Austin American-Statesman. June 24, 2024.
Editorial: Trump’s pledge to deport millions of immigrants would devastate Texas businesses
Texans depend on immigrant workers, including those who are here illegally. Donald Trump’s promise of mass deportations might appeal to some voters, but it would have grave consequences.
As Texans rebuild their storm-shattered homes and businesses, many of the workers they call will be immigrants. Some will be undocumented. Under a second Donald Trump presidency, they might not be here to help. Reviving threats from 2016, the former president has pledged to deport the country’s estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants. He has called for deploying the National Guard, local law enforcement and perhaps the military to carry out deportations, and flirted with the idea of building detention camps.
This fantasy will appeal to many voters. Illegal immigration ranks among Americans’ top concerns, with record numbers of unauthorized immigrants apprehended at the southern border in the last two years. Meanwhile, Gov. Greg Abbott has vaulted to the heights of Republican politics, thanks to the costly, optics-intensive Operation Lone Star.
But mass deportations would have grave consequences for Texas. Immigrants – authorized and unauthorized, highly educated and low-skilled – are critical to our workforce. In February 2024, the nonprofit Every Texan reported that for every 1,000 workers, Texas immigrants and asylum seekers add $2.6 million to state and local taxes in their first year of eligibility. Once they get work permits, new immigrants in Texas earned an average of $20,000 in their first year, rising to $29,000 by their fifth year.
Undocumented workers also bring a net cost benefit, researcher Jose Ivan Rodriguez-Sanchez found in a 2020 report for the Baker Institute for Public Policy. Fully calculating cost and benefits for immigration, direct and indirect, is a complex task. But, Rodriguez-Sanchez found, in 2018 workers from Texas’ estimated 1.6 million undocumented residents made up 8.2 percent of the state workforce. These immigrants generated costs such as education, medical care and incarceration. But their unemployment rate was 5.7%, and overall, the revenue they brought to Texas exceeded what Texas spent on them for public services, with an estimated net benefit of $420.9 million in fiscal year 2018. For every dollar spent on public services for undocumented immigrants, undocumented immigrants provided Texas with $1.21 in fiscal revenue.
These immigrants are deeply enmeshed in Texas culture. Nationally, an estimated 62 percent of unauthorized immigrants have lived in this country for at least 10 years. In 2018, 1.4 million U.S. citizens in Texas were living with at least one relative who was undocumented.
Long-settled populations with deep roots in the United States
“This is a long-settled population with deep roots in the United States,” said Michelle Mittelstadt, communications director for the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute. “People with U.S.-born children, who have been in their workplaces for many years, who have opened businesses and employ workers including U.S. workers, who have homes, including loans.”
Mass removal of workers would devastate Texas businesses, especially restaurants and building companies. “The construction industry is perhaps the most dependent on undocumented workers,” said author Loren Steffy, an expert on Texas immigrants and the construction industry. Commercial builders, he explained, must ask unions to supply the workers they need. But unions frequently don’t have enough workers to offer. Contractors then may use other workers, typically turning for this to labor brokers – who tend to supply workers who are undocumented.
Yet business owners rarely publicize these dilemmas. The ferocious political rhetoric surrounding immigration is too threatening. One exception: Houston construction subcontractor Stan Marek, with whom Steffy coauthored a book. One of Marek’s common-sense proposals: an ID system giving undocumented workers tamper-proof IDs that permit them to work only for employers who pay payroll taxes and withhold federal income tax from employee paychecks. This would also allow employers to invest in training.
Texas businesses must be able to honestly disclose their labor needs
For real changes in policy, though, Texas business must openly air its needs. This could start with more robust activism from a state-level consortium of Texas business interests that rely on immigrant workers and clients, national business immigration advocate Laura Reiff said. The group should include leaders from agriculture, high tech, health care, restaurants, higher education and construction. This is especially urgent because migration itself has transformed. At the Texas/Mexico border, a migration flow once dominated by male workers from Mexico now includes large shares of families and unaccompanied children, many of them seeking asylum. In 2023, 51 percent arrived from beyond Mexico and Central America. Texas and the nation need a new, hemispheric approach to adapt our society – and our businesses – to these immense changes.
Texans rightly want to update the immigration system. But as the Editorial Board has noted before, turning the border into a military front doesn’t do that.
Nor does Trump’s fantastical deportation plan, which could cost the equivalent of 30 percent of the 2024 Pentagon budget. That’s before the recession that would likely be triggered from removing so many workers from the economy. Instead, businesses deserve lawmakers who respect their labor needs. Communities need leaders who will honor their families and institutions. And Texas needs workers who are decently treated and decently paid and who can keep Texas growing, storm after storm.
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Dallas Morning News. June 6, 2024.
Editorial: Dogs are being dumped all over rural Texas roads
A new law may help, but shelters are overflowing
A recent social media post told of a cruel scene in the small North Texas town of Valley View: Someone in a truck stopped on the side of a road, forced a dog outside the vehicle and sped off. The pup chased the truck as it accelerated toward the interstate, but the animal soon gave up.
The poster, the sole witness, said she yelled at the dog ditcher to stop but couldn’t get a license plate number. She pleaded for the public’s help, but by the time local property owners got to the scene, the dog was long gone.
Unfortunately, dog dumping is on the rise across Texas as animal shelters operate at or beyond their capacities and pet owners struggle to make ends meet, experts say.
A new state law could help. It prohibits anyone convicted of animal abandonment or another cruelty charge from owning companion animals for five years. The possession ban, which went into effect in September, was authored by Rep. Matt Shaheen, R-Plano, and supported by several law enforcement officials who rightly noted the link between animal cruelty and violence against humans.
But much more must be done. Animal abandonment, a Class A misdemeanor, is particularly on the rise along country roads, where there are often few witnesses. “This truly is becoming a crisis of epic proportions as we see our rural counties growing and exploding,” Shelby Bobosky, executive director of the Texas Humane Legislation Network, told us.
Bobosky said her organization has traveled the state educating judges and prosecutors about the new law. She’s also traveled to several rural counties to advise local sheriffs, overwhelmed with dog dumping in their jurisdictions, on ways to help mitigate the problem. Many are posting signs warning of the criminal consequences of animal abandonment. Others are placing hidden wildlife cameras in problem areas, or encouraging property owners to do so, in hopes of catching perpetrators in the act.
Often, however, the only evidence of an abandoned dog is the dog itself, roaming around a pasture or along a road looking for food and water. If lucky enough to be picked up by a good Samaritan, there are scant shelters to take it. And many are already over their limits.
That’s the case everywhere. Dallas Animal Services, for example, this week reported that it was at 139% capacity. And SPCA of Texas facilities are “bursting at the seams with animals, including an influx of puppies and kittens, unlike anything we’ve seen in the past 15 years,” spokeswoman Maura Davies told us in an email.
Bobosky, also an adjunct law professor at Southern Methodist University, said many rural counties don’t have a shelter at all, something she hopes the next Legislature will address. We do, too.
Texans need to know there are consequences to dumping an unwanted dog on the side of the road. But they also need humane alternatives to give up a pet.
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Fort Worth Star-Telegram. June 8, 2024.
Editorial: Republicans own Texas. So, why is the state GOP acting like it expects to lose?
For a party that hasn’t lost a statewide election in nearly 30 years, the Texas GOP sure is acting like it expects to start losing.
First, there was the obsession with voter fraud, a serious issue but never so widespread or alarming to merit the paranoia it has stirred among some Republicans. Then, there was the push to close primary elections to only certain voters, as if Democrats and independents are flooding GOP nominating contests.
The latest addition to the Texas Republican Party platform, while creative, is a wild overreaction to — well, we’re not sure what, since Republicans are still dominating elections. The small, populist group that has taken over the state party apparatus wants Texas to require that candidates for statewide office win not just the most individual votes in the general election, but also a majority in each of the state’s 254 counties.
The party would also require that amendments to the state constitution get majorities in two-thirds of the counties. Right now, most amendments that clear the Legislature are approved by voters. with healthy majorities anyway.
These are the reactionary moves of a party that expects to struggle soon to win majorities, not one that has remade the state’s political scene in a little more than a generation. They would shift power to rural counties that strongly vote Republican. It’s true that Texas’ big cities tend to vote Democratic. But this reads like a tacit acknowledgment that the suburbs are slipping away from the GOP, too.
The ideas are constitutionally dubious, as they would violate the principle of one person, one vote. Some might compare them to the Electoral College, but that’s a faulty reading of history. Our unique method of electing a president, whatever you think of it, was a compromise among sovereign states coming together to form a union, meant to protect small states from being overwhelmed by large ones.
Texas is not a collection of counties that came together to form the state. The counties are subsets of the state. The comparison falls apart.
The party is guilty of a faulty reading of politics, too. Republicans seem to agree with Democrats that if more people vote, especially in urban and suburban areas, it will hurt the GOP. Political science suggests otherwise. Daron Shaw, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, has analyzed decades worth of election data to show that even when voter turnout is high, the result tends to mirror the partisan breakdown in the electorate.
Perhaps the small ultra-conservative group that runs the GOP has one good point, not that it’s making it explicitly. The hard-right turn on issues such as abortion doesn’t match the larger population of Texas. The further the GOP wants to go, the more it may struggle.
And yet, Texas is plenty conservative, especially on economics, immigration and even some of the social policies that the far-right focuses on. Persuading Texans to reject liberalism, especially higher taxes and more expansive state services, is not a challenge.
Party platforms need not be taken too seriously. They are created in processes controlled by fire-breathing activists, and both parties tend to craft platforms that are more wishful than prescriptive. The voting changes the Texas GOP wants would require amending the state constitution, which is a high bar: two-thirds support in the Senate and House and a majority of voters in a statewide election.
Curtailing the power of the majority is an important feature of American politics. We do not swing wildly between governments and policies because of the wise protections for minority views that the Founders placed into the U.S. Constitution and the American political culture.
But at some point, anti-majoritarian becomes anti-democratic. The Texas GOP approaches that threshold.
And it need not do so. Parties should broaden their appeal, not shrink it. That doesn’t have to mean sacrificing principles. It means winning arguments and accepting incremental victories.
Becoming and remaining a majority party is not easy; why not just change the systems to lock in your wins?
But the hard work of voter persuasion and turnout is how Republicans have dominated Texas for years. The desperation of proposals such as requiring county majorities suggests at least some in the party are no longer confident that can continue.
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Houston Chronicle. June 5, 2024.
Editorial: Texas abortion exceptions are clear as blood. Just ask the Texas Supreme Court.
Amanda Zurawski was 17 weeks pregnant with her first child when her doctor gave her a gut-wrenching diagnosis: her cervix was prematurely dilated. A miscarriage was certain. Doctors in Austin denied her an abortion because the fetus still had a heartbeat and sent her home, advising her to stay close to the hospital due to the risk to her health. She developed an infection throughout her body and spent three days in an intensive care unit. Though she survived, the infection scarred one of her fallopian tubes so badly that she’s had to turn to in vitro fertilization.
On Friday, the Texas Supreme Court ruled that the doctors who denied Zurawski an abortion because they feared civil penalties or criminal prosecution under Texas’ strict abortion ban were “simply wrong in that legal assessment.” For 19 other women who joined the suit, the justices had the same sort of answer. Doctors and hospitals are merely confused about what the law says. Surely, then, the court would at least clarify the law and underline the supposed exceptions that lawmakers claim are already in place?
Wrong. The state’s highest civil court declined to provide answers for the 20 women and two doctors who asked the court to clarify the emergency exceptions to Texas’ abortion ban. The court’s justices were unanimous in their apparent shock and awe that doctors can’t make sense of the exceptions as written.
Instead, the court argued that state lawmakers have actually demonstrated an “unmistakable commitment to protecting the lives of pregnant women” who experience life-threatening complications. The state law, they contend, is perfectly clear. Doctors simply have to use “reasonable medical judgment,” and perform an abortion when they see fit.
Using Zurawski as a harrowing example, the court wrote: “Ms. Zurawski’s agonizing wait to be ill ‘enough’ for induction, her development of sepsis, and her permanent physical injury are not the results the law commands.”
Never mind the fact that these physicians risk felony prosecution or losing their medical license if they judge incorrectly.
What the court’s ruling underscores is that legal challenges to Texas’ abortion ban have become a high-stakes game of hot potato.
None of the three branches of state government are keen to take responsibility for a law that is putting doctors at risk and their patients in danger. Gov. Greg Abbott and the Republican-controlled Legislature have not adequately amended it. The courts are stuck in an endless tug-of-war interpreting the law, with some lower district courts attempting to provide pregnant women temporary relief, only for those injunctions to be swatted down by the state Supreme Court. Meanwhile, Attorney General Ken Paxton continues to weaponize the statute for political gain, gleefully threatening doctors with prosecution if they overstep the law’s hazy boundaries.
The ruling also has a far more far-reaching consequence, effectively turning the highly complex nature of medical care and human biology into one where doctors must use “objectivity” to assess whether a woman has a life-threatening pregnancy. The law, the court wrote, “demands that medical facts support the need for an abortion.”
Of course, doctors frequently disagree with each other, even when looking at the same scans and test results. Justice Jane Bland, writing on behalf of the court, argued that “reasonable medical judgment” does not mean “that every doctor would reach the same conclusion.” Yet, we’ve already seen how those disagreements impact abortion decisions in Texas. When Kate Cox, a Dallas resident, sued the state last year begging for an abortion after receiving a fatal fetal diagnosis, Paxton’s attorneys pointed to a deposition from an obstetrician-gynecologist who disagreed with Cox’s doctor that the diagnosis qualified for an abortion exception. The Supreme Court ultimately sided with the state, ruling that Cox’s condition did not qualify for an abortion.
That’s cold comfort to doctors risking their medical licenses and prison time. Which physician will step up first to test Bland’s words? The one who doesn’t have a mortgage payment or children to put through college or a long list of established clients depending on him or her.
The Texas Supreme Court’s rulings leave the onus on the Texas Medical Board to provide guidance as perhaps the last lifeline left for pregnant women seeking emergency abortions. As we’ve written, the board’s initial proposed guidance failed to give physicians the protection some were asking for, including a clear, but not limited, list of specific medical conditions that would warrant an exemption to the abortion ban. Instead, their proposal has been widely pilloried, particularly for adding language requiring doctors to provide ample documentation of literature they use to decide whether an abortion is necessary. Even state Supreme Court Justice Brett Busby, in a concurring opinion, chided the medical board’s proposal as a regulation that “does nothing more than restate the relevant statutes.”
The Legislature and the Texas Supreme Court are the ones who twisted the medical board in this Gordian knot. At this point, it appears the only way to untie it is with the sword of a decisive vote by an electorate fed up enough to throw out the leaders who falsely claim to be pro-life while endangering mothers’ lives and their ability to give birth in the future.
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San Antonio Express-News. June 5, 2024.
Editorial: Appointment of anti-abortion activist taints Texas’ maternal death review
The review of maternal deaths in Texas has long been questionable.
Those questions have been magnified with the recent appointment of a San Antonio-based doctor, who is vehemently anti-abortion, to the Texas Maternal Mortality and Morbidity Review Committee.
There’s no question Dr. Ingrid Skop, an OB-GYN with more than three decades of experience, is medically qualified for the position. But her outspoken anti-abortion politics taints the committee. Can she be objective in her analysis? Is she willing to consider maternal deaths due to a lack of access to abortion? That these are fair questions threatens the MMMRC’s credibility.
Skop is one of seven new appointees to the committee. The committee, now with 23 members, studies data on pregnancy-related deaths and makes recommendations to the Legislature on best practices and policy changes. Done correctly, the process would reveal the effects of Texas’ near-total abortion ban, which then would inform state lawmakers and policies.
In addition to expanding the committee during the 2023 legislative session, lawmakers increased the number of community member roles to two, including one representing an urban area and one representing a rural area.
A new requirement that members must work in health care eliminated the role of a community advocate. Nakeenya Wilson, a Black, Austin-based maternal health advocate who nearly lost her life during childbirth, is no longer on the committee.
Skop has a long history of opposing abortion. She is vice president and director of medical affairs for the Charlotte Lozier Institute, the research arm of the political advocacy group Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America. She has testified before Congress, authored amicus briefs and produced medical studies.
In 2021, Skop testified during a congressional hearing that rape or incest victims as young as 9 or 10 could carry pregnancies to term.
From the steps of the state Capitol during a “Rally for Life” on Jan. 30, she called the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade “a victory in the battle but not the end of the war.”
When Kate Cox of Dallas asked a judge last year to allow her to terminate her pregnancy after her fetus was diagnosed with a typically fatal condition, Skop signed a sworn declaration against Cox’s request seeking a medical exception.
Skop described the claim that doctors can’t provide quality health care due to the abortion ban scaremongering and a lie. This ignores experiences like those of Cox and Amanda Zurawski, who developed sepsis after doctors refused to perform an abortion when her water broke at 18 weeks and miscarriage was guaranteed.
Skop, of course, is entitled to her views, just as her medical expertise should be recognized. But, in turn, does her political activism make it impossible for her to objectively study maternal death data?
When the Texas Maternal Mortality and Morbidity Review Committee formed in 2013 in response to a new law, it found Black women were more than twice as likely as white women, and more than four times as likely as Hispanic women, to die from pregnancy and childbirth.
The committee’s most recent report, published in 2022, was delayed from its statutorily required Sept. 1 deadline to late December — which just happened to fall after the midterm election. It revealed a grim picture for Texas women, particularly for women of color. This is one reason why it was so important to have Wilson on the committee.
In a recent statement to Hearst Newspapers, Skop said the state’s high rate of maternal death “deserves rigorous discourse” and “there are complex reasons for these statistics, including chronic illnesses, poverty, and difficulty obtaining prenatal care.”
All true, but what about a lack of access to abortion?
Back in September, she wrote in a blog on the Charlotte Lozier website, “Twelve Reasons Women’s Health and Maternal Mortality Will Not Worsen, and May Improve, in States with Abortion Limits.” That doesn’t sound like someone who is willing to consider the impacts a lack of abortion access can have on women’s health.
Skop’s term expires in 2031. That’s a long time for an activist to play an outsize role on a committee that should be objective.
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