Maybe do more than just worry about what mass deportations might do to Texas?

Just a thought.

In Texas, undocumented people have built apartment complexes and skyscrapers that changed skylines. They have picked fruits and vegetable in fields, cooked in restaurant kitchens, cleaned hospitals and started small businesses. They have become stitched into communities from El Paso to Beaumont.

Now some of their employers worry that many of them could get deported when President-elect Donald Trump returns to the White House.

A number of Texas business leaders interviewed by the Tribune describe a sort of wait-and-see apprehension about Trump’s pledged mass deportations. The impact any deportations could have on Texas’ economy will largely depend on the specifics of what Trump does, business leaders say. But those specifics are not yet clear.

“I don’t think any of us know exactly what’s coming as far as policy — we’ve heard all of the rhetoric,” said Andrea Coker of the North Texas Commission, a nonprofit that promotes the Dallas region.

The owner of a Rio Grande Valley agriculture import-export business who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of legal repercussions said four of his seven employees are undocumented. A majority of similar businesses would take a hit should the government deport undocumented people en masse, the business owner estimated.

Without undocumented workers, he said, “We wouldn’t survive and we’ll have to close.”

[…]

Texas’ state leaders are eager to help Trump, and the state is a target-rich environment. The Pew Research Center estimates that unauthorized immigrants make up approximately 8% of the state’s workforce, including a large presence in the hospitality, restaurants, energy and construction industries.

The state comptroller’s office did a study in 2006 to find out how the state economy would look without the estimated 1.4 million undocumented immigrants living in Texas in 2005. The study said their absence would cost the state about $17.7 billion in gross state product — a measure of the value of goods and services produced in Texas. The state has not updated the study since; analysis replicated by universities and think tanks have reached similar conclusions that undocumented Texans contribute more to the economy than they cost the state.

“We know that immigrants are punching above their weight,” said Jaime Puente, director of economic opportunity at the left-leaning nonprofit Every Texan. “We are looking at a significant loss of productivity.”

Among major Texas industries, construction has the highest proportion of undocumented workers, according to the Pew Research Center. Mass deportations could disrupt the state’s homebuilding industry in the midst of a housing shortage, which could lead to fewer new homes built and even higher home prices and rents, according to housing experts.

A recent paper from researchers at the University of Utah and the University of Wisconsin-Madison explored the aftermath of the deportation of more than 300,000 undocumented immigrants nationwide from 2008 to 2013. In the places where deportations happened, the study found, homebuilding contracted because the local construction workforce shrank and home prices rose. The researchers discovered that other construction workers lost work too because homebuilders cut back on new developments.

“We really find ourselves in the situation where anything that kind of disrupts the process of [adding] housing supply would be detrimental to the housing affordability crisis,” said Riordan Frost, a senior research analyst at Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies.

Seems like a bad thing to happen if one is trying to deal with an affordable housing problem. Maybe some of these “business leaders”, who I’m sure were well aware of what was being said during this past campaign, ought to take a minute and reflect on their past behavior vis-a-vis voting and making campaign contributions. Maybe doing some vocal public advocacy for not wrecking the state economy and destroying thousands of families, and maybe picking up the phone and calling those state leaders who are eager to do exactly that, would be a good idea as well.

I drafted this before Inauguration Day, and sure enough, here we are, with more to come. Now farmers are beginning to worry, because of course they couldn’t see this coming from a million miles away like the rest of us could. I dunno, man. Those of us who oppose Trump and his lackeys have been warning about this for years. Those of you who ignored all that and supported him anyway, you figure it out now.

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One Response to Maybe do more than just worry about what mass deportations might do to Texas?

  1. Meme says:

    They have no intentions of deporting everyone who is here without authorization; they probably will do as good as they did after four years of Trump, making Mexico-America more blue-eyed. From the Cato Institute;

    “President Trump entered the White House with the goal of reducing legal immigration by 63 percent. Trump was wildly successful in reducing legal immigration. By November 2020, the Trump administration reduced the number of green cards issued to people abroad by at least 418,453 and the number of non-immigrant visas by at least 11,178,668 during his first term through November 2020. President Trump also entered the White House with the goal of eliminating illegal immigration but Trump oversaw a virtual collapse in interior immigration enforcement and the stabilization of the illegal immigrant population. Thus, Trump succeeded in reduce legal immigration and failed to eliminate illegal immigration.”

    It is much cheaper to make E-Verify mandatory for all employers, with severe penalties for violations by employers. That was supposed to happen under Reagan.

    Even national IDs were considered, but the right-wingers didn’t trust the federal government.

    Things will be harder for those that DPS and other racist police departments target, the people who look “Mexican,” which includes Native Americans, like the family that was pulled over for failing to signal a lane change.

    Like the 50s and early 60s when we had to travel with birth certificates.

    Hitler studied our Jim Crow laws to do what he did in Germany.

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