SALT LAKE CITY — A month before President Donald Trump officially took office on Jan. 20, Utah Gov. Spencer Cox reinforced the state’s plans to aid the Trump administration in deporting undocumented immigrants living in the country en masse.

“If you commit crimes — I don’t care if they’re violent or nonviolent — you should not be here. You shouldn’t have been here in the first place,” Cox said during his monthly news conference in December.

Trump himself has championed mass deportation efforts as a way to increase jobs for U.S. citizens and reduce housing costs, among other things.

Simultaneously, Cox has touted the state’s goal of building 35,000 starter homes before he leaves office in four years as a crucial step toward ensuring Utah is able to handle its growth and remain an attractive destination for people to come and plant their roots.

However, a study led by a University of Utah professor suggests these two goals could directly contradict each other, with the study showing increased immigration enforcement would slow down construction, increase home prices and could even reduce job opportunities for U.S. citizens.

“We’re able to show that when you increase immigration enforcement, you do in fact generate a reduction in the number of individuals who are supplying labor to the construction industry in a given county,” said Troup Howard, an assistant professor in the University of Utah School of Business’ Marriner S. Eccles Institute for Economics and Quantitative Analysis, and co-author of the study.

“We show that those reductions in workforce are associated with a large decline in homebuilding.”

Co-authored by economists Mengqi Wang of Amherst College and Dayin Zhang of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the study was published on the Social Science Research Network last year. While it remains under peer review for publication in a journal, the study has been cited widely by national media outlets.

This decline in homebuilding Howard mentioned would lead to higher home prices, even for existing housing, potentially exacerbating the housing affordability crisis in places like Utah and beyond. While deportations would likely free up some residential space, it doesn’t come close to offsetting the effect of reduced construction, according to the study.

To conduct the study, Howard and other economists took a look at what happened in counties across the U.S. after they implemented the federal Secure Communities program, which stepped up immigration enforcement beginning in 2008 and eventually covered every county by 2013.

With counties implementing the program at different times over a four-year period, Howard’s team was able to draw causal connections between deportations and slowdowns in residential construction.

“Because the way Secure Communities turns on doesn’t have anything to do with whether or not it’s attractive to build homes in some particular region — it has to do with where DHS (Department of Homeland Security) decides to green light the program next,” Howard said. “We can compare areas that launch with areas that haven’t yet launched this increased enforcement, and done properly, we’re able to sweep out all the background factors … that are driving housing production decisions, and we can isolate the impact of the immigration enforcement.”

Through the study, Howard and his team found that increasing immigration enforcement causes the average county to miss out on about a year’s worth of homebuilding over the four-year period after implementation of the program.

While the study found that deporting more undocumented immigrants won’t do much to increase the housing supply, it also doesn’t increase employment opportunities for U.S. citizens.

In fact, it found that many construction positions opened up by a deported employee were not filled by an American worker, particularly in lower skilled occupations.

“Say two lower-skilled jobs get vacated because workers are removed from the county. Roughly speaking, our results suggest that one of those jobs is going to be filled by an American, and the other one doesn’t get filled,” Howard said.

So, a net loss in the number of people willing to work in low-skilled construction jobs (day laborers, construction workers, drywall installers, etc.) that immigrants typically hold undermines the need for higher-skilled construction jobs (electricians, plumbers, elevator installers, etc.) held by U.S. citizens and undocumented workers, alike.

“We do find that this set of occupations experiences large declines in undocumented workers pursuant to Secure Communities. So, this is consistent with people being removed from the country who were working these jobs,” Howard said. “We find that there are not one-to-one replacement flows from domestic workers. We find that U.S. citizens are not taking these vacated jobs in sufficient numbers to offset the losses.”

This, Howard said, leads to a net decline in the number of people providing their labor to low-skilled jobs.

As for the relationship between low-skilled and high-skilled jobs, Howard explained it simply.

“It looks like the net losses in people willing to work in these lower-skilled occupations are inducing an overall slowdown in the construction industry,” Howard said. “The more casual way of saying that is you need someone to frame the house before you need the relatively higher skilled plumbers and electricians to come in and finish the house.”

The study can be read in its entirety here.