Lyons: Talk of mass deportation is Texas bull

Putting aside the question of whether he will be inaugurated as president come January, is there any chance that Donald Trump will deport millions of undocumented immigrants from the United States? To anybody who knows very much about what's actually going on in the American economy, the answer is no.

Of course not.

Even Trump is not that crazy. As my favorite political blogger Kevin Drum puts it: "When Donald Trump thunders about deporting every illegal immigrant in the country, it's just empty talk, red meat for the rubes. In reality, our economy would collapse without immigrants, and no one wants to risk that. So we continue appealing to xenophobia with walls and agents and raids, but it's all theater."

Drum is responding to an extraordinary piece of explanatory journalism by Jack Herrera in the November 2024 Texas Monthly magazine — where I used to work once upon a time, and which remains a singularly important publication unconstrained by Washington/New York political chatter and willing to describe the "border crisis" as it actually exists, rather than how posers say it's supposed to be.

And how it is, Herrera writes, is that Texas politicians from Gov. Greg Abbott on down are engaged in an elaborate game of hide-and-seek, making a great show of talking tough, chasing down luckless migrants at the border, locking them in holding pens, shipping them back to Mexico, even loading them in buses bound for Chicago, New York and Denver — any northern city with a Democratic mayor will do — and doing everything in their power to render migrants powerless and without legal recourse. "Operation Lone Star," Abbott called his policy of turning Texas state troopers into border guards, cruising south Texas in fleets of SUVs and wearing white Stetson hats.

As for the businessmen employing undocumented immigrants in the current Texas construction boom, they face few impediments. Indeed, the numbers of employers facing legal charges for that crime have actually fallen in recent years. Harassing and jailing campesinos from Guatemala and El Salvador desperately seeking work is one thing; taking action against their North American bosses is quite another. Most are insulated from responsibility by elaborate workarounds involving subcontractors who deal directly with workers.

As a consequence, migrants end up paying billions in Social Security and withholding taxes for benefits they'll never see.

Herrera: "[P]oliticians, including Abbott, have instead found a middle ground: They keep up their bombast regarding the border, but they avoid stringing any razor wire between undocumented immigrants and jobs in the state's interior."

All this is made necessary by the increasing unwillingness of natural-born American workers to enter the construction trades in the first place. The numbers are compelling. "In 2017 the National Association of Home Builders polled 2,001 young adults, asking them what careers they wanted to go into. Of the respondents who told the pollsters they were 'undecided,' 63% reported that there was 'no or little chance they would join the trades, regardless of pay,'" Herrera reported.

Enter Marco, a hardworking former bus driver from Honduras, whose story Herrera chronicles. Although reluctant to leave his aged mother, who could no longer afford her medicines, Marco felt he had to go north. "Driving a bus in San Pedro Sula, Marco made 8,000 lempiras — about $325 — a month. Working just a week on a construction site in the States, he could make $1,120. He could change his mother's life."

And so he embarked on a perilous journey across Mexico, threatened by rapacious gangs along the way and finally swimming the Rio Grande between Piedras Negras and Eagle Pass, Texas, where he was able to jump a train loaded with construction materials — gypsum and concrete — that makes its way northward every day.

Marco's engagement with Operation Lone Star has been largely benign, encountering empathetic Spanish-speaking cops and a Texas judge who simply turned him loose to continue his quest. He has made friends, found a stable work relationship, and ended up living with Honduran relatives with personal stories similar to his own.

He's been lucky in most important ways, has Marco. Herrera interviews Texas cops who investigate horrifying incidents of human trafficking — mainly women and teenaged girls, of course. One investigator explained the facts of life to him this way: "'Hey, boss, I got this case — these workers aren't getting paid properly for hanging sheetrock,' I would tell him: 'Look, here's a case of a little girl who is getting raped 12 times a day.'"

Pretty much everybody involved except the politicians shouting about it on Fox News, however, understands that both kinds of cargo on those trains crossing the border at Eagle Pass are equally necessary to Texas' continuing prosperity.

"Cutting off the supply of undocumented workers," Herrera writes, "would be like cutting off the supply of concrete and lumber." The economic consequences of the "mass deportation" many Republicans think they want would be catastrophic.

One way or another, it's not going to happen.

eugenelyons2@yahoo.com