Debate Aside, Immigrants Help To Keep Texas' Economy Ticking
GEORGETOWN -- Early on the morning of Aug. 13, twenty-one agents with the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service blocked the entrance to the Sun City retirement community here and began arresting construction workers as they arrived on the job.</br></br>Immigration officials say the roadblock and a sweep through the site a week later netted more than 300 undocumented workers, more than a third of the total number employed to build homes in the fast-growing community. Even those contractors who didn't have employees taken in the raid felt the impact, if only temporarily. "It slowed down the building process for a couple of days," says Don Carrington, a vice president at D.R. Kidd Co., a roofing contractor in Austin.</br></br>The raids and others across the Austin area at the time yielded more than 1,100 arrests -- part of a nationwide crackdown on illegal immigrants in the workplace. Indeed, the raids in Central Texas, with its booming economy and an unemployment rate less than half the national average, spotlight the irony of the growing debate over federal immigration policy: While Congress passed late last month a bill that, among other things, makes it easier to deport illegal immigrants, economic necessity has already made immigrants, both legal and illegal, an integral part of the Texas economy.</br></br>These days, restaurants, landscapers, janitorial services and other businesses that account for large numbers of low-wage, low-skill jobs in Texas could scarcely operate without a ready supply of immigrant workers, documented and otherwise. Other industries -- notably, many construction trades -- have grown so dependent on immigrant labor that there is a serious dearth of skilled workers to take their place.</br></br>"We're not honest in the sense that we need that labor," says Bill Gilmer, chief economist at the Federal Reserve Bank in Houston. "There's no question that we can stop illegal immigration, but we have not chosen that route." Adds Charles Foster, an immigration lawyer in Houston: "If you could theoretically pick up all the illegal workers in the state of Texas, it would be devastating. It would have an immediate, drastic impact on a lot of businesses."