Advancing Immigrant Rights in Houston

Eight days before Inauguration Day 2025, the New York Times ran an editorial warning of the dangers of mass deportation by comparing Houston, Texas, to Birmingham, Alabama. Houston owes much of its dynamic economy to its welcoming of immigrants, the editors argued, while Birmingham's raft of anti-immigration measures has hastened that city's decline. Although the contrast is valid, Els de Graauw and Shannon Gleeson's recent book, Advancing Immigrant Rights in Houston, offers a more complex and critical analysis of Houston's response to its immigrant communities.As Texas's largest city and the fourth largest in the United States, Houston has experienced rapid growth in its immigrant population since the 1980s. Today, 29 percent of its population is foreign born, speaking 145 different languages. Once largely Mexican, the city's immigrant population now includes sizeable communities from other parts of Latin America, Asia, and Africa. Non-Hispanic whites make up only about a quarter of the city's residents, while Latinos are approaching a majority. Immigrants have found work in both the skilled sectors of medicine and high tech as well as in lower-paid construction and service industries.As the authors explain, integrating these immigrants has been challenging given the city's political and social context. A mixed political scene, a weak nonprofit sector, and Houston's location in a very conservative, anti-immigrant state means that a diverse array of local actors must work together to achieve change through negotiation and compromise. Chapter 2 presents four case studies of immigrant rights initiatives: the establishment of the city's immigrant affairs office, relationships with federal immigration enforcement, the provision of legal and citizenship services, and workplace rights. In the first two cases, progress has been sporadic, rising and falling with the political winds. In the second two cases, though, Houstonians achieved notable change by arguing for efforts such as citizenship services and wage theft legislation as conducive to good business practices and economic growth.The campaign against wage theft is perhaps the book's most illuminating story. The effort began under Democratic Mayor Lee Brown, who launched an investigation of labor abuses on city-funded construction sites. Labor and community activists pushed to expand the campaign to sites across the city, but various enforcement efforts failed. Wage theft—particularly among undocumented workers—was a major problem, but few of these workers were willing to interact with police authorities. The situation became even more critical following Hurricane Ike in 2008, which required an infusion of immigrant workers to help rebuild housing across the city.After the Houston Interfaith Worker Justice Center released a scathing report documenting widespread wage theft abuses, the center teamed up with the SEIU and other unions, faith groups, and reform-minded business leaders to launch the Down with Wage Theft campaign. The authors highlight the strange bedfellows in this campaign, including Republican construction magnate Stan Marek, a devout Catholic who opposed wage theft as both immoral and unfair to honest businesspeople. After years of organizing and negotiating with Marek and other business interests, a Wage Theft ordinance became law in 2013. The ordinance established a process for reporting wage theft and created a database of offending companies that could lose their city contracts or their business licenses if they fail to pay assessed penalties. Although staffing and oversight have been inadequate, the authors are “cautiously optimistic” such coalition efforts can advance immigrant rights through “a slow and contentious process” (p. 81).Showing how change can occur in a purple city in a deep red state, Houston's experience may be instructive for advancing immigrant rights in our current conservative era. But as the authors also point out, even modest reforms like those in Houston have run headlong into right-wing anti-immigrant policy-making at the state level. Efforts to limit the Houston Police Department's participation in immigration enforcement, for example, lost steam with the passage of SB4, a 2017 Texas law allowing local police to inquire about the immigration status of people they detain and requiring local police to cooperate with federal immigration authorities—effectively banning sanctuary cities. Likewise, the Texas Regulatory Consistency Act, passed in 2023, strips the authority of (typically blue) cities and counties to enact local ordinances or rules that exceed or conflict with state-level codes. The law will likely undercut Houston's wage theft law.Such state efforts to stymie immigrant-friendly policies at the local level have been taken up by the Trump administration that is now targeting blue states and sanctuary cities for mass deportation and funding cuts. Such punitive measures may not be successful, but they will make the process of advancing immigrant rights locally even more slow and contentious.

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