AUSTIN — Construction crews recently wrapped up work on James Gaines’ new house in College Station, where he’s the chief economist at Texas A&M University’s Real Estate Center. 

“The electrician and the HVAC guy were the only Anglos on the job,” Gaines said. “I don’t care as long as my house gets built in a timely fashion and is good quality.”

But there is concern that foreign-born workers who are in the U.S. under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program would be returned to their home countries if the president rescinds the policy, complicating recovery from Hurricane Harvey by trimming the Texas construction industry’s workforce of much-needed employees.

“Is there a labor shortage? The short answer is, yes,” Gaines said.

President Trump has recently signaled that he wants to rescind the policy, but discussions over DACA are in flux, with the president tweeting on Thursday morning that, “No deal was made last night on DACA.”

The DACA policy dates from 2012 and allows those who entered the United States as children — they’re commonly referred to as “Dreamers” — to remain in the U.S. for school or work under renewable two-year permits.

A 2016 national survey by Tom Wong, United We Dream, National Immigration Law Center, and the Center for American Progress showed that 91 percent of DACA recipients are employed, with 93 percent of those over 25 working.

Nationwide, about three percent of the estimated DACA recipients work in construction, according to the 2016 survey.

There’s no count of the number of Texas’ 124,000 DACA recipients in construction, but Ray Perryman, the Waco-based economist who raised the issue in a recent report, said that whatever the figure is, losing protection from deportation would decrease their “willingness to come out and work” in an industry that was breaking records even before Harvey hammered Texas’ Coastal Bend.

Gaines said that Texas’ construction industry “needs the bodies.”

Jerry Garcia, who owns Hacienda Construction in Corpus Christi, said that with telephone poles along the roads to Coastal Bend cities such as Port Lavaca and Aransas Pass “snapped like toothpicks” in Harvey’s wake, it’s going to be months before some areas regain power, and years before housing is back to pre-storm levels.

According to Perryman’s recent report, “Houston and the Gulf Coast could easily face a shortage of 100,000-150,000 or more workers for the efforts to rebuild homes, businesses and infrastructure.”

Dreamers median age is 25, making them significantly younger than the typical Texas carpenter or framing crew member, who averages 55 years old, said Emily Blair, CEO of the Home Builders Association of Greater Austin. 

“Right now our industry is most concerned with how we can respond,” to Harvey, Blair said. “There’s an expectation that labor issues are going to be exacerbated.” 

Marguerite Telford, director of communications for the conservative Center for Immigration Studies in Washington, D.C., is confident that the president will make a deal with Democrats who want Dreamers to be able to remain in the U.S.

But she decries a possible amnesty, saying that when Congress passed the Immigration Reform and Control Act in 1986, giving 2.7 million undocumented immigrants legal status, millions more followed.

Allowing DACA recipients to stay would “attract the next group,” of undocumented immigrants, Telford said. 

As for Texas and the need for construction workers, Telford said that “a large number of the unemployed are Americans, and these types of jobs down there are perfect for them.”

But according to Perryman’s report, in Texas, “even if all currently unemployed persons filled jobs now held by undocumented workers (which is impossible for myriad reasons), the state would be left with a glaring gap of hundreds of thousands of workers if the undocumented workforce were no longer available.”

Because they’re required to register, DACA recipients are documented.

Meanwhile, Gaines said that as the ripples from Hurricane Harvey spread across the state, residents who want to build or remodel will feel the impact, as will construction workers, documented or not.

“For the last 200 years Texas has been built by (people) who walked across the river,” Gaines said. “That’s one reason we’ve always had affordable housing.”

John Austin covers the Texas Statehouse for CNHI’s newspapers and websites. Reach him at jaustin@cnhi.com.