‘A sizable impact’: How Trump’s mass deportations could affect New Mexico’s workforce, economy

Editor’s note: This is the second in a series of stories exploring the impact of Donald Trump’s second term as president on New Mexico.

Marcela Díaz remembers when the federal Department of Homeland Security conducted I-9 audits, a means of identifying undocumented workers employed by local businesses, during former president Donald Trump’s first term in office.

“Several businesses here in New Mexico, all within the same two-week period, got these I-9 audits,” said Díaz, executive director of the immigrant workers’ rights organization Somos Un Pueblo Unido. “Employers didn’t know how to protect their workers, or themselves, and they were feeling pressured by a lot of the folks at (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) saying, ‘Hey, we can find you. This could potentially be criminal, so cooperate with us and everything will be fine.’ But cooperating with them means basically handing them over all the information that they request.”

Díaz said the audits by federal agents had an immediate effect on workers, many of whom left their jobs — a move that resulted in the loss of income for undocumented workers and their families and kneecapped local businesses. In other cases, the audits resulted in criminal charges and, eventually, deportation.

Díaz and other workers’ rights groups in the state are prepping for mass deportations under a second Trump term, a plan that is creeping closer to reality as the president-elect and his incoming administration have upped their rhetoric on sending undocumented immigrants back to their home countries.

“I got three words for them: shock and awe,” Tom Homan, President-elect Trump’s border czar, said on a recent episode of Donald Trump Jr.’s ‘Triggered’ show in talking about mass deportations.

In New Mexico, the impact of mass deportations could be a major blow to the already low workforce participation rate — and mean millions, maybe even billions fewer dollars flowing through the state’s economy. And while Hispanic supporters of Trump are hoping that only criminals get deported, his actions in his first term would point to broader deportations, which could have a huge impact on American businesses, and particularly in New Mexico for the agricultural, construction and the crucial energy sectors.

Filling the gaps

New Mexico harbors about 192,400 immigrants, a mix that includes green-card holders, refugees and those with temporary status, according to a report from the American Immigration Council (AIC), a national advocacy group.

That number also includes an estimated 53,200 undocumented immigrants, who are about 28% of the overall immigrant population here in the state.

Undocumented immigrants make up 2.5% of the state’s population and an even larger percentage of the working population at close to 4%, according to the report.

Nationally, undocumented workers make up almost half of all crop farmworkers, according to a 2023 report by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and nearly a quarter of construction workers, according to a 2021 report from the Center for American Progress. While New Mexico lacks precise figures, the vast majority of its undocumented immigrants work in the agriculture, construction, hospitality and energy industries, according to Reilly White, a local economist and professor at the University of New Mexico’s Anderson School of Management.

Undocumented workers know that acceptance of under-the-table employment or providing false documentation can lead to work with established businesses, he said. Regardless, those workers have contributed to economic growth across the country — and here in New Mexico, many have filled roles affected by employment shortages, White added.

“Businesses are going to be very tempted (to hire) an undocumented worker, because what we’ve seen post-COVID has been an increase in labor costs across the board,” White said. “A restaurant might have a profit margin of 2 or 3%. … If we see undocumented workers, they’re here because there are jobs here and there are jobs here because, in most cases, there is not a corresponding availability of (legal) workers at whatever rate the company wants to pay to fill those jobs.”

As America has turned into a more highly educated service-based economy, menial jobs like in agricultural fields have increasingly been filled by undocumented immigrants, who often come from subsistence farming countries in Central and South America. In New Mexico, that is certainly the case, where undocumented workers find themselves in jobs in the agriculture industry. Some crops in New Mexico like chile, pecans and onions still favor handpicked labor, said Jay Lillywhite, a professor with the Department of Agricultural Economics and Agricultural Business at New Mexico State University.

Lillywhite said deporting those workers would “reduce the labor supply, (and) that’s going to increase the cost of labor.”

Two things could mitigate that: increased use of mechanization — yes, robots harvesting crops — or channeling more immigrants through legal programs. But both have their challenges, and neither solution can be ramped up quickly enough to be used in the near future by many New Mexican businesses, Lillywhite said.

With technological advancements, mechanized harvesting has become more common for certain crops. That is also the case in New Mexico, where some researchers and farmers have prototyped machines that pick chile. But there are many more complicated crops where such a solution is years away from mass implementation.

Programs that also bring workers from outside the U.S. to fill the state’s agricultural labor shortages have also become more common. H-2A, for instance, allows for temporary agricultural workers from other countries to work American fields for up to 10 months.

But H-2A can be costly for some farmers, particularly smaller, family-owned operations in the state, said Travis Day, a lobbyist with the New Mexico Chile Association.

Day said the program is mostly used by larger chile businesses in the Hatch and Deming areas who can afford the associated costs with the program like housing and meal vouchers, and higher pay.

For smaller farms, however, the inability to afford such a program has led to the hiring of undocumented workers, some of whom have worked with those businesses for many years, Day said. He estimates that hundreds of undocumented workers pick chiles in an industry that employs roughly 5,000 workers each year.

“The mass deportation immigration policy that the Trump administration comes out with, it’ll certainly have an impact,” Day said. But “I think we can offset that impact with having some cutting of red tape when it comes to getting some of these folks over through the legal process.”

Undocumented workers also make up part of the construction sector here in New Mexico, playing a vital role in areas like the homebuilding industry.

Lana Smiddle, executive vice president of the Home Builders Association of Central New Mexico, which represents some 600 companies from larger developers to subcontractors, said the workforce shortage in the state has “been something that’s coming, and we knew it. We just couldn’t get ahead of it.”

Part of the shortage has been the result of a lack of marketing the trades to young adults and students as a proven source of income. Plugging that shortage has resulted in the hiring of some undocumented workers.

“They’ve always been important,” Smiddle said.

“A lot of our builders, their trades depend on them,” Smiddle said. “We just don’t really have an idea what the policies are going to be. … We’re all playing the guessing game at this point.”

While much of the focus is on the gaps in the workforce filled by undocumented immigrants, Anna Trillo, staff attorney with the New Mexico Immigrant Law Center, said what’s forgotten is the entrepreneurial spirit of that population, some of whom are business owners in the state.

Since July, she said, she’s helped about 15 to 20 individuals who’ve come to the law center’s workshops “to seek legal advice, to find out information about what an LLC is and how to register with the (secretary of state).”

“It provides economic mobility for themselves and their families,” Trillo said. “It’s important to remember immigrants try to do things the legal way. Just because there isn’t a legal pathway for them to have status in the U.S., because it is so difficult and almost nonexistent, doesn’t mean they don’t do everything else legally.”

‘A lot of lost money for the economy’

In southeastern New Mexico, immigrant workers also make up a fair share of the oil and gas workforce, said Díaz, whose organization earlier this year commissioned a report on the industry.

Díaz said some of the state’s biggest population gains have come in that area of the state, and immigrants have gone in and helped “avert significant population losses or help grow those counties.” About 46% of oil and gas workers are Latino, including many documented and undocumented immigrants, according to the University of New Mexico report on the industry released in January.

“I think about the southeastern part of the state as being key counties because they generate oil and gas revenues. Last year, (they) made up close to 40% of our general budget for the state, as well as those resources funding our public education system,” Díaz said.

The AIC in its report said undocumented immigrants account for $312 million in state, local and federal taxes.

And their spending power, according to the AIC report, stands at $1.1 billion, money that directly supports businesses in the state. White said that money accounts for as much as 1% of New Mexico’s gross domestic product.

“The amount of money that stays here (they spend with) businesses and food and other things — that’s going to have a negative impact to have those workers removed. That’s a lot of small businesses, that’s housing, that’s other resources that are reliant on income from these workers that will suddenly dry up,” White said. “It’s a sizable impact.”

Added Díaz, “It’s a lot of lost money for the economy. We also pay income taxes, so there’s a loss for the state. It’s the industries that we work in that will see an immediate loss. I don’t think we can underestimate the loss of income for families with U.S. citizen children who aren’t going anywhere.”