Mass deportations are a shameful campaign promise. DonOLD Trump: "promises made are promises kept". Immigrants are victims

Houston Chronicle opinion echo essay by By Massey Villarreal

I am a Texas-born first-generation American, and like many Texans, my family story is an immigration story. My father crossed the border from Mexico without papers when he was just 17 years old.

But to me, he was simply a hard-working Texan who took care of his family. He worked 75-hour weeks in construction, making 75 cents an hour, carefully saved money and bought a house. He made sure all six of his children went to college.

His story is quintessentially an American one. And it’s why I’m urging Texans to think of immigration as a workforce issue. In Houston specifically, immigrants account for nearly a quarter of the population — and more than 30% of the workforce. New research by the American Immigration Council also shows their importance to key industries: they make up about 27% of health care workers and energy workers and 51% of construction workers.

How we’re going to fill these jobs — and keep the workers we already have — is what we should be talking about as the election approaches. Losing them to widespread deportations is unthinkable in our state, where more than 8% of the workforce is undocumented. We need the next Congress — and the next president — to take this problem seriously and reform our immigration system to bring in the workers we need.

In fact, the U.S. already has more job vacancies than people available to fill them. Houston needs people who are willing to work. Thankfully there are commonsense solutions that are supported by both sides of the political aisle — as well as by 160 Texas business leaders and associations.

First, we need to welcome into our workforce the people who’ve grown up in our school system, lived in our communities and even have children who are U.S. citizens. Often called Dreamers, they include more than 210,000 Texans — and an estimated 60,000 Houstonians — who need a pathway to legal status so they can continue to live and work here.

Though the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program offered temporary work permits for the past decade, that program stopped processing new applications. Since last year, thousands of Texas Dreamers have graduated high school without the ability to work. This is an extraordinary waste of talent❗

Second, recent arrivals who have applied for asylum should be able to work legally while their cases move through the courts. Many wait more than a year for their work permits to be approved. By granting these permits earlier, we take the burden off of municipalities and charities to provide essential services. 

Plus, we enable this pool of immigrants to take many of the labor-intensive jobs that abound throughout the city. For example, Houston has the highest number of job postings for meat and dairy workers in the state.

Finally, it must be easier for qualified health care workers who are educated abroad to practice here. Despite Houston’s reputation for having some of the world’s top medical centers, we’re also known for our persistent health care shortages. Our international medical graduates are eager to update their skills and enter the U.S. system, but they face major licensing barriers. 

We can streamline the bureaucracy around this process and support visa expansion programs that bring in more nurses, dentists and pharmacists.

To be clear, I am not advocating for unchecked immigration. We need secure borders and a better system to know who is coming into our country. But the people who are already here — like my dad — are already contributing to the economy and their communities in meaningful ways. Undocumented workers rent (and buy) houses, purchase cars and gas and pay their taxes. They pay sales tax at the supermarket just like the rest of us. If those workers were gone tomorrow, America's gross domestic product could fall by nearly 7%, roughly $1.7 trillion.

It is possible to both protect our country and protect our prosperity. This is the conversation we should be having right now. Any other discussion does a disservice to Texas.

Massey Villarreal is CEO and president of Precision Task Group, Inc., a Houston-based consulting firm providing data processing solutions to public and private businesses. He also serves on the board of the Greater Houston Partnership and is chairman of the Texas Association of Business.

By Massey Villarreal