Trump’s proposed mass deportations would hit these Tarrant County industries hardest

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If elected, former President Donald Trump says he would execute the largest deportation operation in U.S. history, according to an interview with Time published this week.

“I don’t believe this is sustainable for a country, what’s happening to us, with probably 15 million and maybe as many as 20 million by the time Biden’s out,” Trump told the magazine, saying he would use the military if necessary. “Twenty million people, many of them from jails, many of them from prisons, many of them from mental institutions.”

Many industries in Tarrant County, however, depend on undocumented labor, according to U.S. Census Bureau data compiled by the American Immigration Council.

Research Director Nan Wu analyzed data from the bureau’s 2022 American Community Survey and found that 28.8% of construction workers in Tarrant County are undocumented.

“Our analysis also shows that 23.9% of workers employed in cleaning occupations, including janitors & cleaners and maids & housekeeping cleaners, are undocumented immigrants,” Wu said in an email exchange.

Other industries in the county with high concentrations of undocumented workers include hospitality (12.1%), general services (10.8%), manufacturing (8.3%), professional services (6.2%), retail (6.1%), and transportation and warehousing (4.2%).

Tarrant County and neighboring Denton are among the 10 fastest growing counties in the country, and construction is the third largest creator of jobs in the Metroplex, according to Sriram Villupuram, a professor of finance and real estate at UT Arlington.

“When you take labor away from it, if that gets strained, then that will affect our growth as an economy,” he said. “You need roads, you need infrastructure, you need homes, you need buildings, and so on.”

Cutting more than a quarter of the industry’s workforce would spell the end of Tarrant County’s recent growth spurt.

“You need people to build the infrastructure to bring in more people,” he said. “When you don’t have the first set of people to build an infrastructure, costs go up, and the place becomes unattractive.”

The same effect would be seen in the hospitality industry, especially with restaurant food prices, Villupuram said. While wholesale food inflation is down around a half a percentage point, diners really feel the sting of inflation when eating out, where the rate is around 5%, primarily due to the cost and shortage of labor. Worsen that shortage, and restaurant food prices will also go up.

The American Immigration Council’s data highlights the importance of undocumented workers to construction, one of Tarrant County’s most thriving industries, according to Christine Bolaños, director of communications at the Workers Defense Project, an advocacy organization for immigrant workers in Texas’ construction industry.

“It reinforces the reality that while migrants continue to be scapegoated by the far right, they are essential to our economy and to our society,” she said in an email exchange. “They are the ones building our new roads, schools, and hospitals, and our communities would be nearly inoperable without them given the dynamic growth Texas has experienced in the last couple of decades.”

This importance to the local economy is not lost on Tarrant County’s undocumented population.

Norma Ramírez and her husband José have lived in Fort Worth since 2008. Originally from the Mexican state of Durango, they are both undocumented.

They now run a successful food truck, but for years she worked cleaning homes, offices and restaurants, and he worked in construction. They are surrounded by the buildings they built and kept clean.

“Every time we pass one, my husband says, ‘Oh, I built that movie theater, I built that over there,’” Norma Ramírez said in an interview. “Yeah, I tell him, but it’s not yours.”

Susana Nieto and her husband have lived in Fort Worth for 22 years. She now owns and operates a thriving pastry business, but like Norma Ramírez, she started out in cleaning services and later in the hospitality industry.

She began to develop arthritis while working at an Einstein Bros. Bagels, before the Covid-19 pandemic brought her time there to an end.

“My arms swelled up a lot and everything hurt,” she said in a phone interview. “I always ended up in the hospital.”

Considering low labor market participation rates alongside these industries’ need for the labor provided by undocumented workers, UT Arlington’s Villupuram said he believes the industries will push back on any real-world attempts at mass deportation.

“By saying this, I’m neither pro nor against [undocumented workers], it’s what the data is saying,” he said. “If you don’t want them, you have to find a different pool of labor.”

The other option would be to agree to a stoppage in economic growth until labor participation by U.S. residents and citizens picks back up. That, however, is not sound economic policy, in his opinion.

“The economy is not an on/off switch,” he said.