From Slate:
The U.S. Might Not Have Enough Construction Workers to Rebuild Houston After HarveyAnd if you can’t trust the National Association of Home Builders for unbiased press releases …By Daniel Gross
… The National Association of Home Builders reports that 77 percent of builders are facing a shortage of framing crews while 61 percent are grappling with a shortage of drywall installation workers and 45 percent report a shortage of weatherization workers.
The problem is particularly acute in Texas, where the housing industry has been powered by consistent population and job growth and whose service industries are disproportionately reliant on immigrant labor.Even better, the immigrants could form favelas! Everybody knows you need shantytowns to have good music.… And given the Trump administration’s hostility to Latinos and desire to ramp up deportations, it’s unlikely that what worked in previous disasters will work again. Back in 2007, the Washington Post reported on a Tulane and University of California, Berkeley, study that found some 100,000 Hispanic workers thronged into the Gulf Coast region in the wake of Katrina, many of them undocumented.
Houston will need a similar migration for it to recover. In 2017, from where will those workers come?