Trump's promises seem to be at odds

Migrants a large portion of oil and gas workforce

By: Lauren Villagran
USA Today

LEA COUNTY, NEW MEXICO - This sliver of southeastern New Mexico dotes with pump-jacks and gas wells helped catapult the U.S. to energy independence five years ago. Immigrant workers, including those here illegally, helped make it happen.
..... That has made for an uncomfortable reality here in this proudly conservative county, but the politics are deep red and nearly 80% of voters favored Donald trump in the last election.
..... Now, Trump's twin vows to "drill baby, drill" and deport unauthorized immigrants are on a collision course in Lea County.
..... Here, fake work papers can be bought for $250 and oil companies employ workers - knowingly or not - who sneaked across the America's borders or overstayed a tourist visa. The complicated reality, experts say, is that today's oil and gas economy is carried on the backs of migrant workers.
..... Carlos Diaz, 50, who is Mexican, is an oil and gas safety inspector in Lea County. he has been deported multiple times, including at least twice during Trump's presidency. He has always came back and found an employer willing to hire him.
..... "We're the most important labor force there have," said Diaz, who asked to be identified by the name for which he isn't known locally. "we're Mexican. We're close by. We're easy ... to hire."
..... A USA Today investigation found that immigrants - including those without authorization - increasingly do the dangerous and difficult jobs that make fracking for oil and gas possible in the United States.
..... Interviews with more than a dozen current and former unauthorized oil-field workers and their family members, as well as immigration advocates, elected officials, economists, researchers and federal investigators, revealed an oil and gas industry supercharged by demand during the post-pandemic economic recovery.
..... "Undocumented workers are one of the oil and gas industry's best-kept secrets," said U.S. Representative Gabe Vasquez, a Democrat who represents southern New Mexico's oil and gas country, despite losing Lea County in the last election. "They are the shadow workforce."
..... Trump has repeatedly argued that sealing the border and deporting unauthorized immigrates is necessary to fight the flow of drugs and reduce crime - and conservative Lea County residents agree. His promise to roll back environmental regulations and red tape is a winning one on a community that lives and dies by the price of a barrel of oil.
..... Even immigrant workers who could end up deported see dollar signs in Trump's promise to energize the industry.
..... "With Trump," Diaz said, "there will definitely be more work in oil - that's what you hear around here."

A boom-bust cycle in the oil industry

..... In Lea County's largest city p Hobbs, population 40,508 - today's oil boom looks like restaurants filled three times a day with tables of men in work boots, a Starbucks open seven days a week at 5 AM., big-city traffic, and 23 hotels in a town too small for a target.
..... But everyone in the county dreads the busts, which - when they hit - hit hard.
..... Restaurants and hotels close or scrape by. Equipment lots fill up with rows of parked oilfield machinery. Workers with citizenship or legal residency wait on unemployment for the global price of oil to climb again. With no access to government benefits, immigrants working illegally sit tight and do what they have to survive.
..... Now, with the industry going strong, "if there was a mass deportation, it would be profoundly disruptive across the oil patch,' said Gabe Collins, energy analysts at Rice University;s Baker Institute in Houston.
..... "Think of all the folks who work here and who are wring money each week to Mexico," Collins said. "Imagen what happens when those flows are cut off. Not only do you have the immediate disruption, but you are actually setting the state for a larger humanitarian crisis in our hemisphere which will rebound back to the border."
..... Hobbs residents know how a workforce shortage can hold back oil and gas development.
..... In 2018, voters approved a $30 million bond to, in part, help fund a new technical program at Hobbs High, the largest high school in New Mexico. Now, the school's more than 3,000 students - many of them the children of immigrants or immigrants themselves - can train to work in the oil and gas industry. The program is open to all students, without regard for their immigration status.

Why can't immigrant workers get a visa?

..... The federal government issue visas for seasonal farmworkers and highly skilled workers like doctors and software developers - but not for low-skill, year-round jobs like those that underpin the oil industry.
..... Neither Trump nor President Joe Biden has proposed expanding work visas for oil and gas.
..... "These jobs are walled off form the legal immigration system," said David Bier, director of immigration studies at the libertarian CATO Institute. "The vast majority of these jobs are year-round positions not requiring a college degree, and there in no work visas for that."

Looking toward the future

..... As voters look toward November, [2024] expectations for immigration reform from either party remain low.
.... A bipartisan border security bill - negotiated by three senators, including a Republican, a Democrat and an independent - failed earlier this year [2024] after Trump bashed the proposal. With no legislative solution, immigration remains a flash-point in the presidential campaign.
..... Meanwhile, a huge gap remains in the U.S. economy between open jobs and workers to hire.
..... Even if every unemployed American took one of the 8.8 million jobs the Labor Department lists as available now in any industry nationwide, more than 2 million positions would still be left unfilled.

HOME