Bill to require Texas illegal immigration impact study dies
AUSTIN (KXAN) — It's been nearly 20 years since Texas last studied the impact of mass deportations, and there's no plan to revisit the effort anytime soon.
As the federal government continues widespread deportations of undocumented immigrants and workers, a bill that would have required an annual study of the effect unauthorized migrants have on the state has died.
Senate Bill 825 would have required a biennial report cataloging the economic, environmental and financial impacts of illegal immigration. The governor's office could have contracted with a state or federal agency, a nonprofit or an institution of higher education to conduct the research.
In 2006, former Texas Comptroller Carole Keeton Strayhorn released the first, and last, comprehensive study on unauthorized workers' impact on the state's finances. Undocumented immigrants in Texas generated "more taxes and other revenue than the state spends on them," the study found.
Back then, 31% of undocumented immigrants worked in the service industry, followed by 19% in construction. The study found a quarter of all farm workers were undocumented. Deporting 1.4 million undocumented workers would have dropped gross state product by $17.7 billion with the state unable to fully recover the loss of labor over a 20-year period, according to the report.
Today, the American Immigration Council, estimates Texas has more than two million undocumented immigrants making up 9% of the workforce. The AIC estimates 27% of construction workers, 17% of agriculture workers and 11% of manufacturing jobs in the state are done by undocumented workers.
But, without official data, the exact numbers are hard to know.
Texas Commissioner of Agriculture Sid Miller previously acknowledged "we don't have the data," but said, "using cowboy logic," he didn't foresee much economic damage from a spike in immigration enforcement — at least not for farming, which his office oversees.
"I'm not advocating spending a lot of tax dollars on it," Miller told KXAN last month when asked if the state should revisit the issue and once again study the economic impact.
"The private industry is moving so fast I don't know that they could even catch them at this point. So, at some point, it would be nice to at least get 20 years [of] updated [data] and see what we've got. And, I think we could do that...with pretty reasonable research."
Miller credited automation and new technology for lessening the need to hire undocumented farm workers.
Amid ongoing reports of Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids on businesses and job sites around the country a KXAN investigation previously found the federal government has focused far more on going after migrants than the bosses who hire and pay them.
SB 825 passed the Senate but never made it to a floor vote in the House.