There are around 600,000 undocumented folks here in the Houston area. Deporting them all would destroy the city.
Posted by
Qale (aka Qale)
Nov 20 '24, 14:06
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The American Immigration Council, a national immigration research and advocacy group, has estimated that a one-time mass deportation operation — a logistically unlikely scenario given the roughly 11 million immigrants believed to be living in the United States illegally — would cost at least $315 billion. If the government deported about a million people a year over the course of the next decade, as some GOP leaders have suggested, the AIC estimated those costs would balloon to nearly $1 trillion.
While the brunt of those direct costs would be born by the federal government, a mass deportation would undoubtedly send shock waves through the economy in the Houston area, which is believed to be home to nearly 600,000 immigrants living here illegally, and leave over 300,000 children without at least one of their parents.
Immigrants living in the Houston area illegally made up about 10% of all workers in 2019, according to the Migration Policy Institute, but are significantly over-represented in certain industries, such as construction.
The Houston area construction industry is believed to be employing over 100,000 immigrants living here illegally, comprising nearly one-third of the industry's total workforce, according to a recent AIC report published in partnership with several Houston and Texas trade groups. Immigrants of all legal statuses together make up over half the area's construction workers.
If workers here illegally were to be deported, contractors would likely find it difficult to fill the vacated positions, as fewer American-born young people opt for jobs in blue-collar trades, according to a 2017 study by the National Association of Home Builders. The ensuing labor shortage would likely stall work, drive up housing costs and lengthen building times on public and private projects.
In a statement published alongside the AIC report, Greater Houston Builders Association President Matthew Reibenstein said: "The future of housing attainability in our region depends on a consistent and reliable flow of entrepreneurs and workers," referring to immigrants of all legal statuses.
“We need a skilled, entrepreneurially spirited workforce within our community, and the immigrant workforce has long played a vital role in meeting housing demands as skilled craftsmen, laborers, and contractors in the home building industry," Reibenstein said.
Chelsie Kramer, Texas organizer for the AIC, pointed out that recovery times after a natural disaster could be extended even longer without immigrant workers conducting repairs, as they did after Hurricane Harvey.
"If we suddenly snap our fingers and 30% of workers are gone, I can't imagine what the next natural disaster is going to look like," said Kramer.
The 1.8 million immigrants living in Texas illegally contributed roughly $4.9 billion in state and local taxes in 2022, the most revenue collected in any state besides California, according to a recent report from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy.
In the Houston area, those 577,000 immigrants paid about $1.46 billion in state and local taxes, according to ITEP researchers. Those contributions, for perspective, are equivalent to 20% of this year's Houston city budget, and greater than the $1 billion bond that taxpayers will pay off over the next 25 to 30 years in the agreement reached with the firefighters' union earlier this summer.
"The state and local tax contributions of undocumented immigrants in Texas are almost $5 billion, and localities are already oftentimes strapped for cash," said Marco Guzman, a senior policy analyst at ITEP. "Texas does not have an income tax, so finding sources of revenue does not come easy — you have to increase fees and fines, rely on the property tax, so there would be a noticeable impact to state and local economies and coffers (if undocumented immigrants were removed)."
The majority of immigrants' contributions to public finances in Texas come in the form of sales and excise taxes, which amount to about $2.8 billion in payments. The rest of the tax payments largely come from property taxes on owned or rented homes and businesses.
On a national level, roughly one-third of tax contributions from immigrants living in the country illegally go toward programs that they are prohibited from accessing due to their immigration status, such as Social Security, Medicare and unemployment insurance, Guzman said.
The deportation of at least 11 million immigrants across the country would likely lead to worker shortages in key industries such as agriculture, where immigrants here illegally are over-represented, leading to disruptions in supply chains that would raise prices for the average consumer, including in Houston and Texas.
Pandemic-related immigration restrictions imposed by the Trump administration were among the factors that led to rising inflation in 2021 and 2022, according to the Federal Reserve. Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said in 2022 that "a plunge in net migration and a surge in deaths during the pandemic" accounted for roughly 1.5 million vacant jobs, which made it difficult for businesses to keep up with "abnormally strong demand."
"Looking back, we can see that a significant and persistent labor supply shortfall opened up during the pandemic," Powell said.
In Houston, shoppers would likely feel the sting of inflation in the housing market and at the grocery store. Roughly half of hired crop farmworkers in the U.S. do not have legal immigration status, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, meaning the agricultural industry would be hit particularly hard by mass deportations.
"Especially considering the amount of produce that absolutely has to be picked by hand in the state of Texas ... if we're forcing immigrants into hiding and making sure they can't access these jobs, produce prices are going to up for Texans and Americans," Kramer said.
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