Trump’s followers in our state talk tough when it comes to border enforcement and mass deportations. A close read tells a different story.
Why does the Texas economy do so well year after year? What Rick Perry called the Texas Miracle can, at least in part, be attributed to the state’s ability to import people from other states and other countries: low-wage labor and high-wage labor, documented and undocumented. But that prosperity has bred some resentment.
As rents have gone up, out-of-state newcomers taking high-wage jobs have often been better equipped to share in the wealth generated by the growing economy. Bad policy choices compound the feeling of falling behind. Services deteriorate as Texas fails to keep pace with a growing population. The state is doing a pathetic job at preparing the native Texan workforce to take advantage of opportunities. Just one in three Texas high school students obtains some kind of degree or credential within six years of graduating—placing us behind other states of similar size, economic growth, and business opportunities—while more than half of the jobs in the state require one. Sometimes the resentment that fosters is expressed as a meme, sometimes as directionless political frustration, and sometimes as overt racism—toward Hispanic laborers, Vietnamese fishermen, Hindu temples.
Texas politicians have managed the resentment in part by focusing anger on one cohort of newcomers—who, by definition, can’t vote. When Governor Greg Abbott first took office, in 2015, he sounded more like Perry as a booster for Texas’s growth in population. These days, he talks more about those he’s kept out than those he’s welcomed in. Your city may be doubling in size every twenty years, he is able to say, but I have secured the border. Or, in point of fact, I have secured the border of a small city park in the town of Eagle Pass.
It doesn’t mean a lot in practice, but it does, by scapegoating migrants, create the impression for Texans that something is being done about their dread. But what elected officials here have never done is attempt to meaningfully reduce the state’s reliance on population growth and an imported workforce, either legal or illegal, and slow down or reverse demographic change. Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick may have run for office in 2014 on a call to shut down the border, but in the past, we have not seen calls for mass deportations and economic nativism here as blunt as those as we have heard from President Trump lately. Why would state leaders kill the goose that laid the golden egg?
That was how things stood, at least, prior to the election of the most nativist president in about a century. Trump’s call for mass deportations was the signature feature of his third campaign—in the way the “border wall” was the signature feature of his first campaign—and it has permeated the wider Republican Party. At the Republican National Convention, held in Milwaukee this year, I heard Florida Senator Byron Donalds address a Moms for Liberty gathering about wokeness in schools. When asked what one thing he would do to make American education better, he answered, without a moment’s thought: “Mass deportations.” Once the poor brown kids taking up finite resources were gone, in other words, everyone else would be better off.
The big question for Texas, now, is whether Trump will follow through and change, root and branch, how the state’s economy works—its dependence on undocumented labor—or whether he intends a sort of Texas-style sleight of hand in which he performs rigidity and inflicts misery on a relative few while leaving the underlying economic relations of the country intact. Anyone who claims to know the mind of the president is fooling themself, of course. It is difficult to assess where the tough talk of politicians ends and the intent to act begins.
But we’ve had some hints. For one thing, the messaging from Texas officials has been a little more careful than might have been expected, given that Abbott and others were extremely loud on the issue throughout 2020. It’s true that Land Commissioner Dawn Buckingham and the state have made a big show out of offering land to the feds for use in future deportations. Buckingham calls the program the Jocelyn Initiative, after Jocelyn Nungaray, who was murdered, allegedly, by two undocumented Venezuelans in Houston. This is classic border theater, and Buckingham got to put on her best hat for the press conference, at which she vowed one of the facilities would be for “violent criminals.”
But if the state were really interested in facilitating sweeping internal arrests and deportations, it seems like the camps would be built on state land near Houston and the Metroplex, where there are large populations of undocumented workers, and not on the border in Starr County, where Buckingham proposed putting one.
Abbott has similarly talked tough about his intent to cooperate with the administration and subordinate the state police and National Guard to federal immigration cops. But read what he’s saying more closely, and it seems a little more indefinite. Feds would have to have a “priority list,” he said in November. First on that list would be “all the criminals who are here who crossed the border illegally and committed a crime in the United States or had a criminal background before they entered the United States.” After Trump was done with them, he said, the president could “look elsewhere.” This could be understood as a vow to better preserve the status quo, since those convicted of violent crimes or who have criminal backgrounds elsewhere are already supposed to be deported.
Trump administration officials, too, including Trump border czar Tom Homan, have talked about priorities, stressing that the top target is the relatively small number of migrants who have committed violent crimes. The talk is hard to read, but we know that capacity is at least somewhat limited. This month, Homan privately warned Republicans in Congress that Immigration and Customs Enforcement will need more resources to carry out the promised deportations. Homan hinted that ICE raids in Chicago would begin on Tuesday, the first full day of the administration. But then he seemed to backtrack, and even these foreshadowed raids don’t seem to match the administration’s maximalist promises.
The Trump administration’s first round of executive orders, signed after the inauguration Monday, were mostly focused on the border and asylum applicants. Perhaps the most consequential is an order barring those who show up at the border from claiming the right to asylum, arguably a violation of international law. Most of Trump’s executive orders are pretty thin and heavy on show: His wan effort to change the Constitution by fiat to eliminate “birthright citizenship,” a core feature of the U.S. system since Reconstruction, should be quickly thrown out if there’s an independent judiciary worth the name left in the country.
We won’t know for a while whether the administration will focus on “criminals” or is just using the term as a synonym for all undocumented migrants. But it seems notable that the Trump administration’s policy proposals so far are largely focused on the border and those accused of violent offenses—not workers in Houston or Philadelphia. That shift may come, but it hasn’t yet.
The ambiguity is a cause for optimism, for the Texas business class and the faction of the Republican Party that will quietly acknowledge that the state is a transitional zone, a hub for the free flow of capital and labor, and that its borders are more real on paper than in real life. It has gone through this before, in Trump’s first term, after the president vowed to rip up NAFTA.
After Trump won the first time, I called up Texas businessmen who supported him and held stakes in the banks and transshipment operations that make bank on Mexican trade to ask them, a bit smugly, if they felt they had been mistaken in donating to a candidate who would jeopardize their core businesses. They calmly said that Trump would do no such thing. I wondered how they could be so sure. But they were right: Trump “killed” NAFTA by replacing it with a mostly identical trade pact that had a different name, the USMCA. Business continued mostly as usual.
Immigration hard-liners—those who passionately believe that demographic change is the country’s number one threat—rightfully feel that they’re about to get shafted again. There is a small but vocal faction within Trump’s base that wants a real social revolution—a costly one—to reverse demographic shifts and stop the flow of immigrant labor to Texas and the rest of the country. To that end, the most interesting story of the Trump prepresidency is a brewing fight within the Republican Party about high-skilled immigration.
You may have heard a little about the loudest part of this split, which played out over the holidays—don’t these people have families?—on the social network X, owned by the man who bought the world, Elon Musk. Right-wingers like Laura Loomer, a onetime confidant of the president who seems to have been squeezed out of the inner circle amid rumors the two were having an affair, fought with Musk and his buddy Vivek Ramaswamy over the H-1B visa program. That program allows American companies to bring over workers from other countries if they affirm that they can’t find local workers with the right skills. Musk is a proponent of more H-1B visas; Trump has sided with the man who helped him win the election.
The H-1B program has its critics on both the left and the right, for some good reasons. Recipients of the visas are tied to their jobs—if they get fired, they get deported, creating space to abuse workers. And plenty of companies use the program to obtain lower-cost workers for jobs they could surely find American workers to do. (At least one of those companies is run by Elon Musk and headquartered in Texas.)
But the H-1B program functioned as a proxy for a wider debate on the right about whether America should want high-wage immigrants. Both sides could agree that Nicaraguans weren’t wanted. What about Indian programmers? Musk and Ramaswamy took the position that America should want them, the latter going on to argue that American workers were too lazy and American parents were too lax with their children.
They were met by a wave of virulent racism. But under that racism is a partially debatable economic argument. If you’re an immigration restrictionist who wants to reduce immigration in order to raise wages for natives—a line of argument that was once the province of American Democrats and the unions—high-skilled immigration should bother you more than unskilled immigration. The median American will not pick crops for the wages farmers are willing to pay. But they may be able to vie for the skilled jobs that companies often fill with H-1B visas. The goal of the most hardcore immigration restrictionists is to create a climate in which Tesla, when it needs to hire ten programmers, upskills Americans rather than importing contingent foreigners.
The restrictionists argue that Trump’s Republican Party is engaging in double-talk—that it has no appetite for really changing the foundations of the American economy and doesn’t have the willingness to be honest about the social relations it favors. They have a point about the party’s hypocrisy—which is, again, drowned out by virulent racism.
On January 6, Current Revolt, the most important right-wing publication in Texas, published an extended diatribe from editor in chief Tommy Oliver about the H-1B fight that put the focus on Abbott, who recently took a red-carpet tour of India. The Texas Enterprise Fund, run out of the governor’s office, was extending subsidies to companies that used H-1B visas to bring Indian workers to Texas rather than pay citizens.
On the charge of hypocrisy, Oliver was correct, in a way. Abbott supports, and brags about, an economic model in his state that runs on the fuel of immigrant labor. But he will not, and cannot, explain that to his own voters, even at a moment when the underpinnings of that economic model are threatened. He is not alone in this. America suffers from a shortage of leaders in both parties who are willing to explain what immigration means to the country.
Then, of course, the point was buried under sewage. “I don’t want to get into the fact that 500+ million people in India defecate outside on the ground every day (because ew), or how the average IQ in India is 76, or that 800+ million Indians are on government welfare,” Oliver wrote. Anti-Indian racism is becoming a little more prominent in Texas these days as the Indian diaspora gains power here, and it’s been a drumbeat on Current Revolt. For his part, the author has given up hope that Abbott—or Trump—will actually do something. “Trump has indicated he will make the H-1B crisis much worse,” Oliver concluded.
This right-winger, for a moment, channels the pre–World War II German Marxist Rosa Luxembourg, who wrote as she faced execution: “Your ‘order’ is built on sand.” “The ‘economic miracle’ that elected officials brag about in Texas does not coincide with the quality of life for the average Texan,” Oliver wrote. “Many people now find they have new neighbors from the other side of the world that they cannot communicate with.” This could not last, Oliver implied. It would cause a revolt.
For the time being, at least, belief that the “Texas Miracle” is hollow is shared only by the left and the far right. Everybody else is happy enough. But the disquiet bubbling up on the edges should make us wonder. There are limits to everything, and Texas can’t keep building up and out forever. There’s only so much water, only so much land in the Katy Prairie. What’s next?
https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/texas-gop-anti-immigration-hard-liners-putting-on-a-show/