to losing its workers because the country wasn't always this way. This was not always an immigrant job.

Michael Barbaro: Well, just explain what you found in your reporting about how it came to be that the US housing industry has become so dependent on immigrant labor and as you just said, so vulnerable to losing those workers to a crackdown.

Ronda Kayson: So, construction employs the highest share of foreign-born workers of any industry in America.

Michael Barbaro: Huh.

Ronda Kayson: And to explain how we got to this point, we usually hear one of these two stories. We either hear that immigrants stole Americans' jobs, or we hear that Americans were too lazy to do these jobs.

Michael Barbaro: Mhm.

Ronda Kayson: But these two narratives put together don't make a lot of sense.

Michael Barbaro: They can't both be true.

Ronda Kayson: Why not?

Michael Barbaro: Well, because there's a tension in that. Like, so one is I don't want the job, and the other one is I'm stealing a job you'd want. So, which one is it? quite add up.

Ronda Kayson: So, it doesn't add up to me. And so, my colleague Rob Gebeloff and I really wanted to know why did American workers leave this industry, and why did the immigrant workers come into it?

Michael Barbaro: Mhm. And what did you actually find?

Ronda Kayson: So, what we found is the story starts in the 1970s. And back then, homes were built almost exclusively by American workers. There was about me 5% of the industry was foreign-born. And union membership at this time was at an all-time high. It was like 40% of all construction workers were unionized, which was like higher than other industries.

Michael Barbaro: So, if you were getting a house built in the US in the 1970s, it was almost assuredly going to be built by American-born unionized workers.

Ronda Kayson: Certainly for new construction and for the larger projects, yeah. These were union jobs. And they were good jobs. [music] So, union construction workers earned $1.71 for every dollar the average American worker earned.

Michael Barbaro: Wow.

Ronda Kayson: You had health insurance, you had a pension, you had vacations, [music] and it was a job you didn't have to have a college degree for. And one of the construction workers I met from that era was Matt Moore.

Ronda Kayson: So, are you from Orange County originally?

Matt Moore: Uh no, I was actually born in LA County, born in Lynwood.

Ronda Kayson: And he was really emblematic of the type of workers who were working in the industry at that time.

Michael Barbaro: How so?

Ronda Kayson: Well, he graduated from high school in Southern California in 1975. He doesn't really know what to do with his life.

Matt Moore: My father told me one thing when I was growing up cuz after I graduated high school I was going to I wanted to go to college and he looked at me and he said there's two kinds of humans. He goes there's two kinds of man. There's man with a strong mind, man with a strong back. God blessed you with a strong back. Go to work.

Ronda Kayson: He decides to work at a parts department at a Volkswagen dealership and one afternoon his high school buddy comes in and says, "Hey, uh I just started roofing." He goes uh and it's great. He goes, "You can get $2 more an hour." I was making $2 an hour and I doubled my money starting roofing. Uh we went to the union shop, went to the hall, signed the paperwork and that was it.

Ronda Kayson: And he goes to the union hall, he fills out his union card, he gets a pair of hot boots, which are the boots you wear on a roof, and he's up on a roof that day.

Michael Barbaro: I so want to know what a pair of hot boots looks like.

Ronda Kayson: I saw them. They're just like boots, but I guess they don't melt.

Michael Barbaro: [laughter]

Ronda Kayson: So, suddenly he's an apprentice and he absolutely loves it. He's out in the Southern California sunshine. He's throwing up roofs from the ocean to the mountains in Orange County. He's building tracts of homes in California.

Matt Moore: If we were working by the coast, we brought our surfboards and everybody went surfing afterwards. Surf the glass off at night.

Ronda Kayson: And he's going surfing in the afternoon.

Michael Barbaro: What a life.

Ronda Kayson: Yeah, and he is happy as a clam.

Matt Moore: Work would dry up.

Michael Barbaro: Okay.

Matt Moore: But it wasn't a big deal. You just go to the hall and they'd say, "Hey, who wants to here?" and they would pull you off the list and they'd give you a slip and you'd go to the next job.

Ronda Kayson: So, he's getting paid well, he's 19 years old, and he meets a girl, as one does.

Michael Barbaro: [laughter]

Matt Moore: Uh the girl I was dating, which became my wife, she looked at my bank account and said, "What are you going to do with this money?" And I said, "I'm going to go buy me a Dodge truck."

Ronda Kayson: So, he's got $10,000 in bank, and he wants to buy a car. $10,000 in the bank in 1976 by now?

Michael Barbaro: That's real money.

Ronda Kayson: Right, so he's got real money.

Ronda Kayson: And she said, "No, you're going to go buy a house." His parents never owned a house.

Matt Moore: So, I said, "Okay, I'll go buy a house then."

Michael Barbaro: That's a How much was it?

Matt Moore: 48,000.

Ronda Kayson: He buys a house, and he's 20 years old, all from making money as a roofer.

Michael Barbaro: Right, not old enough to drink, but old enough to buy a home.

Ronda Kayson: And he's only been putting on roofs for 2 years.

Michael Barbaro: So, this is quite lucrative, and it sounds like things are going pretty swimmingly for Matt.

Ronda Kayson: Right, for Matt, this is a gravy train he's on. And in the 1970s, the unions had locked in really, really strong contracts, partly because of Vietnam War, there was less workers, like they had gotten these great contracts. But then you've got this period where there's high inflation, high interest rates.

Michael Barbaro: Right, this is the '70s.

Ronda Kayson: So, the late '70s, and the home builders and corporate America decides it's time to start fighting back against unions that have been incredibly powerful for decades.

Michael Barbaro: [music]

Ronda Kayson: And they form a lobbying group, and one of their goals was to weaken labor laws, and to sort of break the stranglehold that unions had on industry, and construction was in the center of this. So, they start [music] introducing non-union crews into unionized job sites.

Matt Moore: It happened very slowly. What happened was a a lot of non-union started coming up.

Ronda Kayson: So, the way this plays out in Southern California, where Matt is, is that in 1983 the Carpenters Union goes on strike and the real heart of the strike is not about wages, but is about whether non-union shops can come into any job where there's a carpenter union.

Michael Barbaro: Got it.

Ronda Kayson: They think they're going to win on this,

Michael Barbaro: [music]

Ronda Kayson: but instead the strike drags on for 4 months.

Michael Barbaro: Wow. And they're not working during this period.

Ronda Kayson: working during this period. They've basically underestimated how determined the home builders would be. Meanwhile, other local unions have gotten involved.

Matt Moore: Because we were fighting other trades at that period and not fighting our and not fighting the where we should have been fighting.

Ronda Kayson: There's a lot of infighting and the coalition starts to break down [music] and they have to make a deal. And in the end the unions concede to the home builders and let non-union crews on residential sites where there's a unionized carpenter.

Michael Barbaro: Basically, they lose on the marquee issue of the strike itself.

Ronda Kayson: Exactly.

Michael Barbaro: [music]

Ronda Kayson: But at the time it doesn't seem like that big of a deal.

Michael Barbaro: Why not?

Ronda Kayson: Because while they were letting non-union workers come into unionized residential projects, the union still had a lock on the commercialized work in the construction industry.

Matt Moore: We had so much what they called commercial work. We had so much of it.

Ronda Kayson: California's building a lot and they're building a lot of commercial. They're building hotels, they're building hospitals, they're building strip malls.

Matt Moore: It was just flowing out of the the the cracks. We had so much

Ronda Kayson: So the union say, "It's fine. We'll just go do commercial."

Matt Moore: I brought it up more than once. They said, "Oh, we have too much uh Don't worry about it. There's too much commercial. Go to work."

Michael Barbaro: So if they cede some of their work in the residential sector

Ronda Kayson: They'll be okay.

Michael Barbaro: They'll be okay.

Ronda Kayson: will make up for the residential.

Michael Barbaro: Right. No big deal.

Ronda Kayson: Okay.

Ronda Kayson: Do you think it was a mistake things like turned away didn't worry about residential?

Matt Moore: I do.

Ronda Kayson: Why?

Matt Moore: Because it it it eliminated a whole uh section of our industry. I honestly think when we lost residential it it changed my trajectory in the industry.

Ronda Kayson: Tell me. Like so

Ronda Kayson: Matt immediately notices a change. The first thing he sees as he goes into the union hall where he's supposed to see his jobs and there's far fewer residential jobs available. There's just less of them and the ones that are available are a lot smaller. There's just like they're not building 60, 80 trucks of homes, maybe it's 10.

Matt Moore: That's when two gates started coming up. We had a union gate and a non-union gate.

Ronda Kayson: And when he goes to the job sites, he starts seeing two gates, one for union crews and one for non-union crews.

Michael Barbaro: Huh.

Ronda Kayson: And they're keeping those workers separate. So remember though at this time in the early 1980s both the unionized and non-unionized workers were still American-born workers.

Michael Barbaro: Hm. That's just the demographics of this workforce.

Ronda Kayson: That's the demographics of America at the time. But

Michael Barbaro: [music]

Ronda Kayson: in the early 1980s was the beginning of Reaganism and he was very pro-business, but he was also very pro-immigrant. He had a huge amnesty program and his successor George H. W. Bush saw an even bigger wave of immigrants and he expanded Reagan's amnesty programs and he ends up signing the Immigration Act of 1990, which is this major piece of legislation that created the TPS program, H-1B visas, a visa lottery program. He does, you know, also add in some border protections and try [music] to reduce illegal immigration, but overall this is a time where the borders are porous and it was not the hard border that we think of today.

Michael Barbaro: [music]

Ronda Kayson: So all these immigrants are looking for work and many of them are coming in without documentation and [music] and many of them also in either already knowing how to build homes or they come and join family members who've already gotten jobs in construction. And so construction becomes a natural place for immigrants to find [music] work. And for the American worker, these home construction jobs are becoming less appealing as non-union work grows in the sector. [music] And these non-union jobs don't have those good benefits. And so [music] Matt starts seeing the labor force changing. Suddenly there's more Spanish being spoken on the job sites. A few years later, the foremen are often Spanish speaking.

Matt Moore: I literally was working one day and I turned around on the roof and I happened to be the oldest guy and the whitest guy on the roof. I wonder what happened to all the white guys. I really did. They all went different places. Nobody wanted to do it anymore.

Michael Barbaro: So, just to be clear about the sequence of events here, home builders decide to challenge the union's hold over the construction of housing. [clears throat] They say we want non-union workers. They fight the unionized workers to get that to happen. And as that's happening, these waves of immigrants are coming to the US and they are being introduced especially to this non-union world of home construction, which it sounds like is very open to hiring them.

Ronda Kayson: Exactly. It's almost like a parallel experience is happening because you know, while Matt is noticing that the folks who look like him on the job site are disappearing, I spoke with a lot of immigrants who arrived during that time period and they tell almost a similar story to what Matt's youth was like.

Michael Barbaro: Mhm.

Ronda Kayson: So, one guy I spoke with was named Mariano Martinez.

Ronda Kayson: So, where are you Where were you born? Where are you

Mariano Martinez: Oaxaca, Mexico.

Michael Barbaro: Okay.

Ronda Kayson: And he's also a roofer. And he arrived in the United States, he was 19. He came in the late 1980s from Oaxaca, Mexico.

Ronda Kayson: So, he walked across the border? And it was easy then?

Mariano Martinez: Back in the day, yeah, it was. It was like not even half hour.

Ronda Kayson: Okay, did it cost a lot of money or?

Mariano Martinez: No, it was like $110, I think.

Ronda Kayson: Okay.

Ronda Kayson: He crosses the border with the help of a coyote. He's initially working at a gardening center and he's not making very much money. He got laid off. And like Matt, a friend tells him about roofing.

Michael Barbaro: Oh my god, quite literally it is a parallel story.

Ronda Kayson: story. And so, what did your friend say about roofing?

Mariano Martinez: Well, he said it was a hard work, but if you like it, it's a good job.

Ronda Kayson: So, what So, when you What was your

Ronda Kayson: So, he doesn't speak any English. He shows up on a job site. They put him on a roof. He's got to rip off an old roof. It's horrible work. He absolutely hates it. He thinks he's never going to do this again.

Mariano Martinez: But, I really needed the job, so I act like really know know what I'm doing, but definitely then.

Ronda Kayson: Did you go

Ronda Kayson: The money's a lot better. And he comes back the next day anyway. And in a few months, he's making $100 a day in cash. So, the money's good, but there's no benefits.

Ronda Kayson: And then did you have a health insurance?

Mariano Martinez: No, not at that time.

Ronda Kayson: No, I see.

Ronda Kayson: There's no retirement, there's no paid vacation, but it's more money than he's ever seen. And his friends actually tell him, you know, there is union work you can get, but it's not worth it because it's not steady. There's all this work in the non-union work. There's so much to be had. Or the union work, there's all these rules and you may be out of work sometimes. So, he never even bothers to consider union work. And he doesn't have to because

Michael Barbaro: the contracts no longer require it.

Ronda Kayson: Right. And for Mariano, the money is so good that by the late '90s, he's also married and he has enough money to buy a house, also in Southern California.

Michael Barbaro: Mhm.

Michael Barbaro: I'm really curious as immigrants like Mariano are starting to take these non-union home construction jobs, what is happening to people like Matt? Clearly, he's looking around and the world is changing, but I presume that he's still getting plenty of union construction work.

Ronda Kayson: Right, he's he's not even looking at the jobs that Mariano is looking at. So, remember, he's still looking at the jobs in the union hall. So, he's not seeing Mariano's jobs. Unionized workers have just shifted increasingly into commercial work.

Michael Barbaro: Right, as they kind of predicted.

Ronda Kayson: As they predicted. So, which sounds like, well, what's the difference? I mean, a job is a job, a roof is a roof.

Ronda Kayson: Commercial work, did you go up and do high-rises and stuff?

Matt Moore: Yes.

Ronda Kayson: Wow, how was that? Was that hard?

Matt Moore: Yeah, it was hard.

Ronda Kayson: Was it harder than residential roofing?

Matt Moore: Oh, yes. Oh, yeah. Yeah, we

Ronda Kayson: But, putting a roof on a two-story house in the Orange County suburbs is a lot different than putting a roof on a 30-story tower. These are multi-million dollar projects. There's a lot of pressure to get them built very fast. You're up on steel beams. You can get seriously injured. It's very hard, hard work. The hours are much longer.

Matt Moore: like that. And trying to get the trash off, we'd put these big giant tubes up and you would throw the trash in the tube from the roof. And if it got stuck, well, you had to send the smallest guy down on a rope inside the tube.

Ronda Kayson: No.

Matt Moore: Yeah.

Ronda Kayson: And, you know, Matt tells stories of just intense physical labor and and real danger with real injuries.

Matt Moore: Oh, I've broken my back twice. I've ripped off this arm, ripped off this wrist, ripped off this elbow.

Ronda Kayson: Fell off a roof.

Ronda Kayson: He fell off a roof and ripped his arm off his body and had it reattached. Showed me the scars.

Matt Moore: My knee is completely wiped out. I've broken both my ankles several times, broken my pelvis, fractured ribs. [music]

Ronda Kayson: But, even despite how difficult the job was, Matt and other commercial roofers still had enough work and had decent salary and benefits to hang on and to build a good solid life. But then something happens that no one anticipated that makes American-born unionized workers like Matt feel even more [music] left behind.

Michael Barbaro: We'll be right back. So Rocio, what happens that makes life and work even worse for folks like Matt?

Ronda Kayson: The housing boom. If

Michael Barbaro: Not not intuitive, but I know you're going to explain.

Ronda Kayson: Right. If you all remember in the early 2000s, there was this huge housing boom fueled by subprime mortgages and Americans start building millions of new homes. And also, they're not just building anywhere. They're building in the Sun Belt, states like Arizona, Nevada, and Texas, and California, where there's a lot of immigrants because these are border states and many of these states are right-to-work states. So they have very, very weak union representation. And so where the construction industry is growing is increasingly non-union and they have this enormous workforce that is moving across the border eager and willing to take these jobs that are not particularly attractive to a worker who's born in the United States.

Michael Barbaro: Got it. So I'm intuiting from what you're saying that this is a boom time for non-union foreign-born construction workers.

Ronda Kayson: It is. And if you look at the share of foreign-born workers in the construction industry, it is just skyrocketing during this period. But what's also happening simultaneously is union membership for both foreign-born workers and American-born workers is falling from this peak of 40%. It's just falling off a cliff.

Michael Barbaro: Mhm.

Ronda Kayson: And while that's happening, wages for both union workers and non-union workers aren't keeping up with everyone else's wages.

Michael Barbaro: Why?

Ronda Kayson: Well, because if you think of union workers as like the standard of what you're supposed to be paid, then even if you're hiring for a non-union job, you're kind of matching that a bit. So, as there's fewer workers in unions, they there's fewer jobs to be had, wages start to shrink, and then the non-union wages sort of fall in concert.

Michael Barbaro: Because if the standard starts to go away, then the non-standard pay can start to fall faster.

Ronda Kayson: Exactly. So, in some ways, union work, even if you're not unionized, keeps your standard of living a little bit higher for everyone. And that standard is now falling. And [snorts] at the same time, we're seeing this huge wave of immigration that is really transforming the construction industry. Remember, in 1973, about 5% of construction workers were foreign-born.

Michael Barbaro: Right, tiny percent.

Ronda Kayson: Tiny percent. But so, during the housing boom, the percent continues to just soar. And now in California, they make up half of all construction workers. In some parts of the construction industry, like drywall, roofing, they're like 80, 90% of the workers are now foreign-born. And also, the unions provided huge apprenticeship programs. Matt came in and was trained on day one. He went through a long apprenticeship program where he got trained to do a union roof. When Mariano came, there was no apprenticeship program. He was just trained by his friends. So, you don't have that apprenticeship program that was a pipeline to train a new workforce cuz the unions don't exist. And so, young people graduating from high school are no longer putting on their hot boots and getting on a roof.

Michael Barbaro: So, even before the housing boom inevitably yields to a housing crash that we all remember, the entire infrastructure that encourages American-born workers to go into construction is eroding on top of the fact that the wage advantages of entering this industry are starting to evaporate as well.

Ronda Kayson: Right. And all these things are happening together. So, the pathways to get into construction for an American-born worker are rapidly disappearing because the unions are disappearing, because the construction that's happening is happening in places where there's no unions, and they're building residential homes. And instead, what's happening is a pathway for immigrants. So, Mariano arrives, his friend tells him about this job, he brings cousins and got them jobs in construction in Southern California as immigrants. And that becomes the new pathway into construction.

Michael Barbaro: So, what happens when this housing boom inevitably becomes a housing bust in 2007, 2008, 2009?

Ronda Kayson: It's a complete disaster for the construction industry. No industry faced more job losses than construction. Almost 2 million workers lost their jobs. That's one in four construction workers lost their jobs. For workers like Matt, they were staring down the barrel of a very bleak future. It had already become a pretty hostile environment for them. So, Matt is 51, and he walks away.

Michael Barbaro: He quits the construction industry in the middle of the housing crisis.

Ronda Kayson: He retires. He gets his pension, and he walks away. And he is one of millions of workers who did the same thing. And so, as the industry starts to churn again and starts to rebuild, it never reaches the levels it did in 2000s, which is what is sort of setting us up for where we are today. Home builders are not building at scale. They're not building the number of houses Americans need, and there's a labor force that was just never recovered. We're short 300,000 workers because they left, and they retired, and they didn't come back. And we don't have the pipeline of new young American-born workers to fill those jobs. So, now we have a workforce that is incredibly dependent on the immigrant workers who have been here and have been working and building homes for years in this country, and they're being deported. They're being deported from job sites, and they're being deported from Home Depots, and they're being deported from their homes. And if they aren't being deported, they're afraid to come to work.

Michael Barbaro: Mhm. It can't have escaped the awareness of the president and those around him that at this moment, when America desperately needs a lot more housing, and faces a shortage of workers to build it, that this deportation campaign is at odds with the goal of getting more housing and more affordable housing. And I wonder if the Trump administration assumed, believed, that if it was deporting all these foreign-born workers who are building these houses, that it might bring the American-born workforce back somehow?

Ronda Kayson: Yeah, I think that is the vision. Is that wages will rise because now you'll have to pay them again the good wages that you once had. I think that's J.D. Vance's argument, for sure. Home builders will have to pay more, and American workers will come and take these jobs, and that the problem is, again, that immigrants have taken their jobs, and if you remove the immigrants from the equation, the Americans will fill the void.

Michael Barbaro: Is there any evidence that that's starting to happen?

Ronda Kayson: Um there's actually evidence that it's not. So, researchers found that in communities where there was a high level of deportation, employment dropped for immigrant workers.

Michael Barbaro: Right.

Ronda Kayson: But, here's what's kind of surprising. Employment also fell for American-born workers.

Michael Barbaro: Huh. And what does the study say is the causality there? Why?

Ronda Kayson: Well, you would think that contractors would raise wages because they're short on workers, but that's not really the way the industry works. American-born workers and foreign-born workers aren't evenly split across the industry. You have a concentration of foreign-born workers who maybe build the foundations. So, let's say your crew that builds a foundation doesn't show up because they've all been deported or they're afraid to go to work. So, you don't build the foundation. So, then when you call in the carpenter,

Michael Barbaro: They're like, "What am I supposed to build on? There's no foundation."

Ronda Kayson: So, you don't need the carpenter. So, you just don't hire him. You know, in my reporting, I spoke with a number of contractors who said jobs that were taking 3 months to build now take 5 months to build because there's just fewer workers to get each stage of the project done.

Michael Barbaro: [snorts]

Ronda Kayson: And they're not paying their workers any more money. They're just taking longer to get the job done. And this housing bill doesn't address the labor force. It doesn't provide a pathway to a trade school or any requirements to hire unionized labor. So, it provides no avenues to expand an American-born workforce. There is one place in the bill that does speak to a potential future, and that is the factory-built housing. So, the bill makes the first major changes to manufactured housing, which means that now we can build lots of different types of factory-built housing. That kind of housing requires less labor. You don't need as many workers. I'm not sure if that's an upside, but it's an upside for housing, but not for construction workers.

Michael Barbaro: Exactly.

Michael Barbaro: So, Rhonda, I want to end by returning to where we began this conversation, which is with these prevailing narratives around why the US home construction industry became so reliant on foreign-born workers. One of those myths is that foreign workers took those jobs from Americans. The other myth is that the American workers decided they didn't want to do those jobs anymore. But obviously, it's much more complicated than those simple stories.

Ronda Kayson: Yes, and I think it's a provocative thing to say, but what we learned through the reporting is that there's some elements of truth in both these threads. Yes, immigrants replaced Americans in the jobs they used to hold, right? But it was because they had an opportunity to do so where they couldn't before. The government allowed them in and the unions no longer had a lock on the jobs, and businesses wanted to hire them, and they made a choice to do that.

Michael Barbaro: Right. They wanted this cheaper labor that was non-union. They pushed for it. And the immigrants presented themselves as that cheaper labor.

Ronda Kayson: Exactly. So, you had this partnership between government and business to really decide together to erode what was a really solid American job.

Michael Barbaro: Mhm.

Ronda Kayson: And as young American-born workers entered the workforce during this period, they looked at this backbreaking manual labor that maybe their fathers had done, and it didn't feel worth it to them. There were other opportunities where the wages were higher, where the protections were safer, where there were health benefits, where maybe there was air conditioning in an office. And the industry no longer appealed to a new generation of American-born workers. And in its place, it opened an opportunity for a generation of people coming to this country looking for work.

Michael Barbaro: Mhm.

Ronda Kayson: But they didn't exactly take jobs from people who wanted them anymore.

Michael Barbaro: I mean, one of the things that strikes me is that almost everyone in the story you have told here did act in a pretty economically rational way, right? US-born workers started to walk away from an industry when the work became less lucrative. Immigrant workers still flocked to it because it was lucrative enough for them, and builders saw it cheaper and cheaper labor in a system that didn't require them to work with just unionized workers. So, in a system where everyone's acting rationally, and we end up in a place where there's more and more foreign-born workers at the center of the industry, and then the government decides that a lot of those workers need to leave the country, and we have a huge housing shortage, and not enough workers to build, in that scenario, where lots of people have been acting naturally, and it's not working, it feels like the only solution is for something unnatural to happen, and I wonder what you, as someone quite expert in this area, think that perhaps unnatural thing now needs to be. What is going to fix the American housing crisis if there aren't enough American-born workers who want to do the work, and increasingly there are foreign-born workers who are being asked to leave?

Ronda Kayson: I mean, one option, obviously, is to rethink the deportation policy.

Michael Barbaro: Mhm.

Ronda Kayson: Another option is to really have meaningful training programs. If it If it is a priority for this administration to have a domestic workforce, then there needs to be quality training programs and quality wages for workers across the board. You need to sort of decide to have a policy that would actually rebuild the ranks of the workforce.

Michael Barbaro: [music]

Ronda Kayson: And absent that, you're just sort of haphazardly removing an already fragile workforce, that just makes it harder to get the job done.

Michael Barbaro: [music]

Michael Barbaro: Rowanda, thank you very much.

Ronda Kayson: You're welcome. [music]

Michael Barbaro: We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. The governor of New Jersey, Democrat Mikey Sherrill, [music] said that about 400 non-citizens voted in the state after they were improperly registered in 2023 and 2024. The voting [music] was the result of a software error at the New Jersey Department of Motor Vehicles, which [music] put more than 6,000 non-citizens on the voter rolls, even after they had disclosed their immigration status. New Jersey said that the voting had no [music] impact on any elections, and that all of the non-citizens have been removed from the state's [music] voter rolls.

Michael Barbaro: And

Alice Callahan: we've never seen an outbreak this large for this parasite [music] in the US.

Michael Barbaro: As cases of Cyclospora surge across the United States,

Michael Barbaro: [music] inflicting diarrhea on thousands of people, my colleague, Alice Callahan, has been looking into the central question raised by the outbreak.

Michael Barbaro: [music]

Alice Callahan: For Cyclospora, the parasite only survives in humans, so as far as we know, it has to come from human feces.

Michael Barbaro: How did a parasite that only grows in the human gut somehow get into our food system on such a large scale?

Alice Callahan: So, usually what that means is there is a situation on farms where

Michael Barbaro: [music]

Alice Callahan: their septic system maybe has a leak in it or they have outhouses next to the field and somehow the waste gets [music] into the water supply that's then used to irrigate the crop.

Michael Barbaro: So far, [music] government agencies have linked the current outbreak to iceberg lettuce grown in Mexico that a company called Taylor Farms supplied to Taco Bell locations in multiple states. Taylor Farms has now recalled iceberg lettuce from 27 states

Michael Barbaro: [music] and the US government is stepping up its screening of lettuce coming from Mexico.

Alice Callahan: That's another thing about this bug is that alcohol-based hand sanitizers don't work to kill it. So you really need soap and water and full hand washing to get rid of it.

Michael Barbaro: Today's episode was produced by Nina Feldman and Chris Benderav with help from Stella Tan and Shannon Lin. It was edited by Lisa Chow and contains music by Marion Lozano, Diane Wong and Dan Powell. Our theme music is by Wonderly. This episode was engineered by Chris Wood. Special thanks to Robert Gebeloff. That's it for the daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See tomorrow.