As widespread ICE raids have swept up hundreds of people over the past two weeks, it’s not just immigrants getting caught in the crackdown. Over the past few months, major Fortune 500 companies have warned about the potential for Trump’s immigration policies to impact their businesses.
Fortune reviewed statements from large publicly traded companies and found that consumer-facing Fortune 500 giants including Walmart, Ross, Keurig Dr Pepper, and Constellation, which owns beer brands including Corona, Modelo, and Pacifico, have all commented about the impact that immigration could have on their business.
“Roughly half our business is in the Hispanic community,” William A. Newlands, CEO of Constellation, which owns beer brands Corona, Modelo and Pacifico, said at a June presentation at the dbAccess Global Consumer Conference. “The things that we’ve seen with that consumer is there’s a lot of concern about inflation. There’s a lot of concern about the whole immigration question…where it’s playing itself out is in behaviors that are sort of anti our business, which is they’re going out to eat less.”
Walmart was more muted on the topic, but connected changes in immigration policy to business consequences. “We were able to detect some other changes potentially related to maybe negative consumer sentiment around looming tariffs, immigration noise. And we think that has some impact on our business,” said VP and CFO John David Rainey at a company conference presentation in June.
Timothy P. Cofer, CEO of Keurig Dr Pepper, said on an earnings call in April that changes in shopping trends due to immigration were not “moving the needle yet,” but characterized it as something the company was keeping an eye on.
“The Hispanic consumer is the second largest demographic group here in the U.S. and accounts for a meaningful percentage of our business and broader CPG purchases,” he said. He added that the company had seen “softening trends among Hispanic consumers.”
While those companies are thinking about consumer spending habits, building and construction companies are dealing with the labor side of the business equation. Sherwin Williams, Prologis, and Builder FirstSource, for instance, have all made public statements about how immigration could potentially impact their business.
In a January earnings call, the CEO of real estate and supply chain company Prologis, Hamid Moghadam, said that when it came to Southern California, he believed that there were two issues that the market was not focused on.
“One is this whole discussion about immigration and its impact on labor supply and the impact of that on construction costs; and secondly, the pressure that the rebuilding efforts are going to put on material supplies and labor,” he said. “I think all of those things are going to drive replacement costs significantly higher.”
Heidi G. Petz Chairman, CEO of Sherwin Williams, said on an earnings call in April that “immigration and labor [issues] are not new for us. We’re continuing to focus on our value proposition here, which is simply to help these crews get on and off of job sites faster. So helping to solve for productivity is at the core of what we’re trying to do with this segment and all segments.”
After saying that his company would be advantaged against its competitors if immigration were to tighten, Peter M. Jackson, the CEO of Builders FirstSource, a manufacturer and supplier of building material, warned on a February earnings call about what kind of effect that tightening would have on the labor force.
“The downside is we still think net-net, any severe impact or radical impact on the labor force would be bad for the industry and bad for affordability, which is bad for starts, and we don’t like it,” he said. “So we think the trend is there. We think we’re ready. We think we’re going to win. But we sure hope that there is some thoughtfulness around how it’s executed in the market, both in tariffs and in immigration.”
Richard Camp, the CEO of Camden Property Trust, a real estate investment firm, said at a company conference presentation in March that along with the end of a supply boom, labor shortages due to immigration were one factor pushing construction costs up.
“The math for merchant builder development today is very, very difficult, given the more than doubling of the cost of capital, construction cost has continued to go up and not down, especially when you think about labor shortages and labor issues relative to immigration issues and tariffs that are on the horizon today.”
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
