The Daily - Trump’s Clashing Goals: More Housing, Fewer Immigrants
Episode Date: July 22, 2026To address the United States’ acute housing shortage, Congress recently passed a landmark piece of legislation designed to encourage the construction of new homes. The problem is that President Trum...p’s crackdown on immigration has taken aim at the work force required to build those homes. Ronda Kaysen, who covers housing for The New York Times, explains how the U.S. housing industry became so dependent on immigrant labor. Guest: Ronda Kaysen, a real estate reporter for The New York Times who covers the intersection of housing and society. Background reading: Where did all the American-born roofers go? Here’s what is in the housing bill that just became law. Photo: Philip Cheung for The New York Times For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
Transcript
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From New York Times, I'm Michael Bobarro.
This is the Daily.
To confront America's acute shortage of housing, Congress just passed a historic piece of legislation
designed to encourage the construction of new homes.
The problem is that President Trump's crackdown on immigrants
is taking direct aim at the workforce required to build those homes.
Today, my colleague, Rhonda Kaysen
explains how the U.S. housing industry
became so dependent on immigrant labor
and how that reliance could end up undermining
a once-in-a-generation housing law.
It's Wednesday, July 22nd.
Rhonda, welcome to the Daily.
Thank you. Thank you for having me.
So let me just set the stage.
By the time that Congress decided to pass this,
landmark housing bill, which has now become law, and is supposed to make it a lot easier and faster
to construct new homes in this country. You had finished a line of reporting into the workers
who actually build those houses, and that reporting allowed you to see more clearly than most
of us that there was a little bit of a problem here, and that problem was a gap between
intention and kind of reality. Just explain that.
So if we look at the law specifically, this new law that was passed has all sorts of tools in it to get housing built, all sorts of different ways that you can encourage developers to make it easier for them to build, encourage them to want to build.
But somebody has to actually build those homes.
Right.
And we already had this labor shortage.
We've been short 300,000 workers for a long time.
And Trump has another policy, which is separate of this industry, which is.
which is to have a mass deportation policy,
and no industry is more reliant on immigrant labor than construction.
Right.
The two goals that the president has and has articulated at various points,
a cheaper housing market and a major crackdown on illegal immigration,
you're saying those are profoundly intention.
Right.
The core of the housing crisis is that we haven't built enough housing.
We really haven't built enough housing in decades.
And one of the reasons is that we don't have to be.
have enough workers to build the housing. And so labor costs are high, which makes it expensive.
And construction relies on labor and relies on immigrant labor. And Trump has been actively deporting
that population. And so Congress passed this landmark legislation that's the first time in
more than 30 years that the federal government has said, we want to build housing. At the same time,
the federal government's also saying we want to deport the immigrant workforce.
Who builds the houses?
who builds the houses.
And so you could end up with a situation
where there's all sorts of builders ready to go
and they don't have the workers to do the work.
So I wanted to know how did the construction industry
become so reliant on an immigrant workforce
so that it's now so vulnerable to losing its workers
because the country wasn't always this way.
This was not always an immigrant job.
Well, just explain what you found in your reporting
about how it came to be
that the U.S. housing industry
has become so dependent
on immigrant labor
and, as you just said,
so vulnerable to losing those workers
to a crackdown.
So construction employs
the highest share of foreign-born workers
of any industry in America.
Huh.
And to explain how we got to this point,
we usually hear one of these two stories.
We either hear that immigrants stole Americans' jobs
or we hear that immigrants,
that Americans were too lazy to do these jobs.
But these two narratives put together don't make a lot of sense.
They can't both be true.
Why not?
Well, because there's a tension in that.
So one is I don't want the job,
and the other one is I'm stealing a job you'd want.
So which one is it?
That doesn't quite add up.
So it doesn't add up to me.
And so my colleague Rob Gebeloff and I really wanted to know
why did American workers leave this industry
and why did the immigrant workers come into it?
Mm-hmm. And what did you actually find?
So what we found is the story starts in the 1970s.
And back then, homes were built almost exclusively by American workers.
There was about maybe 5% of the industry was foreign-born.
And union membership at this time was at an all-time high.
It was like 40% of all construction workers were unionized, which was like higher than other industries.
So if you were getting a house built in the U.S. in the U.S. in the
1970s, it was almost assuredly going to be built by American-born unionized workers.
Certainly for a new construction and for the larger projects. Yeah, these were union jobs.
And they were good jobs.
So union construction workers earned $1.71 for every dollar the average American worker earned.
Wow.
You had health insurance. You had a pension. You had vacations. And it was a job you didn't have to have a college degree for.
And one of the construction workers I met from that era was Matt Moore.
So are you from Orange County originally?
No, I was actually born in L.A. Count, born in Lindwood.
And he was really emblematic of the type of workers who were working in the industry at that time.
How so?
Well, he graduated from high school in Southern California in 1975.
He doesn't really know what to do with his life.
My father told me one thing when I was growing up.
Because after I graduated high school, I wanted to go to college.
And he looked at me, and he said there's two kinds of humans.
He goes, two kinds of man.
There's a man with a strong mind, man with a strong back.
God bless you with a strong back.
Go to work.
He decides to work at a parts department at a Volkswagen dealership.
And one afternoon, his high school buddy comes in and says, hey.
He goes, I just started roofing.
He goes, and it's great.
He goes, you can get $2 more an hour.
I was making $2 an hour.
And I doubled my money to start in roofing.
We went to the union shop, went to the hall, signed the paperwork, and that was it.
And he goes to the union hall.
He fills out his union card.
He gets a pair of hot boots, which are the boots you wear on a roof.
And he's up on a roof that day.
I so want to know what a pair of hot boots looks like.
I saw them.
They're just like boots, but I guess they don't melt.
So suddenly he's an apprentice, and he absolutely loves it.
He's out in the Southern California sunshine.
He's throwing up roofs from the ocean to the mountains in Orange County.
He's building tracks of homes in California.
If we were working by the coast, we brought our surfboards,
and everybody went surfing afterwards, surfed the glass off at night.
And he's going surfing in the afternoon.
What a life.
Yeah.
And he is happy as a clam.
Work would dry up.
Okay.
But it wasn't a big deal.
just go to the hall.
And they'd say, hey, who wants to go here?
And they would pull you off the list and they'd give his slip and you'd go to the next shop.
So he's getting paid well.
He's 19 years old.
And he meets a girl, as one does.
The girl I was dating, which became my wife, she looked at my bank account and said,
what are you going to do with this money?
And I said, I'd go buy me a Dodge truck.
So he's got $10,000 in the bank and he wants to buy a car.
$10,000 in the bank in 1976 by now?
That's real money.
Right.
So he's got real money.
She said, no, you're going to go buy a house.
His parents never owned a house.
So I said, okay, I'll go buy a house said.
That's amazing.
How much was it?
48,000.
He buys a house, and he's 20 years old, all from making money as a roof room.
Right.
Not old enough to drink, but old enough to buy home.
And he's only been putting on roofs for two years.
So this is quite lucrative, and it sounds like things are going pretty swimmingly for Matt.
Right.
For Matt, this is a gravy train he's on.
And in the 1970s, the unions.
had locked in really, really strong contracts, partly because of the Vietnam War, there was less
workers. Like, they had gotten these great contracts. But then you've got this period where there's
high inflation, high interest rates. Right. This is the 70s. So the late 70s. And the home builders
and corporate America decides it's time to start fighting back against unions that have been incredibly
powerful for decades. And they form a lobbying group. And one of their goals was to weaken labor
laws and to sort of break the stranglehold that unions had on industry.
And construction was in the center of this.
So they start introducing non-union crews into unionized job sites.
It happened very slowly.
What happened was a lot of non-union started coming up.
So the way this plays out in Southern California, where Matt is, is that in 1983, the
Carpenters union goes on strike, and the real heart of the strike is not about wages,
but is about whether non-union shops can come into any job where there's a carpenter union.
Got it.
They think they're going to win on this, but instead, the strike drags on for four months.
Wow.
And they're not working during this period.
They're not working during this period.
They're losing money.
They've basically underestimated how to determine the home builders would be.
Meanwhile, other local unions have gotten involved.
Because we were fighting other trades at that period
and not fighting our,
and not fighting the where we should have been fighting.
There's a lot of infighting,
and the coalition starts to break down,
and they have to make a deal.
And in the end, the unions concede to the home builders
and let non-union crews on residential sites
where there's a unionized carpenter.
Basically, they lose on the marquee issue of the strike.
itself. Exactly. But at the time, it doesn't seem like that big of a deal. Why not?
Because while they were letting non-union workers come into unionized residential projects,
the union still had a lock on the commercialized work in the construction industry.
We had so much what they called a commercial work. We had so much of it. California is building a lot,
and they're building a lot of commercial. They're building hotels. They're building hospitals. They're
building strip malls.
It was just flowing out of the cracks.
So the unions say it's fine.
We'll just go do commercial.
I brought it up more than once.
They said, oh, we had too much, don't worry about it.
There's too much commercial.
Go to work.
So if they cede some of their work in the residential sector...
They'll be okay.
They'll be okay.
The commercial will make up for the residential.
Right.
No big deal.
Okay.
Do you think it was a mistake?
The unions that turned away, didn't worry about residential?
I do. Why?
Because it eliminated a whole section of our industry.
I honestly think when we lost residential, it changed my trajectory in the industry.
Matt immediately notices a change.
The first thing he sees is he goes into the union hall where he's supposed to see his jobs,
and there's far fewer residential jobs available.
They're just less of them, and the ones that are available are a lot smaller.
They're not building 60, 80 tracks of homes.
Maybe it's 10.
That's when two gates started coming up.
We had a union gate and a non-union gate.
And when he goes to the job sites, he starts seeing two gates,
one for union crews and one for non-union crews.
Huh.
And they're keeping those workers separate.
So remember, though, at this time in the early 1980s,
both the unionized and non-unionized workers were still American-born workers.
That's just the demographics of this workforce.
That's the demographics of America at the time.
But in the early 1980s was the beginning of Reaganism, and he was very pro-business, but he was also very pro-immigrant.
He had a huge amnesty program.
And his successor, George H.W. Bush, saw an even bigger wave of immigrants.
And he expanded Reagan's amnesty programs.
And he ends up signing the Immigration Act of 1990, which is this major piece of legislation that created the TPS program, H-1B visas, a visa lottery program.
He does, you know, also add in some border protections and try to reduce illegal immigration.
But overall, this is a time where the borders are porous.
And it was not the hard border that we think of today.
So all these immigrants are looking for work.
And many of them are coming in without documentation.
And many of them also are coming in either already knowing how to build homes or they come and join family members who have already gotten jobs in construction.
And so construction becomes a natural place for immigrants to find work.
And for the American worker, these home construction jobs are becoming less appealing as non-union work grows in the sector.
And these non-union jobs don't have those good benefits.
And so Matt starts seeing the labor force changing.
Suddenly, there's more Spanish being spoken on the job sites.
A few years later, the foreman are often Spanish speaking.
I literally was working one day, and I turned around on the roof, and I happened to be the oldest guy and the whitest guy on the roof.
I wonder what happened to all the white guys.
I really did.
They all went different places.
Nobody wanted to do it anymore.
So just to be clear about the sequence of events here, home builders decide to challenge the union's hold over the construction of housing.
They say we want non-union workers.
they fight the unionized workers to get that to happen.
And as that's happening, these waves of immigrants are coming to the U.S.
and they are being introduced, especially to this non-union world of home construction,
which it sounds like is very open to hiring them.
Exactly.
It's almost like a parallel experience is happening.
Because, you know, while Matt is noticing,
that the folks who look like him on the job site are disappearing,
I spoke with a lot of immigrants who arrived during that time period,
and they tell almost a similar story to what Matt's youth was like.
So one guy I spoke with was named Mariano Martinez.
So where were you born?
Oaxaca, Mexico.
And he is also a roofer.
And he arrived in the United States.
He was 19.
He came in the late 1980s from Oaxaca, Mexico.
So you walked across the border?
And it was easy and then.
Back in the day, yeah. It was like not even half hour.
Okay. Did it cost a lot of money?
No, but it was like $110, I think.
Oh, okay.
He crosses the border with the help of a coyote.
He's initially working at a gardening center,
and he's not making very much money. He got laid off.
And like Matt, a friend tells him about roofing.
Oh, my God, quite literally, it is a parallel story.
It is a parallel story.
And so what did your friend say about roofing?
Well, he said it was a hard work, but if you like it, it's a good.
So he doesn't speak any English.
He shows up on a job site.
They put him on a roof.
He's got to rip off an old roof.
It's horrible work.
He absolutely hates it.
He thinks he's never going to do this again.
But...
I really need the job.
So I act like really know what I'm doing, but definitely then.
The money's a lot better.
And he comes back the next day anyway.
And in a few months, he's making $100 a day in cash.
So the money's good, but there's no benefits.
And then did you ever have health insurance?
No, not on that time.
No, no.
There's no retirement.
It's no paid vacation.
But it's more money than he's ever seen.
Mm-hmm.
And his friends actually tell him, you know, there is union work you can get,
but it's not worth it because it's not steady.
There's all this work in the non-union work.
There's so much to be had.
The union work, there's all these rules, and you may be out of work sometimes.
So he never even bothers to consider.
consider union work.
And he doesn't have to because the contracts no longer require it.
Right.
And for Mariano, the money is so good that by the late 90s, he's also married and he has
enough money to buy a house also in Southern California.
I'm really curious, as immigrants like Mariano are starting to take these non-union
home construction jobs, what is happening to people like Matt?
Clearly, he's looking around and the world is changing, but I presume that he's,
He's still getting plenty of union construction work?
Right.
He's not even looking at the jobs that Mariano's looking at.
So remember, he's still looking at the jobs on the union hall.
So he's not seeing Mariano's jobs.
Unionized workers have just shift increasingly into commercial work.
Right, as they kind of predicted.
As they predicted.
So it sounds like, well, what's the difference?
I mean, a job is a job.
A roof is a roof.
Commercial work, did you go up and do high rises?
Yes.
Wow, how was that?
Was that hard?
Yeah, it was hard.
Was it harder than residential roofing?
Oh, yes.
Oh, yeah.
But putting a roof on a two-story house in the Orange County suburbs is a lot different than putting a roof on a 30-story tower.
These are multi-million dollar projects.
There's a lot of pressure to get them built very fast.
You're up on steel beams.
You can get seriously injured.
It's very hard, hard work.
The hours are much longer.
Just like that.
Trying to get the trash off.
We put these big giant tubes up, and you would throw up.
And you would throw the trash in the tube from the roof.
And if it got stuck, well, you had to send the smallest guy down on a rope inside the tube.
Yeah.
And, you know, Matt tell stories of just intense physical labor and real danger with real injuries.
I've broken my back twice.
I've ripped off this arm, ripped off this wrist, ripped off this elbow.
He fell off a roof and ripped his arm off his body and had it reattached.
Showed me the scars.
My knee is completely wiped out.
I've broken both my ankles several times, broken my pelvis, fractured ribs.
But even despite how difficult the job was, Matt and other commercial roofers still had enough work and had decent salary and benefits to hang on and to build a good, solid life.
But then something happens that no one anticipated that makes...
American-born unionized workers, like Matt, feel even more left behind.
We'll be right back.
So, Rwanda, what happens that makes life and work even worse for folks like Matt?
The housing boom.
Not intuitive, but I know you're going to explain.
Right.
If you all remember in the early 2000s, there was this.
huge housing boom fueled by subprime mortgages. And Americans start building millions of new homes.
And also, they're not just building anywhere. They're building in the sunbelt. States like Arizona,
Nevada, and Texas and California, where there's a lot of immigrants because these are border
states. And many of these states are right-to-work states. So they have very, very weak union
representation. And so where the construction industry is growing is increasingly non-union,
and they have this enormous workforce that is moving across the border eager and willing to take
these jobs that are not particularly attractive to a worker who's born in the United States.
Got it. So I'm intuiting from what you're saying that this is boom time for non-union
foreign-born construction workers.
It is. And if you look at the share of foreign-born workers in the construction industry, it is just skyrocketing during this period.
But what's also happening simultaneously is union membership for both foreign-born workers and American-born workers is falling from this peak of 40 percent.
It's just falling off a cliff.
And while that's happening, wages for both union workers and non-union workers aren't keeping up with everyone else's wages.
Why?
Well, because if you think of union workers as like the standard of what you're supposed to be paid, then even if you're hiring for a non-union job, you're kind of matching that a bit.
So there's fewer workers in unions. There's fewer jobs to be had. Wages start to shrink. And then the non-union wages sort of fall in concert.
Because if the standard starts to go away, then the non-standard pay can start to fall faster.
So in some ways, union work, even if you're not unionized, keeps your standard of living.
a little bit higher for everyone.
And that standard is now falling.
And at the same time, we're seeing this huge wave of immigration that is really transforming
the construction industry.
Remember, in 1973, about 5% of construction workers were foreign-born.
Right, tiny percent.
Tiny percent.
But so during the housing boom, the percent continues to just sore.
And now in California, they make up half of all construction workers.
In some parts of the construction industry, like drywall, roofing.
they're like 80, 90 percent of the workers are now foreign-born.
And also, the unions provided huge apprenticeship programs.
Matt came in and was trained on day one.
He went through a long apprenticeship program
where he got trained to do a union roof.
When Mariano came, there was no apprenticeship program.
He was just trained by his friends.
So you don't have that apprenticeship program
that was a pipeline to train a new workforce
because the unions don't exist.
And so young people graduating from high school,
are no longer putting on their hot boots and getting on a roof.
So even before the housing boom inevitably yields to a housing crash,
that we all remember, the entire infrastructure that encourages American-born workers
to go into construction is eroding.
On top of the fact that the wage advantages of entering this industry,
are starting to evaporate as well.
Right. And all these things are happening together.
So the pathways to get into construction for an American-born worker are rapidly disappearing
because the unions are disappearing because the construction that's happening is happening in places
where there's no unions and they're building residential homes.
And instead, what's happening is a pathway for immigrants.
So Mariano arrives, his friend tells them about this job.
He brings cousins and got them jobs in construction in Southern California as immigrants.
And that becomes the new pathway into construction.
So what happens when this housing boom inevitably becomes a housing bust in 2007, 2008, 2009?
It's a complete disaster for the construction industry.
No industry faced more job losses than construction.
Almost 2 million workers lost their jobs.
That's one in four construction workers lost their jobs.
For workers like Matt, they were staring down the barrel.
of a very bleak future.
It had already become
a pretty hostile environment for them.
So Matt is 51 and he walks away.
He quits the construction industry
in the middle of the housing crisis.
He retires.
He gets his pension and he walks away.
And he is one of millions of workers
who did the same thing.
And so as the industry starts to turn again
and starts to rebuild,
it never reaches the levels it did in 2000s,
which is what is sort of setting us up,
for where we are today.
Home builders are not building at scale.
They're not building the number of houses Americans need.
And there's a labor force that was just never recovered.
We're short 300,000 workers because they left and they retired and they didn't come back.
And we don't have the pipeline of new, young American-born workers to fill those jobs.
So now we have a workforce that is incredibly dependent on the immigrant workers who have been here
and have been working and building homes for years in this country.
And they're being deported.
They're being deported from job sites,
and they're being deported from home depots,
and they're being deported from their homes.
And if they aren't being deported, they're afraid to come to work.
It can't have escaped the awareness of the president and those around him
that at this moment, when America desperately needs a lot more housing
and faces a shortage of workers to build it,
that this deportation campaign is at odds with the goal of getting more housing and more affordable
housing. And I wonder if the Trump administration assumed, believed that if it was deporting
all these foreign-born workers who were building these houses, that it might bring the American-born
workforce back somehow? Yeah, I think that is the vision, is that wages will rise because now
you'll have to pay them again the good wages that you once had.
I think that's J.D. Vance's argument for sure.
Home builders will have to pay more, and American workers will come and take these jobs.
And that the problem is, again, that immigrants have taken their jobs.
And if you remove the immigrants from the equation, the Americans will fill the void.
Is there any evidence that that's starting to happen?
There's actually evidence that it's not.
So researchers found that in communities where there was a high-level deportation, employment dropped for immigrant workers.
But here's what's kind of surprising.
Employment also fell for American-born workers.
Huh.
And what does the study say is the causality there?
Why?
Well, you would think that contractors would raise wages because they're short on workers.
But that's not really the way the industry works.
American-born workers and foreign-born workers aren't evenly split across the industry.
You have a concentration of foreign-born workers who maybe build the foundations.
So let's say your crew that builds a foundation doesn't show up.
because they've all been deported
or they're afraid to go to work.
So you don't build the foundation.
So then when you call in the carpenter...
They're like, what am I supposed to build on?
There's no foundation.
So you don't need the carpenter.
So you just don't hire him.
You know, in my reporting,
I spoke with a number of contractors
who said jobs that were taking three months to build,
now take five months to build
because there's just fewer workers
to get each stage of the project done.
And they're not paying their workers any more money.
They're just taking longer to get the job done.
And this housing bill,
doesn't address the labor force. It doesn't provide a pathway to a trade school or any requirements
to hire unionized labor. So it provides no avenues to expand an American-born workforce.
There is one place in the bill that does speak to a potential future, and that is the factory build
housing. So the bill makes the first major changes to manufactured housing, which means that now we can
build lots of different types of factory build housing. That kind of housing, we're
requires less labor. You don't need as many workers. I'm not sure if that's an upside, but...
It's an upside for housing, but not for construction workers. Exactly. So, Rhonda, I want to end by
returning to where we began this conversation, which is with these prevailing narratives around
why the U.S. home construction industry became so reliant on foreign bond workers. One of those
myths is that foreign workers took those jobs from Americans. The other myth is that the American
workers decided they didn't want to do those jobs anymore.
But obviously, it's much more complicated than those simple stories.
Yes, and I think it's a provocative thing to say.
But what we learned through the reporting is that there's sort of elements of truth in both these threads.
Yes, immigrants replaced Americans in the jobs they used to hold, right?
But it was because they had an opportunity to do so where they couldn't before.
The government allowed them in.
and the unions no longer had a lock on the jobs.
And businesses wanted to hire them, and they made a choice to do that.
Right.
They wanted this cheaper labor that was non-union.
They pushed for it, and the immigrants presented themselves as that cheaper labor.
Exactly.
So you had this partnership between government and business to really decide together to erode what was a really solid American job.
And as young Americans,
born workers entered the workforce during this period, they looked at this backbreaking manual labor
that maybe their fathers had done. And it didn't feel worth it to them. There were other
opportunities where the wages were higher, where the protections were safer, where there were health
benefits, where maybe there was air conditioning in an office. And the industry no longer appealed to a
new generation of American-born workers.
And in its place, it opened an opportunity for a generation of people coming to this country
looking for work.
But they didn't exactly take jobs from people who wanted them anymore.
I mean, one of the things that strikes me is that almost everyone in the story you have told
here did act in a pretty economically rational way, right?
U.S.-born workers started to walk away from an industry when the work became less lucrative.
Immigrant workers still flocked to it because it was lucrative enough for them.
And builders sought cheaper and cheaper labor in a system that didn't require them to work with just unionized workers.
So in a system where everyone's acting rationally, and we end up in a place where there's more and more form,
born-born workers at the center of the industry,
and then the government decides that a lot of those workers
need to leave the country,
and we have a huge housing shortage
and not enough workers to build.
In that scenario, where lots of people have been acting naturally
and it's not working, it feels like the only solution
is for something unnatural to happen,
and I wonder what you, as someone quite expert in this area,
think that perhaps unnatural thing now needs.
needs to be, what is going to fix the American housing crisis if there aren't enough American
born workers who want to do the work? And increasingly, there are foreign born workers who are
being asked to leave. I mean, one option, obviously, is to rethink the deportation policy.
Another option is to really have meaningful training programs. If it is a priority for this
administration to have a domestic workforce, then there needs to be quality training programs
and quality wages for workers across the board. You need to sort of decide to have a policy
that would actually rebuild the ranks of the workforce. And absent that, you're just sort of
haphazardly removing an already fragile workforce that just makes it harder to get the job done.
Well, Rhonda, thank you very much.
You're welcome.
We'll be right back.
Here's what else you need to another day.
The governor of New Jersey, Democrat Mikey Sherrill, said that about 400 non-citizens voted in the state.
After they were improperly registered in 2023 and 2024, the voting was the result of a software error at the New Jersey Department of Motor Vehicles, which put more than that.
6,000 non-citizens on the voter rolls even after they had disclosed their immigration status.
New Jersey said that the voting had no impact on any elections and that all of the non-citizens
have been removed from the state's voter rolls.
And we've never seen an outbreak this large for this parasite in the U.S.
As cases of cyclospora surge across the United States, inflicting
diarrhea on thousands of people. My colleague, Alice Callahan, has been looking into the central
question raised by the outbreak. For cyclospora, the parasite only survives in humans,
so as far as we know, it has to come from human feces. How did a parasite that only grows in the
human gut somehow get into our food system on such a large scale? So usually what that means is
There's a situation on farms where their septic system maybe has a leak in it or they have outhouses next to the field and somehow the waste gets into the water supply that's then used to irrigate the crop.
So far, government agencies have linked the current outbreak to iceberg lettuce grown in Mexico that a company called Taylor Farms supplied to Taco Bell location.
in multiple states. Taylor Farms has now recalled iceberg lettuce from 27 states,
and the U.S. government is stepping up its screening of lettuce coming from Mexico.
That's another thing about this bug is that alcohol-based tan sanitizers don't work to kill it,
so you really need soap and water and full hand washing to get rid of it.
Today's episode was produced by Nina Feldman and Chris Benderiv, with help from Stella Tan,
and Shannon Lynn.
It was edited by Lisa Chow
and contains music by
Marion Lazzano, Diane Wong,
and Dan Powell.
Our theme music is by Wonderly.
This episode was engineered by Chris Wood.
Special thanks to Robert Gebeloff.
That's it for the daily.
I'm Michael Bobaro.
See you tomorrow.
