All opinions expressed in this article are solely the opinions of the contributors.
In early July, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) enlisted the Texas National Guard to arrest and bus illegal Mexican immigrants back to entry points along the border. More recently, Abbott sent thousands of migrants to Washington, D.C. to prove a point about President Joe Biden’s lax immigration policies. Straight Arrow News contributor Ruben Navarrette argues it’s hypocritical for pro-business Texas to treat immigrants so harshly when those immigrants have been so instrumental to the state’s success:
Texas sure produces some mighty bitter wine. What I can’t swallow is that here you have the second most populous state in the country, a place whose brand is all about strength and independence and taming the Wild West by unleashing the Texas Rangers to go kill a bunch of Mexicans. And yet, when the issue turns to immigration, Texas gets all squishy. It puts out a wine that’s so weak, so sour, and most of all, so transparent, you can see right through it.
Sure, I live in my home state of California. But before you chalk up what I’ve got to say to an interstate rivalry as old as Southwest, you ought to know that I have zero desire to mess with Texas. I love the place more than blue bonnets and yellow roses. In fact, I consider it my second home. My mom and my oldest daughter were both born in Texas, and I spent five years living in the Lone Star State while I wrote editorials and columns for the Dallas Morning News.
But recently, when a good friend who lives in Texas, a very conservative Mexican-American, glibly told me that illegal immigrants were “destroying the state,” I wasn’t having it. No, I corrected him. Illegal Immigrants built Texas. They made cities like Dallas and Houston virtually recession-proof all through the 1990s and 2000s. And even today, Texans can’t stop hiring the undocumented to do their chores for them.
If this is a wound, and I’m not sure it is, but if it is a wound, then it’s self-inflicted. I went on — if you Texans are really tired of winning, if you’re sick of doing so well with a powerhouse economy that even in bad times is going gangbusters, you should pass a law tomorrow that punishes employers. All the illegal immigrants would pack up and leave the state and go to Oklahoma or Missouri or Indiana. With every state in the country facing a worker shortage, there would be plenty of places eager to take these immigrants off your hands.
