Around 295,400 undocumented migrants worked in Texas construction in 2022, accounting for 23% of all construction workers in the state, according to a September report by the American Immigration Council.

Meanwhile, nationwide, the sector is facing record vacancies amid a sustained construction boom.

“It would devastate our industry, we wouldn’t finish our highways, we wouldn’t finish our schools,” Stan Marek, CEO of Marek, a Houston-based commercial and residential contractor, told NPR.

“Housing would disappear. I think they’d lose half their labour,” he added.

Economist Ray Perryman, president and CEO of Waco-based Perryman Group, also weighed in.

“It’s not remotely practical to round up and deport everybody,” he told NPR. “And, we simply don’t have an economic structure that can sustain that. There are more undocumented people working in Texas right now than there are unemployed people in Texas.”

He added: “The bottom line is if you just look across the country, our birth rates are at historic lows, our population growth is at historic lows, we just simply are not making enough people, so to speak, to sustain our economy. ”

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