The Border Crisis Won't Be Solved at the Border - great article on immigrants

https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/border-crisis-texas-solutions/
By Jack Herrera November 2024

This is a long read, but great insights into the complexity of immigration issues. We need these folks. There are innovative ideas out there for addressing the issues.

If Texas officials wanted to stop the arrival of undocumented immigrants, they could try to make it impossible for them to work here. But that would devastate the state’s economy. So instead politicians engage in border theater.

Today, Texas is home to some 1.6 million undocumented immigrants, according to a Pew Research Center study of 2022 census data. No industry in the state employs a greater number of unauthorized workers than construction, the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute found. Since 2000, Texas’s population has grown by around 10 million, with many new arrivals chasing the “Texas Miracle”—a fast-growing economy that’s the envy of other states. Construction workers lacking legal status have laid the foundations for this miracle. They erected the work camps housing pipe fitters and roughnecks out in the oil fields. They rebuilt Houston after Hurricane Harvey. And they built thousands of apartment complexes and homes, helping Texas avoid the worst of the affordable-housing shortage that is crippling other states.

This means that undocumented immigrants are paying billions in taxes to Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid without qualifying for any of the benefits. The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, a liberal think tank in Washington, D.C., estimates that in 2022, undocumented workers in Texas alone paid $4.9 billion in taxes—a sum that would increase to $5.3 billion if these workers were granted legal status.

It’s not just contractors skimming profits from undocumented immigrants’ labor. All U.S. citizens are getting a cut.