If the threatened mass deportations were enacted, Ms. Eisner explained, the construction industry would not, in the short term, be able to replace the lost workers. “Right now, we’re in the New York budget cycle, and we’re all acutely aware of the housing crisis,” she said. “Even with the work force as is, we’re unlikely to meet targets.” Delays only further increase costs.
Elizabeth Velez, president of the Velez Organization, a Manhattan construction services firm, elaborated. “Construction thrives on predictability and certainty, and when we take that out of the equation, that is when things get crazy in terms of price and scheduling,” she said. “And in this business, scheduling is money.” She is also an advocate for the industry in Albany and is in touch with other employers in the building trades. Some workers, she has heard, were not showing up to job sites this week out of fear of deportation.
Many work as day laborers for small-scale contractors, she said, and many of these businesses are minority-owned. These workers remind Ms. Velez of her father, a carpenter who founded his own company after he was put out of commission by a fall on a job site in the early 1970s. This week, she said, she noticed fewer workers showing up for hire at the Home Depot on Gun Hill Road in the Bronx, where contractors, picking up supplies in the morning, often gather the people they need for the day ahead.
“Like everything, we don’t know what’s happening,” Ms. Velez said. And the mood feels different to her than during the last Trump administration. In an indication of what might come, federal law enforcement made more than 5,500 arrests across the country between Jan. 22 and Jan. 28, according to numbers from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. To put that figure in perspective, early in 2017 it was major news when federal immigration officials arrested 600 people in a week.
“It feels like they have had four years to plan,” Ms. Velez said, “and they’re ready on Day 1.”