The Texas Monthly contacted 100 Republican office holders to get their view of Trump’s plans for deporting millions of immigrants. Only two responded. In Texas, one in 20 residents is an undocumented immigrant. Their absence will have a big economic impact, as will the visuals of rounding up and detaining large numbers of people.

Michael Hardy wrote:

Shortly after he is sworn into office, on January 20, President-elect Donald Trump plans to launch a massive deportation operation targeting the estimated 11.5 million immigrants living illegally in the United States. Texas, with its 1,254-mile southern border and pro-Trump leaders, will play a central role in any such deportations. Stephen Miller, the chief architect of Trump’s immigration policies, has vowed that the administration will build “vast holding facilities that would function as staging centers,” likely on “open land in Texas near the border.” State land commissioner Dawn Buckingham recently offered the administration 1,400 acres in Starr County about 35 miles west of McAllen to build “deportation facilities.” 

In their eagerness to help Trump conduct sweeping roundups of undocumented Texas workers and their families, state leaders who vociferously supported Trump’s candidacy have mostly avoided reckoning with the likely economic consequences of such roundups—including the impact on inflation, a major issue in the presidential campaign. 

Earlier this month, Governor Greg Abbott said he expected the president-elect to begin by deporting immigrants who have committed crimes in the United States, but he would not say who he thinks should be expelled next under the far-reaching plan. “President Trump has made perfectly clear that this is a process and you have to have a priority list,” he said. “You begin with . . . the criminals.” 

But Texas is home to some 1.6 million undocumented immigrants—around one in every twenty residents—and the vast majority are not criminals. In fact, undocumented immigrants in our state commit crimes at a significantly lower rate than legal residents, according to a National Institute of Justice analysis of Texas Department of Public Safety data. Many among these 1.6 million power the state’s construction, farming, and meatpacking industries and work as housekeepers, landscape gardeners, and restaurant workers. 

Deporting every immigrant who is in the U.S. illegally—or even half of them—would cripple the economy. And Texas would be hit harder than most states. A recent report by the left-leaning American Immigration Council estimated that a mass-deportation campaign would reduce the national GDP by 4.2 percent to 6.8 percent—a similar hit to the one the nation took during the Great Recession. The price of groceries would skyrocket. A gallon of milk, for instance, would cost twice as much without immigrant labor, according to a 2015 estimate from Texas A&M University’s AgriLife Extension Service. Mass deportations would also punch a hole in the state budget, because undocumented Texans pay an estimated $4.9 billion in sales and payroll taxes every year, including for retirement benefits they are ineligible to collect. 

Trump has argued that deporting undocumented immigrants would open up jobs for American citizens. But the percentage of citizens willing to work in industries such as landscaping and construction has declined, and economic studies suggest that immigration, both legal and illegal, is a net benefit to the economy. Reducing illegal immigration likely would, over time, result in higher wages for legal workers in industries such as construction, assuming the supply of labor were to fall faster than demand. But suddenly removing a significant percentage of undocumented workers (one recent estimate found that 23 percent of construction workers nationally don’t have legal documents) would likely cause hundreds of building projects to stall, crops to go unharvested, and cattle to stack up in feedlots.

Trump’s program would also impose social costs on communities across Texas. According to the Pew Research Center, around 70 percent of undocumented immigrants in the country live in mixed-status households with at least one family member who is here legally. Expelling these migrants would separate families and decimate communities across the state. “The social, family, and economic impact would be very deep,” said Rice University political scientist Tony Payan. “It doesn’t make sense from any perspective. It would be madness for the U.S. to do that.” 

Some Texas officials, including Senator Ted Cruz, have long supported mass deportation as a campaign platform while remaining vague about how such an operation would be executed and what the consequences might be for the Texas economy. In an attempt to get more specifics, Texas Monthly reached out to top Texas officials and every Republican state legislator to ask about the incoming president’s mass-deportation plan. We posed four questions:

• Do you support President Trump’s plan to deport all immigrants in the country illegally?
• How would you like the deportations to be carried out?
• Are you concerned about the potential economic damage to the Texas construction, farming, and restaurant industries from deporting undocumented immigrants? If so, how would you remedy that damage?
• Are you concerned about the family separations that will occur if all undocumented Texas are deported?

Two legislators responded. Ninety-eight did not.

A loud silence.