LOS ANGELES — On Wednesday and Thursday, firefighters in the Los Angeles area were battling fires. In Pasadena and Altadena, 55-year-old Alejandro was one of several day laborers leading cleanups near burned-out homes.
He helped clear the road of debris and pick up branches and trees that had fallen while others worked. He wore a yellow safety vest, a mask, and glasses.
Without workers like him, Alejandro said, “The country would fall into crisis.” He spoke in Spanish and asked that his last name not be used because he is in the country illegally.
“It wasn’t just one house,” Alejandro said. “There were a million.”
Donald Trump, who will be president next week, has said that he will remove millions of people who are in the country illegally when he takes office. People who support immigrants say that could make it harder for America to quickly rebuild after tragedies like floods, hurricanes, fires, and others.
As the number of extreme weather events caused by climate change rises, so does the number of workers, many of whom do not have legal status. Some go all over the country after big storms to help put whole towns back together again. A lot of them are very good at being electricians, plumbers, and masons. Others do hard physical work, like cutting up and taking away branches and trees that have fallen.
“The truth is that immigrant construction crews are rebuilding those areas, from Palisades to Malibu to Altadena,” said Pablo Alvarado, co-executive director of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network. “They are the ones who went to help second.”
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says that in 2023, the U.S. was hit by 28 climate disasters that each caused more than $1 billion in damage. This was the highest number of such disasters ever. AccuWeather put the damage and economic loss from the wildfires in L.A. at $250 billion to $275 billion. It is still too early to know how many people died or were hurt.
Trump has said that climate change is “a hoax,” and he said that foreigners were taking “Black jobs” and “Hispanic jobs” during his campaign. The work of immigrants helps the economy grow and opens up job options for people born in the United States.
An Associated Press reporter spoke to Karoline Leavitt, a spokeswoman for Trump’s transition team. She said that Trump “will enlist every federal power and coordinate with state authorities” to deport “illegal criminals, drug dealers, and human traffickers… while simultaneously lowering costs for families and strengthening our workforce.”
After Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005, the Gulf Coast became one of the biggest building sites in the world. This made the disaster restoration business boom. There were a lot of small building companies that grew and merged. Some were finally bought by private equity firms that saw an extremely profitable business with lots of money coming in from FEMA and insurance companies.
As of after Katrina, Mario Mendoza has worked in crisis restoration. Within days of the storm, Mendoza was cleaning up homes and businesses that were covered in mud, taking out trash, tearing down walls, and ripping up floors, some of which had asbestos in them.
A 54-year-old worker from Honduras who was in the country illegally remembers seeing dead bodies in homes he was hired to clean. Some bosses wouldn’t pay him. Since Katrina, he has helped people in Louisiana get back on their feet after storms and tornadoes.
He spoke in Spanish, “We’ve been the first people cities call when disasters happen.”
People who live in the area, contractors, or subcontractors hire workers to tear down moldy walls that were damaged by floods or to tarp and fix roofs and windows that were blown off by strong winds. They clear out people’s homes of trash and trees that have been cut down, which clears out streets and roads. After that, they rebuild. People who don’t have legal standing can be exploited and have their wages stolen. They sleep in tents, pickup trucks, and sometimes on the floors of parking lots or in the wrecked homes they’re rebuilding. These people work as roofers, carpenters, tile workers, and laborers.
Workers hired to clean up homes often don’t have safety gear or training, so they are exposed to “severely hazardous materials” and unsafe environments, according to Jessica Martinez, executive director of the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health, a group of labor groups that has trained workers in hurricane recovery. She also said that Trump’s comments against immigrants make workers afraid to ask for simple help because they think they will be targeted and deported.
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics says that in 2020, 10.8 million people worked in the construction business. The Center for American Progress says that nearly 1.6 million immigrants working in construction in 2021 were in the country illegally. Latinos make up a large part of this population. States like Texas and California have more of them.
Aside from workers who are already in the U.S., tens of thousands of people officially get H-2B visas every year, which lets them come to the country to do non-agricultural work for a short time. One industry with a lot of H-2B workers is construction.
Stan Marek, CEO of the building company Marek Brothers, said that forced deportations would make it much harder to clean up and rebuild after disasters, and contractors would have a hard time finishing projects that are already in the works or that will be started in the future.
Marek, a Republican, said, “If you don’t have the people, you can’t fix it.” “Even though Hurricane Harvey happened years ago, we still haven’t fixed everything.” The roofs of some people are still sagging and falling in.
The U.S. also has a housing shortage, which makes people wonder how the Trump government will deal with it since there are fewer construction workers. Vice President-elect JD Vance told the New York Times last year that the millions of men and women of “prime age” who have stopped working could replace building workers who don’t have legal status. Besides that, he said that they might join the trade if they were paid more.
Florida gives us a look at what might happen if a lot of people are deported soon. Some workers without legal status were afraid to finish the repair work they had started after Hurricane Idalia hit the Big Bend area in August 2023 because of a new law in Florida that took effect in July. It is one of the toughest laws in the country and says that companies with 25 or more employees must, among other things, check the legal status of their employees.
“A lot of the workers I know didn’t want to take the chance of staying there,” said Saket Soni, executive head of the non-profit Resilience Force, which helps the growing group of people who work in disaster recovery. “They wanted to finish the job but couldn’t take the chance of being sent back to Italy.” They put down their tools and left.
Sergio Chávez is a sociology professor at Rice University who is writing a book about the disaster recovery industry. He thinks that there are two ways to deal with a possible lack of construction workers: Trump will either have to expand the H-2B worker program or hire Americans to do the work for more money.
Marek isn’t sure though. “Everyone says give them more money.” “We’ve tried giving them more money,” he said. “The wages we start with are higher than they’ve ever been.” They’d rather go work at Buc-ee’s, which is a group of travel stores.
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