Who’s Building Housing in DFW? Mostly Immigrants, Research Shows

It’s been conventional wisdom for decades that immigrants play an outsized role in U.S. construction, and in the D-FW, the percentage of foreign-born workers in the building trades is outpacing the national average.

A recent analysis conducted by the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University put the share of immigrants in the Dallas area construction trade’s workforce at 61%, almost double the one-in-three ratio clocked nationally between 2019 and 2023.

Researchers found that foreign-born construction workers were more overrepresented in the top homebuilding metropolitan areas. Looking at the seven metros that issued a minimum of 150,000 building permits during the period of study, 54% of construction workers were immigrants on average.

The share of foreign-born labor dropped in smaller markets, with researchers clocking 40% in metros that issued between 75,000 and 149,999 permits and 22% in metros that issued fewer than 75,000 permits.

Some have cautioned that President Donald Trump’s restrictive immigration and aggressive deportation policies could have a deleterious impact on the nation’s housing supply.

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“In the short run, reducing immigration could severely hurt the labor supply needed for new homebuilding since up to a third of residential construction employment consists of foreign-born workers,” Realtor.com senior economist Ralph McLaughlin previously said.

Last summer, a study by the Home Builders Institute and National Association of Home Builders found that already-existing understaffing in the sector poses a “multibillion-dollar annual challenge that is responsible for the lost production of thousands of newly built homes.” The labor shortage has led to longer construction times, higher carrying costs, and ultimately increased housing prices due to limited supply.

Undocumented workers themselves are overrepresented in construction (1-2 million nationwide), accounting for as much as 25% or more of certain trades and 10-19% of the sector’s entire workforce.

On the local building front, D-FW logged more than 348,181 permits between 2019 and 2023, the most out of any metro in the country, according to the Joint Center for Housing Studies. The Houston metro area placed second, with 347,863 permits issued and immigrants making up 63% of the construction workforce.

The researchers also looked at how foreign-born workers stacked up in the top remodeling metros. Unsurprisingly, they found the same dynamic. Immigrants made up a bigger share of the workforce in markets with greater spending. The top five metros based on remodeling expenditures clocked 57%, while the remaining 15 metros for which there was available data logged 36%.

D-FW ranked fifth nationally for remodeling with $9.7 billion in expenditures during the period of study. The Houston area came in ninth with $7.7 billion.