(Bloomberg) -- Miami condo developer Jorge Perez said President-elect Donald Trump’s proposed mass deportations risk leading to a “police state” while also fueling new increases in consumer prices.
“Are you going to make people of color have a card that says, ‘I’m a legal resident’?” Perez said at a Bloomberg New Voices event in Miami. “When you think of this, the consequences can be so, so atrocious.”
Perez, an immigrant of Cuban descent who founded Related Group, was a close partner and friend of Trump’s before the incoming president entered politics. Trump wrote the introduction to a book that Perez published in 2008 and asked him to serve in his first administration. Trump also tried to enlist Perez’s help to build a wall on the US’s southern border.
The Miami billionaire declined both offers, calling the wall “idiotic” and saying he was “dramatically opposed” to Trump’s immigration and trade policies. Perez has remained a Democratic donor and criticized Florida’s sharp turn to the right.
Perez said Related Group has already felt the strain from Florida’s tougher approach on immigration after Governor Ron DeSantis ushered in one of the most restrictive policies in the country last year. A Related Group project in Jacksonville, in northern Florida, lost 80% of its workers, who crossed states lines to nearby Georgia, Perez said.
He argued that immigration should be regulated, saying that it’s a “difficult line” to balance who is allowed to stay and who isn’t.
“Immigrants fill jobs Americans don’t want to do,” he said. Perez, 75, was born in Argentina to Cuban parents and immigrated to the US more than 50 years ago.
Perez founded Related Group in 1979 and was a major player in building out the Miami skyline, earning him the nickname “condo king.” The company is one of Florida’s largest residential developers, with 100,000 residential units built and managed and over $50 billion in sales.
Real estate development isn’t the only industry worried about a labor squeeze. Last year, Florida’s powerful hospitality industry drafted legislation that would allow the hiring of undocumented immigrants under certain circumstances, according to reporting from Orlando Weekly.
Without immigrants in the US labor force, employers would have to pay higher salaries that would be passed down to consumers and result in “huge” price increases, Perez said.
He also warned about price pressures stemming from increased tariffs, which Trump has threatened to raise.
“You can’t make televisions in America unless you want to pay $10,000 for every TV set,” Perez said. “There has to be a free trade.”
(Updates with details on Related Group in eighth paragraph.)
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