At a cozy San Antonio restaurant with vibrant oil paintings on brick walls, most of the seven waiters, bartenders and chefs who work to serve customers six nights a week are people living in the United States without legal status.
They are from El Salvador, Colombia, Venezuela, Peru and Mexico and two have worked there for more than a dozen years.
“I’ve been trying to hire people who are legal — they don’t last for whatever reason,” said a local businessman, who spoke on condition of anonymity. But he’s not the exception in the food and beverage industry.
“I don’t think there is a restaurant or a kitchen without a Latin [immigrant lacking documents],” in San Antonio, he said. Without them, he said owners would likely be forced to close restaurants. “It would be impossible to find other workers because it is already bad.”
With San Antonio recently identified as one of the first places where Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) plans to arrest and deport people living in the country without legal status — an effort that began in late January — it’s unclear what the impact on the city’s economy could be.
But business owners and entire sectors are watching closely.
The American Immigration Council estimated in 2022 that there are more than 6 million workers lacking legal status across various industries in the U.S., with almost half working in California, Texas and Florida.
In Texas, 10% of the workforce is made up of workers who immigrated illegally, about twice as many as in most other states, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas.
In late December, the Dallas Fed released results from its Texas Business Outlook Surveys (TBOS). It showed respondents were more positive than negative about prospective economic conditions under the incoming presidential administration, though some worried about potential trade and immigration policy changes.
“A dearth of construction workers paired with tariff-driven raw materials cost increases could limit efforts to expand the housing supply,” the report states.
While the deportations have so far not risen to the level of “millions,” as promised by President Donald Trump since taking office on Jan. 20, the threat remains.
“If this spreads fear in the larger immigrant community, so that people stop going out, stop shopping, stop going out to eat and so forth, for fear of the authorities, then you might see a broader impact,” said the economist Pia Orrenius, vice president of the Dallas Fed.
In the past few weeks, the restaurant owner we interviewed has had to allay the fears of workers who worry about ICE raids they’ve heard about in other places.
“We are in a crisis now,” he says, and reminds the staff that they are in a “loaner culture” now. If they remember they are guests, they won’t have to worry.
“It’s like going to the house that’s not yours — you behave, you wash your dishes, you do homework, you do your chores,” he said. “Maintain order and this country will take you.”
‘In the shadows’
Much of the San Antonio economy relies on “low-wage, low-skill” labor, said Belinda Román, associate professor of economics at St. Mary’s University. And the data shows some of that labor is provided by workers who are not in the country legally.
With a new executive order targeting migrants, now those workers could be at risk of being summarily arrested, detained and deported.
“If they start picking up everybody, then I think a lot of things are going to shut down, and that’s going to be painful,” Román said.
Román grew up in El Paso and after earning her degrees in economics, returned to that city to work for the federal government on border and immigration issues.
Among Román’s tasks was research to determine how the U.S.-Mexico border economy benefits from both legal and illegal immigration if migrants are sending money they earn to their home countries.
She found that there was in fact a benefit if a certain portion of their earnings was going to buy things locally, on products and services that are taxed and pay banking and exchange fees in the local economy to send money home.
More recently, Román has been trying to determine the economic value of domestic work — such as housekeeping, child care and elder care — often performed by immigrants without legal status, especially women.
“Because they’re here, their [American] employers can go out and work and do things they wouldn’t be able to do,” she said, which drives the economy. “What I’ve been working toward doing is trying to capture the dollar value [of that].”
The impact is challenging to calculate because it’s unknown exactly how many people are in the U.S. doing that work, who “are in the shadows,” she said. “It’s a little bit more delicate conversation to have, and given the present environment, it’s going to be harder to have as well.”
Without those workers, she’s certain the fallout would be similar to the COVID-19 pandemic when people could not go to work, especially in those hospitality jobs, and “everything fell apart very quickly,” Román said. “Instead of COVID, now we have a different sort of threat … an enforcement action.”
Labor supply
At his inauguration, Trump promised to deport immigrants without legal status, and others, en masse.
“What I understand is that some of the focus of this policy is that they’re looking for criminals,” Román said. The problem with casting a wide net through mass deportation is the potential to victimize honest, hard-working people, she added.
And reassurances from local politicians and authorities, that criminals are the target, have only elevated the fear among the immigrant community, said the local restaurant owner. “Those are the exact messages that scare people,” he said.
The highest number of workers who are undocumented in the U.S., according to the American Immigration Council, can be found in the construction industry, which is also the largest overall employment sector in San Antonio.
In San Antonio, the construction and real estate industry brought $50 billion in revenue to the city in 2023, according to the economic analysis and strategy firm TXP.
If arrests and mass deportations of construction workers occur, “some of the construction that’s going up, this stuff isn’t going to get built, or if it’s going to get built, it’s going to be much more expensive,” Román said.
Industries with the second and third highest number of undocumented workers in the nation are agriculture and hospitality, another of the city’s key industries.
The Report reached out to local construction industry groups such as the Greater San Antonio Builders Association, the Real Estate Council of San Antonio and the Associated General Contractors of San Antonio (AGC). But staff in those offices declined to share an official response or talk about how the construction workforce could be affected by deportations.
The CEO of the National Association of Home Builders, Jim Tobin, has said that mass deportation of the undocumented labor pool “would be detrimental to the construction industry and our labor supply and exacerbate our housing affordability problems.”
He said this “vital and flexible source of labor” fills an estimated 30% of trade jobs for builders, like carpentry, plastering, masonry and electrical roles.
Legal entry
Likewise, the AGC’s legislative advocacy efforts concerning the industry’s persistent labor shortages are mostly directed at the national level.
Brian Turmail, vice president of public affairs and workforce for the Washington D.C.-based Associated General Contractors of America, pointed to a study that showed nearly 80% of contractors say it is difficult to find qualified hourly craft workers to hire — even more predict it will get harder to hire in 2025.
The report states, “Contractors are worried that the incoming administration’s approach to immigration may further diminish the supply of qualified workers to hire.”
Turmail said that, in addition to doing more to promote construction jobs at the high school level, the federal government needs to expand lawful opportunities for people to work in construction.
“If the concern is that we have this untrackable, undocumented workforce, the obvious answer is, invest in our workforce and allow people to come in lawfully so we track them, to tax them,” he said, adding such programs could be temporary.
In the nation’s agriculture industry, migrant workers make up 61% of the total farmworkers, according to a 2022 U.S. Department of Labor survey, and 42% are not legally authorized to work in the country.
Those who are in the U.S. legally are temporary immigrants who entered under H-2A visas, which farmers use to hire foreign nationals for seasonal jobs.
But the visa process is expensive and lengthy, with more than 200 complex rules, and is limited to 60,000 people a year.
Most of those slots are filled by workers in the hospitality industry, Turmail said, and only 6,000 to 8,000 go to construction, an industry that nationally employs 8 million people. Other avenues for legal entry to work are similarly limiting, he said.
NAHB’s “Blueprint to Address the Housing Affordability Crisis – 10-Point Housing Plan,” states that the current patchwork approach for … documenting employment status not only creates additional and unforeseen burdens but also disincentivizes housing production.
In San Antonio, the economist Román also expressed deep concern for immigrants, people who have a value beyond what they contribute economically.
Losing those workers to mass deportation is of course a threat to the local economy: “It just is so invaluable to the fabric of us,” she said. “But you know, they’re at risk, too.”
Reporter Raquel Torres contributed to this story.
