KVIG Informative

Nevada needs tens of thousands more homes built to close its housing gap. Four in 10 of the workers who would build them are immigrants.

Immigrants make up 40% of Nevada’s construction workforce, the single largest immigrant labor share of any major industry in the state, according to an analysis by the nonprofit FWD.us.

That concentration matters directly for Nevada’s housing supply. Economists have said Southern Nevada’s home construction pace has remained well below historical norms for years, with the region short more than 200,000 homes compared with what 1990s-era construction rates would have produced by now.

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Construction relies more heavily on immigrant labor in Nevada than most other major industries measured in the FWD.us analysis, trailing only a handful of narrower specialty trades like building services and landscaping, which draw even higher shares of immigrant workers.

Immigrant workers without legal status or with temporary protections are also part of that labor pool. Nationally and in Nevada specifically, undocumented workers contribute billions of dollars in wages and taxes annually while remaining excluded from many of the legal protections and benefits available to other workers.

New federal rules taking effect this year add friction specifically for immigrant-owned construction businesses. A Small Business Administration rule effective March 1 bars any small business not fully owned by U.S. citizens from accessing SBA-backed loan programs — a restriction that can affect immigrant-owned construction and trade businesses even when every worker on a job site is legally authorized.

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Nevada’s construction labor pipeline faces pressure from multiple directions at once: an aging existing workforce, declining international migration to the state, and federal policy changes affecting both loan access and workforce authorization.

Every new home Nevada needs to close its housing gap has to be built by someone. Right now, four out of every 10 people doing that work in the state are immigrants — and any policy that shrinks that labor pool shrinks the state’s capacity to build its way out of a housing shortage at the same time.