Editorial: New study shows how vital immigrants are to key parts of this country’s economy

A new study offers further evidence of how much Texas’ economic welfare relies on immigrants. It should remind all of us — especially policy makers — of how much we depend on foreign-born residents, and how pursuing efforts to close our borders and other restrictive policies would hurt our country.

The study, released last week by the American Immigration Council, focuses on three key elements of our state’s economy — health care, construction and energy.

The council found the results “staggering.”

Immigrants comprise 40% of Texas’ work force in the construction industry, 20% of employees in the energy sector and nearly 20% of our healthcare workers, even though they make up just 17.2% of our state’s total population. The numbers demonstrate immigrants’ “critical role in building and maintaining the Lone Star State’s infrastructure and providing quality care,” the council stated in a news release announcing its findings.

Our healthcare industry suffers a severe and chronic shortage of qualified workers. From 2018 to 2023, 3.3 million job openings for healthcare workers were posted in Texas alone, and nearly 5% of those postings cited a need for bilingual skills.

The need for such skills is evident in the Rio Grande Valley and other border areas where immigrants comprise significant parts of our population, but they are just as crucial in other parts of the state, and the country, where quality care requires that doctors, nurses and other care givers understand and can communicate with patients whose primary language is not English.

Immigrants are vital to addressing our current housing and building boom. In addition to providing 40% of all construction workers, 39.7% of entrepreneurs in the industry — those who own construction companies and suppliers — are foreign-born.

Energy-related jobs including the oil and gas, mining and engineering rely heavily on immigrants.

The are only three of our key economic elements. Other studies show that 24% of restaurant workers and 31% of hotel workers are from other countries.

A farmworker holds a mask given to her in her hand as she returns to work preparing watermelon for harvest in a field Tuesday, May 12, 2020, in Edinburg. (Joel Martinez | jmartinez@themonitor.com)

And it should be no surprise that a whopping 73% of our agriculture workers are immigrants. This doesn’t only include field workers; those who tend and process our beef, pork, poultry and dairy products also are primarily new Americans.

Obviously, closing our borders would cause irreparable harm to our country.

In fact, restrictions imposed in recent years already have cost our nation’s economy untold billions of dollars — and each of us in personal expenses.

Those restrictions left businesses unable to fill many job openings following the COVID-19 pandemic. Some never could hire enough workers to reopen, and never did.

Fewer workers meant fewer products on store shelves. We saw the effects here in the Valley and elsewhere; some shrimpers weren’t able to ship out because they couldn’t hire enough deck hands. Some crops reportedly went unpicked because growers couldn’t find enough people to pick them.

Scarcity of products drives prices up.

People complaining about rising costs should recognize our need for better immigration policies — and to stop trying to restrict, and demonize, foreign-born workers who contribute so much to our quality of life.

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