Border politics has GOP leaders at odds with employers

HOUSTON – The Houston Chronicle reports that from citrus farms in South Texas to tech offices in Austin and construction sites in Houston, much of the Texas economy runs on immigrant labor. Immigrants make up 24% of Houston’s population and 11% of the overall state’s population, more than any state except California, according to estimates by the nonprofits Migration Policy Center and the American Immigration Council. And with the Texas economy booming and the unemployment rate near historic lows, businesses across the spectrum are eager to expand foreign worker programs get many more immigrants to come to the Lone Star state. “We need labor,” said Glenn Hamer, president of the Texas Business Association, the state’s largest business lobbyist. “We have more jobs open than people to fill them. Every unemployed person could get a job and we’d still hundreds of thousands of jobs open. The best and brightest people on the world want to come here and contribute, and we need them.”

But that line of thinking is increasingly out of step with the state’s Republican leadership, who after a long history of expanding legal pathways for immigrants to work in the United States are increasingly silent on the issue or turning the other way as thousands of immigrants pour across the U.S.-Mexico border illegally each day. Earlier this month Rep. Chip Roy, the San Antonio Republican, was standing on the floor of the U.S. Capitol railing against the Biden administration’s handling of border security when he questioned the necessity of immigrants in the first place. “We have 51.5 million people who are foreign-born in the United States. They have about 20 to 25 million kids. That puts that well over 20 something percent of the population and it’s the highest such number in the history of our country. People say, ‘Well isn’t that great?’ Is it?,” he said. “Are we teaching people about Western civilization? Are we teaching people about the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the rule of law?” That line of thinking is a stark shift from Texas Republicans’ messaging on immigration earlier this century. When George W. Bush, a former governor of Texas, was trying to pass immigration reform as president in the mid-2000s, he called the Untied States a “nation of immigrants,” and said “immigrants are just what they’ve have always been: people willing to risk everything for the dream of freedom.”