Following the economic and human devastation of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, it was thousands of immigrant workers—documented and undocumented—who stepped in to help rebuild the shattered city of New Orleans. By 2015, NPR found that New Orleans’s Latino population had nearly doubled since Katrina, with these new communities building their own homes, businesses, and lives in the city.

Immigrant workers in Texas again seem poised to step in to help rebuild Houston following the devastation of Harvey—but it’s Donald Trump and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s policies that may instead exacerbate Harvey’s destruction. As America’s Voice notes, “massive cleanup, demolition, and construction will require not only financial resources, but an experienced workforce—a workforce typically derived of immigrant workers.” And it’s Trump’s immoral mass deportation force and Abbott’s now-stalled “show me your papers” law that are targeting this population: Daniel Gross writes:

In the aftermath of natural disasters, first responders and recovery crews flood the zone on a temporary basis. But reconstruction, cleanup, and recovery requires many thousands of workers who can stay for many months or more. FEMA Administrator Brock Long told CNN that “FEMA is going to be there for years.” Houston will require a surge of employment—tens of thousands of people. It will have to find places for them to live, since so much of the housing stock is damaged. And it will likely have to pay them above-market wages, because it will need to lure them away from existing jobs. And given the Trump administration’s hostility to Latinos and desire to ramp up deportations, it’s unlikely that what worked in previous disasters will work again. Back in 2007, the Washington Post reported on a Tulane and University of California, Berkeley, study that found some 100,000 Hispanic workers thronged into the Gulf Coast region in the wake of Katrina, many of them undocumented. Houston will need a similar migration for it to recover. In 2017, from where will those workers come?

The ingenuity of immigrants has always been key in the recovery of cities but through racist, anti-immigrant sentiment and policies, the U.S. is cutting off its nose to spite its own face. “All over the United States, in Colorado, in Nebraska, and elsewhere, construction companies have been complaining that they can’t find enough labor to do their job,” notes Gross. In Dallas last fall, “the King of Texas Roofing Co. says it has turned down $20 million worth of projects in the past two years because it doesn’t have enough workers.”