Immigration enforcement leading to project delays, construction group says

Federal immigration policies have cramped employment at nearly one-third of construction firms, one of the country’s largest contractor associations found in its latest annual survey.

The AGC’s 2025 Workforce Survey found that worker shortages are the leading cause of project delays. More than a quarter, 28%, of respondents reported their construction firm has been affected by stepped-up immigration policies directly or indirectly.

Specifically, 5% reported a jobsite or offsite was visited by immigration agents, and 10% percent said workers left or failed to appear because of actual or rumored immigration actions. And 20% reported that their subcontractors lost workers.

The survey was conducted “against a backdrop of drastic and abrupt policy upheavals,” said Ken Simonson, chief economist for the Associated General Contractors of America, at a virtual media briefing. As a result, “construction spending and employment are not growing as robustly in recent past.”

“The workforce shortages being created by federal education, training, and immigration policies are undermining the country’s ability to build infrastructure and construction programs,” AGC said in an analysis of the survey, which included 1,300 contractor firms.

Since taking office in January, the Trump administration has tightened immigration policies, including halting border crossings and increasing Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s arrests and detentions of illegal immigrants across the U.S, largely through a series of executive orders.

The ICE crackdowns varied by region, AGC found. Contractors in Georgia, Virginia, Alabama, Nebraska and South Carolina were more likely to see enforcement actions, ranging from a high of 75% of firms in Georgia to 36% in South Carolina, the survey found. Only 8% of firms in Idaho and 9% in Alaska reported being impacted by immigration enforcement activities during the past six months.

Nationally, 34% of construction trade workers are foreign born, although not necessarily undocumented, Simonson said, citing the U.S. Census Bureau. That’s about double the rate for all workers in the economy, he said. “So construction is a lot more vulnerable to anything that affects foreign-born workers,” he said.

The AGC government affairs team will take the survey results to Capitol Hill in September, said vice-president of public affairs Brian Turmail.

“We want to make sure that they are aware of those shortages and what impacts they can have on … the construction industry, and what steps they’re taking on enhancing immigration enforcement, one of them being that they are taking people out of the workforce at a time when contractors are trying to build,” Turmail said.

Among the industry’s lobbying priorities are creating a construction-specific visa program and creating “pathways” for undocumented workers to “lawfully remain in the country,” Simonson said.

To attract more workers, 95% of firms said they increased their base pay rates during the past year. More than half said this year’s pay raises were higher than the prior year’s raise.

The survey was conducted after the passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which “contained huge increases in funding and resources for immigration enforcement,” Simonson noted. “It’s early days yet for seeing these enforcement actions at job sites, and construction, because it has such a high percentage of foreign-born workers and they are [at] fixed job sites, they are an easy target for enforcement.”

Some of the Trump administration’s other efforts may be helpful for the industry, Simonson said, noting the series of announcements from various CEOs and foreign leaders that they plan to open manufacturing plants in the U.S.

“These plants haven’t yet materialized for the most part so that’s a wished- for-way in which Trump administration policies may help some aspects of construction, but we can’t point to many examples yet,” he said.