Workforce realities require an update of U.S. temporary guestworker program.

Reforming the temporary-worker program would be a step toward immigration reform.

What’s infuriating about the chaos and cruelty the Trump administration has unleashed on the nation’s immigrant communities — aided and abetted in this state by Gov. Greg Abbott and his Republican cohorts — is how unnecessary it all is, how divorced from reality.

Granted, Donald Trump ran and won by appealing to fear, bigotry and xenophobia. That’s political reality. But now that he’s president, what about reality? Instead of sending agents of Immigration and Customs Enforcement into immigrant communities to ferret out individuals who might lack the necessary papers, instead of dragooning local law enforcement into doing ICE’s work, instead of starting to work on a monstrously expensive borderwall prototype, why not truly engage the immigration problem? Why not engage reality?

The answer, we suspect, is because it’s easier and more satisfying for a certain strain of politician to scapegoat. Comprehensive immigration reform is hard, maybe not as hard as health care reform, but, like health care, it takes effort and information, good will and compromise.

Congress came close four years ago, when the Senate passed a bipartisan reform package. The effort foundered in the House when a rump group of ideologues refused to consider any path to citizenship for those already in the United States illegally.

So, back to reality. Nothing as complicated and as controversial as comprehensive immigration reform is going to get anywhere during a Trump presidency, but what about bits and pieces? If comprehensive reform is un puente too far, is it possible for lawmakers to engage with individual immigration issues that lend themselves to relatively simple solutions?

We offer one example: Drive through any Houston neighborhood where newhome construction is going on, and it’s immediately obvious who’s putting up the dry wall, laying down the tile floors, painting the interiors. High on the scaffolding doing stonework or down on the ground planting shrubbery, they’re skilled laborers, often brown-skinned, who may or may not be natives of this country, who may or may not have the necessary papers.

The National Association of Homebuilders will tell you that foreign-born workers make up close to 40 percent of the construction workforce in Texas. Trump’s bombast about border walls and deportation, coupled with ICE’s oft-expressed enthusiasm for going after people, is scaring workers out of the labor force, and that’s driving up home prices. Relatively inexpensive housing in this state has long enticed business and industry — employers, in other words — but if a dearth of construction workers drives up housing costs, that makes us no different from any other state.

Javier Palomarez, president and CEO of the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce and now an adviser to Trump, professes to understand the problem. He hopes the president’s business-friendly Cabinet understands, as well.

It’s economic reality, in other words. The simple solution involves reforming the H-2B visa program, the program designed to provide a steady, reliable flow of foreign workers when a temporary workforce is needed. The program is flawed, to be sure, in part because guest workers need the same labor and employment law protections that other employees have, and those protections are sometimes ignored.

Deep in the lawmaking weeds, both Democrats and Republicans in Congress have proposed various reforms to the H2-B programs, not to mention Trump’s announced intention to cut them way back. For example, U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., has pushed for an agricultural worker program focused not only on admitting new workers but also on identifying workers who have been in the country illegally and granting them legal status. A Republican-sponsored bill introduced in May would allow state governments to craft their own temporary worker programs.

Whatever the merits, those are sincere, good-faith efforts to craft solutions to knotty immigration problems. Compare those efforts to the cruel and costly ICE crusade that Chronicle reporter Olivia Tallett has written about in her series “Out of Time.” Instead of trying to deport good, law-abiding residents like Juan Rodriguez, the man profiled in Tallet’s series, this nation of immigrants could be trying to accommodate their needs — and ours. Although it’s hard to imagine five months into the Trump administration, someday, yet again, that could be reality.

Rodriguez, by the way, received a temporary reprieve late last month. We suspect the nation will survive.