Some Texas business leaders worried about Trump deportations

Sign up for The Brief, The Texas Tribune’s daily newsletter that keeps readers up to speed on the most essential Texas news.

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.”

He said he hired undocumented workers because he struggled to find U.S. citizens and legal residents willing to do the grueling work.

“The people who are here legally don’t want to work here. They’d rather collect unemployment,” he said. “We’ve hired people who were documented, but they don’t last.”

In speaking about mass deportations, Trump and his incoming aides have said they will prioritize deporting people with a criminal history, while also noting that anyone who has entered the country illegally has committed a crime. Any large-scale deportation plans are sure to face legal and logistical challenges.

But 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.

Stan Marek’s Czech grandfather arrived in Houston in 1938 and began hanging sheetrock. Nearly 100 years later, Marek’s family owns a large Houston-based construction firm with roughly 1,000 employees.

“I have watched the stages of immigration,” said Marek, 77. “Eighty-five years later and our immigrants are here, and like they’ve always been, to do the work that no one else wants to do or can do.”

Marek sees a long overdue opportunity to fix a lingering mess — the country’s immigration laws. He said deportations “will be terribly expensive and terribly nonproductive” but granting widespread amnesty to undocumented people would not work either.

Marek believes giving a path to citizenship to people who arrived in the country as children and received deportation protection through the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, could help the state reduce its workforce shortage. He also believes in the creation of a similar program for adults to gain legal status — which he calls “Adult DACA” — so that they can work legally.

“It’s not just construction. Who’s picking all the fruit and all the vegetables? Who’s milking all those cows? Every job you look at all over the United States, there are immigrants,” Marek said. “We gotta have the business community step up. That’s the key because the business community, more than anybody, is responsible for the labor.”

In the oil-rich Permian Basin, mass deportations could reduce populations in cities and in turn result in closed businesses and the disappearance of sales tax dollars, said Virginia Bellew, executive director of the Permian Basin Regional Planning Commission.

“I think you’ve seen communities just waiting [to see what Trump does], don’t want to take any steps to predict, discuss, or make decisions,” Bellew said.

In Austin, a 43-year-old man who arrived from Mexico 25 years ago said his first job involved sweeping up debris at a construction site for less than $8 an hour. Today he is a foreman for a general contractor, supervising projects and coordinating crews. He asked his name not be published for fear of jeopardizing his pending residency application.

He said he is not letting himself be consumed by the fear of Trump’s promises of mass deportations. He has deep roots in Texas now. He and his wife have raised their three kids in Austin in a house they built themselves.

His kids are U.S. citizens and his wife has legal status through DACA. He’s in the process of applying for legal residency through his eldest daughter, a student at St. Edward’s University in Austin.

“I try to be a great citizen,” he said in Spanish. “[Trump] can not deport everyone because there are so many of us who are indispensable to this country.”

Disclosure: Every Texan and the North Texas Commission have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune’s journalism. Find a complete list of them here.