Clear signals President-elect Donald Trump plans to make good on his campaign pledge to deport millions of undocumented immigrants in his second term has sparked concerns among some in Texas’ business and economic sectors who say mass deportations could upend some of the state’s major industries that rely on undocumented labor, chief among them the booming construction industry.
“It would devastate our industry, we wouldn’t finish our highways, we wouldn’t finish our schools,” said Stan Marek, CEO of Marek, a Houston-based commercial and residential construction giant. “Housing would disappear. I think they’d lose half their labor.”
Talk of a mass round up comes as Texas is booming. Texas cities regularly appear on lists of the country’s fastest growing communities, and construction cranes and workers donning safety vests are common sites in most major cities.
That Texas relies on undocumented labor is one of the state’s open secrets, despite Republicans’ tough-on-immigration stances.
In 2022, more than a half million immigrants worked in the construction industry, according to a report by the American Immigration Council and Texans for Economic Growth. Nearly 60% of that workforce was undocumented.
“The state needs to leverage both U.S.-born and immigrant talent to fill construction jobs that power the Texas economy,” the report notes.
“It’s not remotely practical to round up and deport everybody,” said economist Ray Perryman, the president and CEO of the Waco-based Perryman Group.
He said the reason Texans need so many immigrant laborers is simple: The Texas workforce isn’t large enough to keep pace with its growth. Like Marek, he worries that a massive roundup could have a chilling effect on the Texas economy.
“And, we simply don’t have an economic structure that can sustain that. There are more undocumented people working in Texas right now than there are unemployed people in Texas,” Perryman said.
A sustainable workforce, he added, will be harder to come by as the population wanes.
“The bottom line is if you just look across the country, our birth rates are at historic lows, our population growth is at historic lows, we just simply are not making enough people, so to speak, to sustain our economy,” Perryman said.
