Thousands of construction contractors face difficulties finding workers, in a sector that lost some 5,100 jobs between September 2025 and September 2026 in the Atlanta metropolitan area, the most affected area in the country in a context marked by the raids of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Service (ICE), in the midst of President Donald Trump’s immigration offensive.
According to the Association of General Contractors of America (AGC), the construction labor shortage “remains serious” across the country. After Atlanta, the most affected areas are New York-New Jersey, Oakland and Riverside-San Bernardino, in California, and Lakewood-New Brunswick, in New Jersey. Also included are Pittsburgh, Sacramento, Arlington, San Diego and Corpus Christi.
The association notes that construction companies are having difficulty finding and retaining qualified workers, a shortage it also attributes to the growing demand for labor to build data centers.
Immigration control, he adds, “affects the availability of personnel in almost a third of companies, even when market conditions soften.”
87% of the companies surveyed have vacancies for trade workers and 82% for salaried positions, a lack of personnel that is causing delays in construction.
In fact, 42% reported delays in projects due to a lack of their own workers or their subcontractors, according to the survey by AGC and the National Center for Construction Education and Research (NCCER), which interviewed 1,830 companies.
This is the case of Leo Cárdenas, a Venezuelan contractor from Dunwoody (Georgia), who lost all his workers in recent months: most of them, including his stepfather, ended up back in their countries of origin, deported or self-deported by Trump.
This father of a baby girl who is only months old has had to “reinvent himself” to be able to get ahead with his small business without any help, with the fear that he could also become the next target of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, despite being legally in the country.
“This situation is unsustainable,” Cárdenas told EFE, who even had to sell his white work van, a type of vehicle that has become a priority objective of immigration agents.
Better not to expose yourself
«The impact is real. According to AGC, the lack of workers is today the main cause of delays in construction. That translates into higher costs and longer deadlines,” Gabriela Matute, executive director of the Georgia Hispanic Builders Association (GHCA, in English), told EFE.
Mature indicated that this labor shortage “is not a new phenomenon but rather a cyclical one,” although he recognizes that the climate of uncertainty due to ICE operations “affects the entire Hispanic community, and construction is no exception.”
«In our industry it is felt especially strongly, because for decades construction has been the gateway for generations of Hispanic immigrants: the place where they learned a trade, earned a name and, with years of effort, came to have their own company. Many of the entrepreneurs who today create jobs in Georgia started exactly like this,” he said.
The GHCA executive director said that even workers with legal status and US citizens are taking leave because they prefer not to expose themselves or their families.
In addition to ICE’s control operations, the AGC also mentions rising material costs, interest rates and political uncertainty as factors slowing down new projects.
