Obama’s immigration actions have sparked heated rebuttals from both sides of the aisle, but in Houston, it’s all about business.
On November 20, millions of Americans tuned in to watch President Obama’s address regarding his recent Immigration Accountability Executive Action, which promises temporary relief from deportation for nearly 5 million immigrants who are parents of children who are either citizens or lawful permanent residents, have been in the country for five or more years and have no criminal background. While a politically dividing topic, for Houston, the president’s actions offer a much needed influx of legal laborers.
Stan Marek, CEO of local Marek Brothers Company and a longtime advocate of immigration reform, recently spoke with the Houston Business Journal and elaborated on what Obama’s actions mean for the Bayou City.
“For legal contractors it’s going to be a tremendous boom because we haven’t been able to hire,” he said.
In Houston, developers and contractors have long depended on the availability of illegal labor, not as a practice of choice but rather necessity. The fact of the matter is, local legal labor pools are shallow and growing more so everyday thanks to large investments into energy, as we’ve previously reported, and a surge of new developments.
“Some of its opportunistic but most is driven by supply and demand,” David Harvey Jr., chairman and CEO of D.E. Harvey Builders, told the Business Journal in an October article. “Materials and labor are finite and demand is up for all construction type – apartments, highways, office, retail, even hospitality and residential.”
A collaborative report from the University of Texas at Austin and the Austin-based Workers Defense Project, released in January 2013, found that upwards of 50 percent of the construction workforce in Texas was undocumented.
Not only do the president’s actions allow Houston construction firms to shore up deficiencies and deepen labor pools, but also it gives them an opportunity to legitimize their current roster and step away from the ever-present fear of having workforce’s unexpectedly cut short and the threat of subsequent legal action.
It’s hard to speculate how quickly eligible undocumented workers will be able to “get straight” with the system, but Charles Foster, a founding partner of the immigration law firm Foster LLP, told the Business Journal that in the wake of Obama’s announcement “there is going to be a rush of a million-plus individuals wanting to get into the system,” and that could mean significant bureaucratic congestion.