Cesar Gomez’s life is great right now. And a little scary.
The great part: He just got a 45 percent raise –- to $160 a day. A master remodeler in Houston, he’s in such hot demand amid the post-hurricane cleanup that his boss threw him the extra cash to make sure he wouldn’t bolt for a rival outfit.
But Gomez is wanted in another sense of the word, too. He’s an undocumented Mexican living in a state that’s pursuing one of the country’s toughest crackdowns on undocumented immigrants. This has made him extra leery of bumping into police officers and, as a result, hesitant to venture outside for anything but work. “I just go straight home from work to eat and sleep and that’s it, and then back to work again,” he said.
Houston has become ground zero in the nation’s immigration crisis, testing just how much the hard-line deportation push espoused by President Donald Trump and his allies -- like Texas Governor Greg Abbott -- will hamper an economy already confronting full employment and an aging workforce.
If a Texas law enacted last year survives a court challenge, it may ensnare Gomez and toss him out of the country. A victory for conservative leaders, but at what economic cost? If it took a 45 percent pay increase to keep Gomez on the job, how much would it cost to find his replacement if he and the state’s 250,000 other undocumented construction workers are gone?
“There’s ultimately an economic price to be paid for this labor shortage,” said Jose Garza, executive director of the Workers Defense Project, which is based in Austin, Texas. “Governor Abbott’s immigration policies and Donald Trump’s immigration policies are wreaking havoc.”
Visas for low-skilled workers are limited mostly to agriculture and tourism, last only 10 months, and are complicated and expensive to obtain. In 2016, the government issued only 221,000. The shortage fuels illegal migration as people bypass long waiting lists to fill readily available jobs, said Alex Nowrasteh, an immigration policy analyst for the libertarian Cato Institute in Washington.
Hunting Hands
The labor-market dynamics are a lot different than they were in New Orleans when it rebuilt from Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Back then, tens of thousands of immigrants streamed in, said sociologist Elizabeth Fussell, a Brown University professor. Wages stayed the same or even declined and many local construction workers complained they couldn’t find jobs.
Few would gripe about such a thing now in Houston. Overall unemployment in the state is down to just 3.9 percent and the market for skilled labor was tight well before Hurricane Harvey inundated the coast with 50 inches of rain and submerged vast swaths of the fourth-biggest U.S. city. Of course, as wages climb there, they are doing so from low levels. Texas is a right-to-work state -- and labor unions have little presence -- so construction laborers made about 20 percent less than the national average in 2016, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Now, Houston homeowners bunk with family or friends as they wait for repairs. Those with two-story homes camp upstairs while waiting for torn-out walls, floors and kitchen cabinets to be rebuilt. In the Cinco Ranch community, two-story brick houses with manicured lawns and backyard pools are interspersed with piles of discarded drywall, wood, carpet and insulation. In suburban Kingwood, work crews outnumber residents in neighborhoods where the visible waterline in empty houses tops five feet.