Early last year, President-elect Donald Trump promised that when he returned to the Oval Office, he would allow the US Navy to build more ships. “It’s very important,” – he said“because it’s work, great work.”
However, companies that build ships for the government are already having trouble finding enough workers to fill those jobs. And Trump could make it even harder if he follows through on another promise: to end immigration.
The president-elect has told supporters he will impose new limits on the number of immigrants allowed into the country and mount the largest mass deportation campaign in history. At the same time, the shipbuilding industry, which he also says he supports and which has provided significant financial support to the Republican cause, is struggling to overcome acute labor shortages. Immigrants were crucial to help fill the gaps.
According to last year’s Navy report, there are several major shipbuilding programs years behind schedulemainly due to labor shortages. The shortage is so serious that production of warships is declining to its lowest level in a quarter of a century.
Shipbuilders and the government have poured millions of dollars into training and recruiting American workers, and under a bipartisan bill just introduced in the Senate, they offered to spend even more. Last year, the Navy awarded a Texas nonprofit a nearly $1 billion contract in a no-bid contract to modernize the industry with more advanced technology in a way that would make it more attractive to workers. The non-profit organization has already produced flashy TV commercials for underwater work. One of its goals is to help the underwater industry hire 140,000 new workers over the next 10 years. “We build giants,” beckons one of its ads. “It takes one to build one.”
However, experts say these serious efforts have not yet resulted in enough workers for current needs, let alone a large enough workforce to manage expanded production. “We’re trying to get the blood out of the turnip,” said Shelby Oakley, an analyst with the Government Accountability Office. “There is simply no domestic labor force.”
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At the same time, the industry relies on immigrants to fill a number of duties at the shipyard, with many jobs similar to those on a construction site, including cleaning crews, welders, painters and pipefitters. And executives worry that any future crackdown on immigration or restrictions on legal immigration, including restrictions on asylum or the Temporary Protected Status program, could cause disruptions that would further damage their production capacity.
Ron Will, president and chief operating officer of All American Marine in Washington state, said his company is “clinging” to the workers. And Peter Duclos, president of Gladding-Hearn Shipbuilding in Somerset, Mass., said the current immigration system is “so broken” that he’s already having trouble keeping valuable workers and finding new ones.
There is no publicly available data showing how much the shipbuilding industry relies on immigrant labor, particularly undocumented immigrant labor. Both Wiley and Duclos said they do not hire unregistered workers, and industry experts say unregistered workers are unlikely to work on projects that require a permit. However, a ProPublica report last year found that some shipbuilders with government contracts used such workers. This report focused on a large Louisiana shipyard operated by Thoma-Sea, where undocumented immigrants were often hired through third-party subcontractors.
The story told the story of a young, undocumented immigrant from Guatemala who helped build an $89 million U.S. government ship to track hurricanes. When he died on the job after two years at Thoma-Sea, neither the company nor the subcontractor paid death benefits to his partner and young son.
ProPublica also reported that executives at Thoma-Sea, which declined to comment, have made tens of thousands of dollars in donations to Republican candidates. Still, if Trump’s recent tenure is any guide, the shipbuilding industry will not be exempt from any future crackdowns. One of resulting workplace raids under the first Trump administration were held at an even larger shipyard in Louisiana called Bollinger.
In July 2020, federal immigration agents arrested 19 “unlawfully present foreign nationals” at Bollinger’s Lockport Shipyard, according to story in the Times-Picayune/New Orleans Advocate. Immigration and Customs Enforcement declined to provide information about the raid. According to Bollinger’s website, this shipyard builds U.S. Coast Guard and Navy patrol boats. Five of the arrested workers were sent to an ICE detention facility, and 14 were released with pending deportation cases, according to a news report.
Bollinger denied any wrongdoing after the raid. Four years later, there is no evidence in publicly available federal court records that Bollinger executives have faced any charges in this regard. Meanwhile, federal election records show campaign leaders donated hundreds of thousands of dollars last year to Republican elected officials, including House Speaker Mike Johnson and House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, both Republicans from Louisiana. The company did not respond to ProPublica’s requests for comment.
The administration of President Joe Biden raids on workplaces have ended as in Bollinger, saying it would focus on “unscrupulous employers”. Department of Homeland Security officials did not respond to questions or provide information on how many employers have been prosecuted since then. However, Trump-appointed “border czar” Tom Homan has made it clear that the new administration will return to conducting raids. Asked how a second Trump administration would increase shipbuilding while curbing immigration, a spokesman for Trump’s transition team only doubled down on the president-elect’s deportation pledges, saying they would focus enforcement on “illegal criminals, drug dealers and human traffickers.”
Days after Trump’s election victory, a group of undocumented shipyard welders emerging from a Spanish-language grocery store near a port in Houma, Louisiana, offered a dim view when asked what they thought about the future. One man, who declined to give his name, laughed nervously and blurted out, “Well, we might get deported.” Another man, a welder from the Mexican state of Coahuila who has worked in the United States for about two years, also declined to give his name, but said he feared losing the life he had built in the country.
“If they catch you,” he said, “they’ll take you, and you’ll have to leave everything behind.”
Do you have information on undocumented immigrants in the workforce? Contact (email protected) or contact her at 661-549-0572.
