A new report from the Caminos Institute puts a dollar figure on something Rio Grande Valley business owners have mostly discussed in anecdotes: the economic cost of immigration enforcement.
In a wide-ranging interview with RGVBJ reporter Kristen Mosbrucker-Garza, Caminos Institute executive producer Andrik Gonzalez laid out findings from a new analysis built on FOIA’d federal data from the Deportation Data Project. Between October 2022 and March 2025, the four-county Rio Grande Valley saw 13,377 immigration apprehensions and 10,142 deportations — with apprehensions nearly doubling in 2025 alone and the share of apprehensions ending in deportation climbing from 68% under the Biden administration to 86% under the Trump administration.
Gonzalez and his team then modeled what those removals meant for the local economy. Because the Valley’s roughly 130,000 undocumented residents participate in the workforce at a rate of 93.4%, the institute estimates more than 9,300 laborers were removed from the local labor force — concentrated in construction, health care and social assistance, and food and accommodation. Factoring in lost direct labor income, remittance patterns and local sales tax, the report puts the total economic hit to the Rio Grande Valley at roughly $180 million over three and a half years, with 43% of that loss — about $78 million — occurring in 2025 alone.
The conversation also covers the human side of the data: median age, the number of children affected, and what industry leaders like the South Texas Builders Association are already seeing in labor shortages and slowed home sales.
Listen to the full interview, and hear about the complete methodology, below. Also available on your favorite podcast provider.
The following is a rough, AI-generated transcript of Kristen Mosbrucker-Garza’s interview with Caminos Institute executive producer Andrik Gonzalez. Minor errors and misspellings may appear. For the full conversation, listen to the episode above or through your preferred podcast platform.
Interview conducted by Kristen Mosbrucker-Garza, Rio Grande Valley Business Journal
KRISTEN MOSBRUCKER-GARZA: I’m working on an ongoing series about what it really means for our communities and our economies — not just our changing demographics, but our changing population.
It’s something I’ve looked into a little bit. I’ve heard from business owners, but sometimes those things can be hard to quantify until you really spend time on it, and it sounds like this is something you’ve been doing. Something that’s been in the back of my head is: How many DACA recipients did we have in Texas? How many DACA recipients did we have in the Valley? Are teachers really losing their certification? It’s one of those things that’s so anecdotal in some ways, because it’s also the visa — the immigration system, which is very individualistic in a lot of ways.
ANDRIK GONZALEZ: And so the reason for this report is exactly the sentiment you just shared right now — we know what it is anecdotally, but for our policymakers, our stakeholders and really the general public in mind: What does that look like in numbers? We’re seeing it on social media, all of this, but we don’t have that quantifiable aspect to it. So the Caminos Institute — which is the group I lead as executive producer — that was our goal: to be a platform for researchers in the Rio Grande Valley, or researchers who are interested in the Rio Grande Valley, to be able to produce that sort of data, which I think is much needed. That’s why we started with, I think, a pretty strong report. Our goal — our de facto model, really — is timely and relevant. We want stuff that’s going to be timely and relevant to the community we’re serving. In this case, it was a report on immigration enforcement here in the Rio Grande Valley.
KRISTEN MOSBRUCKER-GARZA: Cool. So, for folks who haven’t yet — what’s your name, your title, whereabouts are you from? What city? What’s your story?
ANDRIK GONZALEZ: My name is Andrik Gonzalez — that’s A-N-D-R-I-K. Telemundo called my name wrong last week, so — ah, qué lástima. I’m going to start using sign language for people at some point. But yeah, I’m the executive producer of a newly incorporated group, the Caminos Institute. Prior to that, I worked in several different capacities, primarily academic, here at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. I also served as a consultant there. I worked on both state and federal assessments that were funded specifically here in the Rio Grande Valley.
And for some time, I was at the Brookings Institution, where I worked on several different things, but among those was a quality-of-life study in the state of Michigan among Latino populations — a study led by a fantastic mentor of mine, Tonya Carmona, a former senior adviser to the Biden White House. There was a study on what she termed policy volatility — in this case, immigration enforcement and tariff policy — on Valley entrepreneurs. And then, what I’m most proud of: a report on quality of life among colonia residents here in the Rio Grande Valley — the largest report of its kind since the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas’s 2015 assessment. We released that back in April, and that concluded my time there.
After that, I realized that the Rio Grande Valley, at this moment — specifically as we’re growing in investment — is pointing toward needing some sort of platform for researchers, and like-minded individuals, to be able to produce the data I believe is necessary.
KRISTEN MOSBRUCKER-GARZA: You know, it’s interesting — I remember when I worked at the local newspaper a number of years ago, I would interact pretty regularly with local institutes, like the Border Economic Studies center at one point, and that’s kind of shifted and changed over time. Now, in the age of the internet, I think these big, glossy annual reports, or five-year reviews, or 10-year lookbacks — even the Texas Demographic Center — they’re trying to think of different ways to leverage the data, because there’s always a lag. And I think that’s always been the challenge between folks in daily news and researchers — that lag, especially when it comes to something like college enrollment data.
ANDRIK GONZALEZ: Exactly. And we actually got some of that from UTRGV not long ago, through a different source. But no, I mean, the purpose of Caminos really is to bridge that gap you’re talking about. Having worked in the academic sector, I understand that oftentimes the research being done is lost in some journal that nobody’s going to read or have access to, or maybe even the researchers themselves are studying within this academic bubble. We’re hoping to escape that. One of those avenues, of course, is social media — we just released a complimentary video to the report we put out. But figuring out how to do that well is going to be interesting, I believe, just because I’m not sure anybody’s really navigated that successfully. I can’t think of one single institution that has.
But that’s our goal — and even for researchers coming in, to be on platforms like the one we’re on right now, between you and me — I think it’s beneficial. I’m not sure how many readers you have, but I imagine it’s a substantial number, and this is one platform out of many. Our goal is to be able to reach people on those platforms — people watching Telemundo, for example, people reading the Rio Grande Valley Business Journal, people on Instagram and Facebook — so they can access this data.
KRISTEN MOSBRUCKER-GARZA: Yeah, and interestingly, when we launched this publication about a year ago, we were curious who our audience might be. As I meet people in the community, as I meet people who reach out to me, it’s a really diverse group — a lot of business people, a lot of consultants, people across the state, people interested in Texas, people interested in the border. I know our leaders have some expansion plans, too, hopefully, because historically our communities have gotten a lot of flash-in-the-pan coverage.
ANDRIK GONZALEZ: Right — but immigration-focused, from a daily standpoint.
KRISTEN MOSBRUCKER-GARZA: Right — of, “Oh, there was an ICE raid here,” or —
ANDRIK GONZALEZ: Exactly.
KRISTEN MOSBRUCKER-GARZA: And I remember about a year ago, the “ropa usada” raid — I covered that, and at some point I was thinking, I’m not sure how this fits into our coverage as a business journal, because it’s not to say we’re pro or anti anything, but how do we cover this from an economic lens? So when I covered that story, we tried to talk to the business owners, we talked to some of the employees, and then also some of the local leaders, because the local leaders are really the ones navigating all of this. Everyone from what we saw with the South Texas Builders Association — they’ve really been organizing, bringing not just politicians together but other business leaders in our communities, because we’re communities of small businesses to a large extent. And those are typically the people leaders listen to and seek advice from, because they want to know directly what’s happening to your company. Like we saw with 57 Concrete, for example — we wrote a story about how they filed for bankruptcy protection, and it was not because there wasn’t business.
ANDRIK GONZALEZ: Right. There’s actually — the price of concrete is the highest it’s ever been in our communities.
KRISTEN MOSBRUCKER-GARZA: It was not because we have a downturn in our economy, but because their existing workforce — who had a variety of legal statuses — and a lot of them, from what they told me, these builders told me, that because of the philosophy of the current administration, they just felt like, well, we’re just going to go in and shut everybody down. We’re going to put everybody in the van or the bus. They even included customers in that situation. And then they were just like, well, I guess we’ll sort it out or figure it out. It was just so incredibly disruptive at that time, and I’ve heard from bankers —
ANDRIK GONZALEZ: And those it disrupts — I’ll add real quickly — not just that specific business that got targeted. Now you have people who don’t want to go to restaurants because they’re afraid something similar might happen. They’re hearing — they’re just throwing anybody in the van. You might be a citizen, you might have your paperwork, but just the idea of immigration enforcement, of ICE coming into a business when you’re just a patron, and they throw you in a van — it’s a very scary thought process. So there’s a specific population being targeted, but this other population is fearing there might be repercussions for them just for being there.
KRISTEN MOSBRUCKER-GARZA: Yeah, and in some of my favorite restaurants in this community, I’ve noticed new signage that says you need not just an administrative warrant if you’re an ICE agent, but also a judicial warrant. And what always strikes me is the duality of that reality — and yet that place opens at 6 a.m., and guess who’s in the drive-through?
ANDRIK GONZALEZ: The guys in green — Border Patrol — and the guys in blue —
KRISTEN MOSBRUCKER-GARZA: You’re right — U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
ANDRIK GONZALEZ: Exactly — al mismo tiempo, the same people. Chris, Chris — you know, I did a photo one time at a Mexican restaurant, having lunch with other members of DHS, and it was at a Mexican restaurant. So it goes to say, like you said, the duality of these sorts of issues. But I’m not surprised.
KRISTEN MOSBRUCKER-GARZA: You know, I remember when [DHS Secretary Kristi] Noem came to this community, it was another situation where I was like, well, is this within our coverage scope? Is this something that’s important to business leaders and our communities? Because sometimes that kind of stuff is, and sometimes it’s not. But she was meeting with local farmers, and agriculture is big business in the Valley. So I went and met with some of those farmers about their experiences, their concerns, the facts they’ve faced — they’ve had people trespass on their land, they’ve had bad actors do illegal things, and that’s just as disruptive to our community.
So, I think that’s also the complex issue about it — and why I think, when you talk to people who live in the Valley, Latinos are not a voting bloc. It’s always been so interesting when people say, ‘Oh yeah, the Latino vote, gotta get that.’ But there’s even a duality in that, because you’d expect the Latino population to feel a certain way, for whatever reason.
ANDRIK GONZALEZ: I think we’ve been told the idea that they’re entirely anti-immigration-enforcement. You talk to some people and they’re not, right? And you said there’s an aspect of this issue where you’re experiencing some sort of illegal activity in your fields — we’re OK with that. I think the Latino population is OK with enforcement against that. But when we talk about the numbers, I find it very hard to believe that, over the span of three and a half years, of the 10,142 people who were deported, that all of that pool of people is, for whatever reason, complicit in the sort of illegal activities the administration itself claims to be enforcing against — whether that’s cartel enforcement or drug activity. Again, I don’t think 10,142 people, specifically here in the Rio Grande Valley, are — maybe a couple of them, without a doubt, I wouldn’t doubt that some have some sort of experience in that kind of illicit activity — but I don’t believe all of them are. I don’t want to speak for the Latino population, but we understand that immigration enforcement is necessary — there’s no doubt about it, especially to fight against some of these criminal activities. But there’s a limitation to that, and we’re starting to see a specific population of laborers being affected by the enforcement that’s going on.
KRISTEN MOSBRUCKER-GARZA: Yeah, the builders held their most recent event, and I kept thinking: the most proudly American Americans are now facing an America that, in some ways, doesn’t want them.
ANDRIK GONZALEZ: Exactly. And I could see that that was really painful for them — not just because they voted for Trump, but because they saw people who looked like them, people who were familiar, who looked like their own fathers and grandfathers. And they mentioned, in particular, the gentleman in Houston who died —
KRISTEN MOSBRUCKER-GARZA: That’s right. He died. He’s dead.
ANDRIK GONZALEZ: And he was in construction — he was with a crew, a construction crew. I can’t remember if he was the business owner or just one of the executives, but he was dressed like a laborer, he was driving the truck, he had no criminal record, he had legal status, and he had a family at home. He thought he was going to work that day, and he did not come home.
KRISTEN MOSBRUCKER-GARZA: Yeah. But no, I agree with you. And again, I suppose, having grown up, we were sold this idea of the American dream — we’re a melting pot. Nowhere in there was there a classification of who’s legal or illegal. But now it’s become such a hot topic that it’s starting to affect — not just the specific population that’s supposedly being targeted, those who participate in criminal activities — it’s starting to bleed into the population that is American, as Americans are. So, tell me more about the data set you all are drawing from — where does it come from, what does it say, how detailed is it, and what can we learn from what you’ve discovered?
ANDRIK GONZALEZ: Of course. So the data was compiled by a group called the Deportation Data Project. All of it was obtained through FOIA requests. It spans from October 2022 to March of this year — they actually just released a new data set, from April to August of this year, that we’re going to start looking at. But it covers everything from arrests to deportations — where people were deported from, where they were apprehended.
It’s also limited in scope, because the way DHS and its agencies function, they’re quite deliberate in what they give you, so as not to give you too much, I suppose. But with what we were able to capture, we could isolate things — it’s a national data set, and we isolated it specifically to the Rio Grande Valley. At first, we looked at the Border Patrol areas of responsibility — Harlingen is an area of responsibility that spans from below San Antonio and Corpus Christi down to the Rio Grande Valley, so it’s a huge area, but we wanted to isolate it even further, to just the four counties that make up the Rio Grande Valley. We did that by looking at where ICE was picking up immigrants from — they have general areas of apprehension, like the Harlingen general area of apprehension, or the Brownsville general area of apprehension, meaning within the general vicinity of Brownsville. So we didn’t get a specific idea of exactly what city or location these people were apprehended at, but from what we were able to capture, I think we determined quite comfortably what the Rio Grande Valley was.
From there, we determined that around 13,377 individuals were apprehended during this three-and-a-half-year span — the majority within 2025, 5,087 individuals, double the year before. We focused primarily on the three years we had full data for — 2023, 2024 and 2025 — not just because we had the full data, but so we could compare them with one another; there were two different administrations, so we could draw a comparison. In the two Biden years — his last years — 6,336 people were detained. In 2023, you had the vast majority of apprehensions under the Biden administration — somewhere around 3,800 to 3,900. The majority of those happened right before Title 42 ended, primarily because people had leeway during Title 42 — if you were deported, it didn’t go on your record, so you could be deported and come back without it ever staining your record. People feared that Title 42 was going to end and that leeway would no longer exist, so they wanted to take advantage of it — we saw this anecdotally, through social media and news coverage, an influx of people during that three-month period right before Title 42 ended.
But another thing we noticed: despite there being maybe as many apprehensions in some months during the Biden administration as during the Trump administration, there weren’t as many deportations. So yes, the Biden administration was apprehending individuals — they just weren’t deporting them as frequently as the Trump administration. In one of the data charts we show, you’ll see how much closer that gap — between apprehensions and deportations — becomes once you get to January 2025. During the Biden administration, there’s a much larger gap between apprehensions and deportations; within those two years, generally about 68% of people who were apprehended were deported. That rose to 86% during the Trump administration. And this is just one year of data — we’re going to start looking at the complete year, or at least about 80% of this year’s data set, to get a better idea of what two years of Trump might look like in terms of the human toll. That’s one of the aspects we wanted to capture. But secondly, we really wanted to know the potential economic toll this might have had, which is why we included the economic perspective as well.
KRISTEN MOSBRUCKER-GARZA: I’m not an expert on immigration or anything, but I’ve worked in a lot of border communities, more from the business side, and in general we have this scale, right? We have everything from the H-2A visas — our farmworkers, maybe people who work in hotels, in the hospitality industry. We have H-1B visas — highly skilled, highly educated, advanced degrees, doctors, professors, sometimes they even work in high-tech semiconductor factories in this global economy. And then we have the EB-5 visa investors — people investing $10 million, $15 million in our communities in exchange for legal visas for their family, and they create jobs. So you have these different levels of investment and interaction as foreign-born workers.
And then you have the legal system — I used to know an executive in San Antonio who used to be in the telecom industry, a wealthy individual, who was kidnapped four times by the cartel. And because of his experiences, he was like, ‘You know what? I don’t want this for me, I don’t want this for my family.’ So he paid the $15,000 it took to go through the legal visa process for him and his family, and now he lives here in Texas and moved his business here, too. And when he heard a lot of the rhetoric — the lumping together — he was deeply hurt, because he was like, ‘I’ve done it the right way, I’ve suffered, I’ve waited in line, I’ve paid, I’ve invested, and I still feel disrespected.’ I always thought that was really powerful.
And then, when you get into the legal side of it — historically, crossing the border, overstaying a visa, has always been a civil offense, an administrative issue, right? Is it illegal? Yes. But it’s never been classified, to my understanding, as a felony.
ANDRIK GONZALEZ: And it’s just very interesting to see how the rhetoric has taken what has historically been a civil penalty, or an administrative offense with a whole judicial system attached to it, into the equivalent of a felony — in terms of penalty, in terms of aggression, in terms of the deportation cycle. That’s something that’s always struck me, and I think it’s important, no matter who you are, to ground yourself in that and just be like: This is really what we’re talking about. We’re talking about people who have come across, whatever the border, whether by airplane or however — and typically it’s overstaying a visa.
That’s the case for a lot of the individuals within the data set we compiled. Like I said, DHS is very deliberate in what they give you, but from the little they do — just looking at the administrative orders and the way people were deported — this is not a population that was doing anything complicit, as we were talking about earlier. These are people who were persecuted, and eventually were either detained, targeted or not — most of the time, not targeted. These are people who were stopped at a light, or who were at a restaurant for whatever reason when ICE walked in. We’ll never have a full picture of these individuals, but from the little there is, I can guarantee we’re able to determine that these are not criminals, as they’re made out to be. They’re young — the median age was about 30. About 118 of those individuals were children — so try telling me what sort of crime a child was committing.
They’re also our workforce — the undocumented workforce in the Rio Grande Valley participates in the labor force at a rate of about 93.4%, meaning they’re a young, working population that, for whatever reason, has had this stigma attached to them. And again, we’re seeing this very aggressive level of enforcement that hasn’t been seen before.
KRISTEN MOSBRUCKER-GARZA: We’ve heard — because we’re a border community, because there are a lot of people who are born on the Mexican side but maybe go to school here on the U.S. side, or maybe they’re seeking higher education, or maybe they had a worker visa or worker sponsorship — and I’ve noticed this administration has also prioritized limiting a lot of those avenues. I wonder what you’ve seen in the data about that. For example, with DACA recipients, I’ve heard they’re shortening the window for work-visa renewals. And this is also primarily in Texas —
ANDRIK GONZALEZ: DACA is nationwide, though —
KRISTEN MOSBRUCKER-GARZA: Right — for folks who may not be familiar, DACA is Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, and these folks, under a previous presidential administration — was it Obama or Biden?
ANDRIK GONZALEZ: I believe it was Obama.
KRISTEN MOSBRUCKER-GARZA: OK — yeah, under the Obama administration, there was some action that essentially protected the children of people who overstayed a visa or crossed the border without documentation, who were minors at the time. And they very much identify as Americans — English is typically their primary language, they’ve gone through the high school system, and then they all became college-age around the same time, and a lot of them couldn’t qualify for student loans. A lot of them were realizing, as they were entering the workforce, that sometimes their families hadn’t even told them their immigration status. And I think that population is generally higher here in the Valley, and I’ve heard that people aren’t getting their CDLs — commercial driver’s licenses, for truckers — and I know there’s a shortage of truckers. Same thing with teacher certifications — very much at the state level, we’re dealing with that, too. Have you looked into that, or is that something you might look into?
ANDRIK GONZALEZ: We have not — this data set specifically doesn’t show what sort of visa they might have had. We can determine, based on the administrative order of their deportation, whether they overstayed a visa — not which visa, but that they overstayed one. But there’s no data to determine whether they were DACA recipients. I suppose once that becomes publicly available, through some sort of Freedom of Information Act request, we would isolate and look at it specifically here in the Rio Grande Valley. I don’t know if we have the legal-department capacity to be the ones to file it, but if it is available, I’d like to take a look at that, without a doubt.
In terms of the economic impact — you asked how many people are no longer part of this economy here in the Rio Grande Valley — the undocumented workforce is generally about 130,000 individuals. This is as of, I believe, 2024, the American Community Survey’s five-year estimates for 2024 — that could be a little off, because, of course, two of those years were COVID years. This is census data — the most up-to-date census data — and they sort of weight their population estimates to account for the fact that COVID took place. But current census data shows that about 130,000 individuals in the Rio Grande Valley who are undocumented are participating in the workforce. The way we determined that — we used a very conservative formula, so I believe the numbers could be higher. We attempted some formulas where the numbers we were getting were higher than the ones we ended up publishing.
But 10,142 people were deported. Based on the fact that 93.4% of undocumented individuals are employed here in the Rio Grande Valley, we determined that, out of those 10,142, it’s likely that 9,374 — I might be off by a couple — individuals who were part of the labor force were deported, the majority of those likely within the construction industry. Also based on census data, the undocumented workforce in the Rio Grande Valley primarily works within the construction industry — about 18% of them. That cost the construction industry, or at least the laborers who would have participated in that industry, about $41 million to $42 million in direct labor income — meaning income they would have received and that would have recirculated back into the economy, and I’ll get to that number in a minute.
Second to that was the industry most affected — mind you, the undocumented workforce within construction makes up about 8% of the total labor force within construction in the Rio Grande Valley, so it’s a specific group of people participating in much higher numbers in this industry. We’re noticing that, like you mentioned earlier, with the talks the South Texas Builders Association is having — I know for a fact that labor shortages have slowed the industry down by about 30% to 40%, and sales have gone down by about 50%, with home prices rising by $10,000 to $20,000. So we’re hearing that anecdotally, and we’re seeing it also in the figures we produced and the figures they’ve given the general public. Second to that was the social-assistance and health care industry — people who work in hospitals, home assistance, nursing homes, etc. That’s the industry with the highest overall workforce in the Rio Grande Valley, at about 16%. The undocumented workforce makes up about 12% of that industry.
KRISTEN MOSBRUCKER-GARZA: Really? I don’t think that’s ever occurred to me — that they would also work in what’s otherwise a pretty highly regulated field.
ANDRIK GONZALEZ: Right — but you also see, in the broader community, signs for home health providers paying like $12 to $14 an hour.
KRISTEN MOSBRUCKER-GARZA: Yeah, I think that’s where my mind went — I was quite surprised by that number, but I thought of home health. Likely home health.
ANDRIK GONZALEZ: There, the directly related income loss was about $27.6 million — or $26.7 million, either or. And then, finally, we looked at another industry we know has been impacted, which is the food and accommodation industry. We looked at several different industries, but we looked at these specifically because, anecdotally, they’re the ones we’ve been hearing about the most — as you mentioned earlier, restaurants being raided, etc. This industry — the number’s escaping me, but I believe it’s between 9% and 10% — that’s the undocumented share of the workforce making up this industry. They lost about $21 million in direct labor income — again, income these laborers would have received and that would have recirculated back into the economy. We know from the Texas Restaurant Association that 36% of restaurants statewide have lost workers — we don’t know what that looks like specifically in the Rio Grande Valley, but that’s the number statewide — and about 28% of them aren’t receiving applicants as frequently to work in the industry.
All told, within those three and a half years, in direct labor income, the Rio Grande Valley’s removed laborers lost about $291 million, once we also took remittances into account. Migrant populations remit at a higher rate than the rest of the country, at about 15%. So once we looked at remittances, that number shifted to about $196 million. For folks who aren’t familiar, remittances are when a foreign-born worker sends money back home — a lot of times through Western Union, or through Walmart, or through similar money-transfer services — a lot of these stores cater to that sub-industry. And again, our formula was very conservative, so that’s one of the things we wanted to include — this isn’t to say that all of this population was sending money back to their country of origin, but we gave it the benefit of the doubt that maybe they are. And then, lastly, we took into account the local tax rate, which here in the Rio Grande Valley is generally about 8.25% — the sales tax.
Once all of that was determined, we were able to look at the number, finally, for the total economic loss for the Rio Grande Valley — this is to say, what these laborers would have been spending on a haircut, on gas, on day-to-day things, going to buy groceries, eating at a local restaurant, paying rent. The total loss was about $180 million within this three-and-a-half-year span. Forty-three percent of that loss happened within one specific year — 2025 — at about $78 million. So the majority of this loss was in 2025.
We’re starting to look at this new data set coming out, and we believe the number will be much higher once we consider what we have for 2026 so far — we have data from January to March, and already the numbers from January to March of this year look higher than those from January to March of last year. Once we have that, we’ll intend to publicize it, but they’re likely going to be higher. And again, we were taking a very conservative approach — one of the formulas we attempted gave us a much higher number, over $200 million, but these are just estimates. We’re trying to be as conservative as possible while recognizing the number we’re putting out.
KRISTEN MOSBRUCKER-GARZA: I was talking with a bank executive the other day, and — it’s not that banks are struggling by any means, but in the residential-construction loan sector — and people who may not be familiar with the Rio Grande Valley, we love houses, we love to build houses. And, in addition, there’s a new U-Haul dealership in Edinburg, actually, that I’m aware of, and all these new subdivisions — the building of houses is very much part of our economic growth story. I think part of it is because it’s very ingrained in the culture, right — whether it’s, ‘I’m going to do the solar,’ or, ‘I’m going to buy the land.’ There’s a pride in home ownership in the Rio Grande Valley.
ANDRIK GONZALEZ: There is, and I think that’s just on a lot of different levels. I think that industry is very much a driver of the economy, because when you’re building a house, you’re paying not just the laborers, not just the material companies — like the concrete supplier — not just all the contractors, subcontractors and tradespeople, but there’s also the whole financial side: the bankers, the real estate agents, the brokers, the title companies. There’s some statistic that underwriting a single mortgage touches so many different people — it’s such an economic stimulus.
KRISTEN MOSBRUCKER-GARZA: So, I think some people, when they think about, well, we’re building fewer houses, we have record-high inventory — we do have a buyer’s market, we’ve definitely built a lot of homes, and so we’re not going to feel that pinch right now. And I suppose this goes into the policy volatility of the nature of the current administration — because, yes, we’re having a specific population that’s been affected, and in return it’s affecting our economy. But in doing so — I mean, you’re talking about tariffs, and enforcement in general — how does that affect the community? It’s a very multifaceted thing that’s going on, where, of course, we know that inflation is quite high and that affordability is difficult right now for people in the Rio Grande Valley, as it is for people all across the nation. But with that in mind, here’s one thing, out of several different things going on, that’s making it increasingly difficult for people — not just in the Rio Grande Valley, but across the nation — to live comfortably in an affordable way, and housing is one of those sectors that’s being affected.
So, y’all’s name is the Caminos Institute — how would you translate the word ‘camino’?
ANDRIK GONZALEZ: Pathways. And there’s a long story as to how we came up with it. My background is — well, not academic, but I spent two and a half years studying colonias. Initially, ‘Caminos’ came from the idea that we were going to do an assessment — a colonias assessment, for mobility, infrastructure, needs, opportunities and services. And all of those are a different pathway for the people of those communities to live more comfortably and have a higher quality of life. Eventually, I realized: Yes, we can focus on colonias, we can focus on so many different things — and that’s because there really isn’t a dedicated institution outside the university doing this — and I have my own thoughts about the university. But there isn’t really a dedicated institution producing the data and research not only for policymakers and stakeholders, but the general public, grant writers, etc. Nobody’s doing that. We want to be the first ones to do it — to open those pathways of opportunity through any sector, any population, in the Rio Grande Valley that we’re researching.
KRISTEN MOSBRUCKER-GARZA: We had our Hidalgo County judge, Richard Cortez, bring a lot of business leaders into the anti-poverty fight, and I think people may not realize that poverty is very much a business issue. He mentioned the other day that we’ve actually seen a decline in poverty for one of the first times ever — I don’t know if that has to do with there simply being fewer people, I don’t know if it’s sometimes hard to tell whether it’s because the area has gentrified, or people have left, or people have been deported — there’s a lot of factors — but I guess the most idealistic way to interpret that is that we’re less impoverished.
ANDRIK GONZALEZ: Right — no, without a doubt. Like you said, it’s one of those issues that’s multifaceted. If we got granular with it — which the data doesn’t exist for, and we haven’t attempted — it might be more revealing as to why the poverty rate has lowered. But this could mean people are working two jobs, and that’s just one example. But again, yes, the poverty rate has lowered here in Hidalgo County specifically — I don’t think Cameron County has shared the same numbers. But again, it’s a multifaceted issue that, if we got granular, what’s revealed could go one way or another — maybe it’s positive, maybe it’s negative. Until we do, we really wouldn’t understand why.
KRISTEN MOSBRUCKER-GARZA: Just to be mindful of your time — I hear from some folks in the general public: Well, the immigration system hasn’t fully functioned in the most efficient way for a long time. A lot of people remember a couple of years ago when we had a large increase of people crossing the border in this community — so much so that we had some new detention centers, some new contractors taking care of a lot of those folks seeking asylum. For people who are like, ‘Well, we’re really right-sizing our communities,’ and it doesn’t matter that our communities aren’t growing, or have fewer people, because we want to redefine our definition of American as white U.S. citizen — what do you say to those folks who say, well, it’s better for me and the economy, that with the same size economic pie, there’s more pie left for me?
ANDRIK GONZALEZ: Well, I’ll give you a clear example of why it’s the contrary. Industries are coming into the Rio Grande Valley, no doubt about it — and specifically, now they’re outsourcing rather than sourcing locally, and that has to say something about the skill set our population has. So, yes, it might seem the pie looks larger, but in reality, for people from the outside, the pie is up for grabs, and they’re grabbing it. The people who think it’s theirs aren’t taking advantage of it, because they have that exact mindset you just described.
But I do think we need to start considering the fact that we’re lagging behind, while industry is coming into the Rio Grande Valley — we’re lagging behind in various skill sets and capacities these industries are looking for, which is exactly why they’re outsourcing. And if we don’t start competing now, we’ll be outsourcing that pie — none of us will have a piece of it. So it’s almost like it doesn’t matter whether you have legal status or not — if you don’t have the skill set, then they’ll use U.S.-born workers from outside the community, or foreign-born workers with visas. They’ll do it with visas already, so it doesn’t matter.
I suppose, in the case of immigration enforcement right now, it’s been quite difficult for us, even in the Rio Grande Valley, to start — and we’re seeing labor shortages start to fill in some of those positions. Industry doesn’t care — they’re going to do it one way or another, and again, if we’re not up to par, we’ll outsource, and we’ll see it, like you said, with visas, quite simply.
KRISTEN MOSBRUCKER-GARZA: We are getting a lot of new investment — I know even Saronic Technologies —
ANDRIK GONZALEZ: Right —
KRISTEN MOSBRUCKER-GARZA: — so, for folks who may not know, that’s a defense-industry contractor, though they do some commercial contracts as well. They’re very AI-focused, autonomous-vessel-focused.
ANDRIK GONZALEZ: Texas A&M just did a presentation to the Port of Brownsville about their autonomous drones — because they’re going to be out in the ocean. We have a long history of welders who weld with steel — well, the welders Saronic is going to need weld with aluminum. And even something as simple as that — I thought that was really insightful, that it’s not just, are you a welder or not, it’s, can you weld aluminum? I do think that the area’s technical institutions, like South Texas College — and I believe South Texas Vocational and Technical schools, the names escape me — but I do think they’re starting to catch on to that idea: Yes, industry is coming in, but we’re not so sure our workforce has the capacity to fill some of the jobs that are going to be coming, too. What that might look like within the next five years, I don’t know. But I think we’re starting to catch up, at least in the idea that we’re being outsourced and need to start doing something about it.
KRISTEN MOSBRUCKER-GARZA: So, what would you say is your biggest takeaway from this report, and what do you want business leaders in the community to understand from the data?
ANDRIK GONZALEZ: Right, without a doubt. To me, my biggest takeaway — I think I mentioned this earlier, on or off the record — was that I find it increasingly hard to believe that that many individuals are criminals, in the way the current administration, or the past one, has portrayed them to be. I really don’t think they are — 9,472 people committing crimes of the nature they’re being blamed for, I doubt that. These are not just a young population — they’re your parents, our neighbors, and for industry leaders, they are our workforce. They’re starting to see, with labor shortages, the adverse effect of this population being removed.
That’s been my biggest takeaway, which is why we included the economic analysis — specifically for industry leaders who already know what the numbers look like to them, as far as what the South Texas Builders Association has displayed for us, but less so what it looks like in terms of the actual workforce. We want to give as much of an image as possible to those who are doing the work, while being mindful of their autonomy, too — of them being individuals. These are humans, at the end of the day. Yes, we’re experiencing their loss through our economy, but there’s a whole different loss that’s being experienced by their families, their neighbors, their friends — and I would hope people are mindful of that.
KRISTEN MOSBRUCKER-GARZA: Well, thank you so much for your time — we really appreciate it. And stay tuned, everyone.
ANDRIK GONZALEZ: Thank you so much for having me.
