AUSTIN (KXAN) — Within his first week in office, President Donald Trump has vowed to intensify deportation efforts nationwide and assist Texas Gov. Greg Abbott in tightening the southern border. Working class industries, like farming and construction, which heavily rely on migrant labor for productivity, warn that deportations could have far-reaching impacts that affect Texans beyond these sectors.
“You hear anything from 50% to 70%,” said Russell Boening, President of Texas Farm Bureau, on the amount of undocumented workers on Texas farms.
According to Boening, the issue of the undocumented workforce is a result of high consumer demand and inefficient legal immigrant labor programs. While he supports stricter border controls, he wants to separate immigration from labor, and work to get better-organized temporary work programs.
“We need to secure borders,” said Boening. “We need to make sure we have legal immigration and we need to make sure that the industries that rely on immigrant labor can access a legal immigrant labor source.”
Boening is referring to programs like the H-2A that allows U.S. employers to temporarily fill agricultural jobs. However, H-2A’s only allow for seasonal employees, which are noncompetitive in Texas’ year-long market, and offer a limited number of spots that don’t account for a large part of the agricultural industry.
“If the Texas producer and the American producer does not have the labor source to produce those products, either one of two things: you’re either not going to have that product, or it’s going to have to be imported,” Boening said.
Sid Miller, the Texas Agricultural Commissioner, said that the deportation threats won’t have as much of an impact on the agricultural industry as people think.
“I don’t believe we work near as many illegals as we used to in years past,” Miller said. “We’re kind of in the age of technology now, so we’ve eliminated a lot of the hand labor that we used to require.”
In addition to a growing reliance on technology in the industry, Miller said that undocumented labor poses a risk for farmers. He believes this danger discourages many from using illegal labor in their production.
“Labor’s hard to come by, and we don’t want to use illegal labor because we don’t want to wake up and have our workforce taken away from us,” Miller said.
For Brian Turmail, spokesperson for the Associated General Contractors of America, this begs the question — what is the scope of the deportations?
“Most frequently they talk about really targeting three types of undocumented people in the country,” Turmail said. “One is folks who are undocumented and are illegal immigrants who are engaged in additional criminal activity. Two is undocumented people who are a threat to national security, and three, undocumented people who have been ordered by a judge to leave the country.”
Turmail said that 80% of construction firms around the country are already having a hard time finding qualified workers to hire. If deportations stretch beyond these current indications laid out, Turmail warns that there could be some potential impacts on the economy.
“If we shrink our workforce even more, then contractors are going to do two things,” Turmail said. One, they’re not going to bid on projects if they don’t think they have enough people to do the work. So, if you’re trying to build a new school, that means fewer firms will be bidding on that school project, and then when they put in that bid, they’re going to charge more because it’s going to cost them more because it will take longer to bid the project.”
Turmail said there are policy solutions that could bring legal immigrant workers and U.S. citizens back to the construction market. One of which would be to increase investments in career and technical education to develop a larger, more skilled workforce.
“Let’s expose our young workers from the United States to career opportunities in construction and give them the skills they need to be successful, but that’s going to take time,” Turmail said.
Another path would be to improve work authorization programs so that construction can have access to a larger number of qualified workers with assured legal status. Similar to the agriculture industry, construction has the H-2B program where U.S. employers can find temporary workers for nonagricultural related jobs.
“We need timely, temporary, taxable, fully lawful work authorization programs where we can bring folks into the country, know where they are, know where they’re from, know their background, tax them,” Turmail said.
Boening agrees that something similar would help ease tensions in the agricultural industry as well.
“As we work through the immigration issue, let’s make sure that we’re working on a guest worker program that’s more user-friendly,” Boening said.
Miller added that the Texas Agricultural Commission will work over the next few weeks to survey agricultural operations to get a more accurate count of undocumented workers and go from there.
