MD Metros Rely Heavily on Immigrants for Home Construction
Kathy Cornwell has spent over 40 years in local media, starting her career with an internship at WCBC in the late 80s. After graduating from from Frostburg State University, she worked extensively in cable television advertising and programming with Comcast. From 2002 to 2005, she was married to WCBC's Jim Robey. Kathy returned to the News Department at WCBC in 2023.
A new report from the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard finds immigrants play an outsized role in homebuilding and remodeling, especially in metro areas. In the Washington, D.C. suburbs, immigrants comprise two-thirds of construction workers. In the Baltimore metro, that share was far lower, but still at a significant 23%. Immigrants play a large part in the homebuilding workforce at large, according to the center’s Riordan Frost…
“Nationally, immigrants play kind of a disproportionate role in the construction trades workforce. They’re about one in five workers nationally in the overall labor force, but they’re about one in three construction trades.”