‘"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.’
Industries devastated by rightwing racism, bigotry, and hate – conservatives are truly this stupid and ignorant.
