Dive Brief:

• The U.S. construction industry, a survey by the University of Texas at Austin finds, has a workforce that is half undocumented immigrants, and the U.S. has an immigration enforcement system that drives those workers off the payrolls and gives them no way to become legal.
• Companies who are told during audits of their I-9 documentation that they have to let workers go then have to turn to subcontractors, who are either the workers themselves or subs of subs of subs who hire the workers.
• Without immigration reform, the workers are stuck in a limbo in which they cannot work legally, pay taxes and be trained by their employers to become skilled workers. There also is no process to let them become documented.

Dive Insight:

The system is broken because those who demand that undocumented workers be given no change to change their status unless they leave the U.S. and apply to come back live in a different world than the construction companies that have to bid work at a competitive price and then get America built. Companies that were built by hard-working, middle-class people, some of them immigrants or children of immigrants, cannot create for today's laborers the same opportunities that helped build the companies.