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SALT LAKE CITY — Utah housing affordability czar Steve Waldrip said an immigrant deportation crackdown will increase home costs amid construction labor shortages and will likely not significantly decrease housing demand.
"It's not going to have a measurable impact on the price of housing to deport immigrants," Waldrip said. "But it will have a negative impact on the production side."
Waldrip, the governor's senior adviser for housing strategy and innovation, estimated on Thursday that around 10% of construction workers in Utah could be migrants in the country illegally.
How many unauthorized immigrants are in Utah?
The Utah Department of Public Safety told the Deseret News that the department's best guess on the number of unauthorized immigrants in Utah, based on information from federal partners, is 75,000.
Waldrip referred to an American Immigration Council report that calculated the presence of 114,200 unauthorized migrants in the state of Utah as of a few years ago.
Since this data was collected in 2022, there have been at least 30,000 immigration proceedings filed in Utah courts, a good indicator of how many asylum-seeking migrants have entered an area, according to Syracuse University's Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse data.
The American Immigration Council report referenced by Waldrip also found that 20.5% of the construction workforce in Utah are immigrants. The report did not draw a distinction between those who are here legally and those who are not.
This was the highest share of immigrant workers in any industry in the state.
The total number of construction workers in Utah is about 143,000, the Department of Workforce Services told the Deseret News. This would translate to roughly 29,300 construction workers in Utah who are immigrants, based on the American Immigration Council report.
How big is Utah's housing shortage?
Ideally, the country would arrive at an immigration policy that allows immigrants to fill gaps in the labor force legally, Waldrip said. "But right now, our immigration policy is so fractured that people are taking whoever they can get, regardless of how they got here."
Homebuilders are already pressed by a shortage of construction workers, according to Waldrip.
"We've had a lot of feedback from the construction industry that they are really struggling to find skilled labor, and particularly carpenters, electricians, plumbers; those kind of trades are really, really thin in the state right now," Waldrip said.
This labor shortage and a flurry of other market forces and regulatory obstacles have contributed to the state's continued failure to close its housing shortfall.
Utah must build around 7,000 single-family starter homes every year to erase the state's supply deficit, Waldrip said during an Economic and Community Development Appropriations Subcommittee meeting on Thursday.
While the state built about 1,000 more starter homes in 2024 than the previous yearly averages, the overall shortage of housing units is set to increase.
Population growth is currently outpacing construction by about 6,000 units, Waldrip said, which could lead to last year's shortage of 37,000 homes growing to a shortage of 45,000 homes over the next year.
Removing a portion of the construction workforce through deportations or more stringent E-verify requirements could result in even less affordable homes on the market as construction firms try to attract the interest of new employees with potentially higher wages.
"No question that this will impact the bottom lines of builders, and they don't generally absorb those losses; they pass those on to the ultimate buyers," Waldrip said.
Some have argued that deporting migrants who are in the country illegally will open up housing supply and decrease costs.
Decreasing the number of individuals in the state who need a place to live will, of course, lead to a decrease in housing demand, Waldrip said. But the impact will likely be much less than people think.
Unauthorized immigrants frequently live with other family members who might be in the state legally because of a tendency toward multigenerational living arrangements, the complications of getting a lease and the inability to afford their own housing unit, Waldrip said.
Who will be deported from Utah?
President Donald Trump has promised the largest deportation operation in U.S. history, beginning with violent criminals and extending to the roughly 10-20 million migrants who have entered or stayed in the country illegally.
This legislative session, House Republican lawmakers have introduced several pieces of legislation to facilitate the Trump administration's deportation agenda and enhance the public safety response to migrant-related crime.
The proposals include:
- Reducing the threshold at which a company must use E-verify to confirm the residency status of their employees from 150 employees to five.
- Expanding Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention space in the state.
- Increasing the number of criminal sentences that would trigger automatic deportations.
Utah House Speaker Mike Schultz, R-Hooper, said the state's focus is on fighting crime. Conversations between state leaders, Trump administration officials and ICE have centered around removing "the criminal element" from Utah communities," Schultz said on Thursday.
"Deportations are an important part of the process; people are here illegally," Schultz said. "But we do have a balance I think we need to find. And right now, we are committed and working on getting the criminals out of our state. That has to be our first priority."
Senate President Stuart Adams, R-Layton, reaffirmed a commitment to the Utah Compact of 15 years ago, which he said outlined a policy where immigrants who are productive would be integrated into the economy, and those who are not productive would be deported.
Ultimately, immigration and the impacts of immigration policy are federal issues, according to Senate budget vice chairman Scott Sandall, R-Tremonton.
And federal partners appear to be approaching deportations piecemeal, Sandall said, referring to a conversation with Gov. Spencer Cox who said that ICE is currently pursuing around 140 immigrants in the state with a criminal record.
Cox told the Deseret News on the opening day of the legislative session that he shares this focus on deporting those who have committed crimes after entering the country illegally.
"The ability of us to deport 10, 20 million people, it's just not a practical thing," Cox said.
