Texas Attorney General and Republican U.S. Senate candidate Ken Paxton told a forum of the U.S. Hispanic Business Council (USHBC) in Fort Worth that the country needs to secure its border before allowing in more immigrants, but acknowledged that many business sectors in Texas needed more immigrants to fill open jobs.
Paxton said the U.S. needs to pursue an "America First" immigration policy that benefits the people who are already here.
"And that likely means that we have to let people in that can fulfill some of these jobs that we don’t have enough people for," Paxton said. "Our birth population isn’t keeping up with demand."
Paxton said he's spoken frequently with ranchers, farmers, homebuilders, and construction firms that rely on immigrant labor. He said people are frustrated with multiple attempts to work out a deal that balances border security with immigration reform that never seems to go anywhere.
"I do think this has been a political football," Paxton said. "President Trump offered up an immigration deal, and the Democrats turned it down because they wanted it as an election issue. So, there was a deal to be had back in the first administration, and the Democrats said no."
Paxton blamed former President Joe Biden for allegedly damaging border security and contributing to transnational criminal activity.
"Joe Biden’s first day in office — he didn’t wait a week. He didn’t wait a month. He came out and announced that we’re not going to deport anybody," Paxton said. "Why would you announce that, unless you wanted the cartels to know, you don’t have to worry about Border Patrol anymore?"
Paxton has made such statements repeatedly since Biden took office in January 2021. In fact, while many undocumented immigrants successfully entered the U.S. undetected during Biden's administration, the vast majority of those that encountered the U.S. Border Patrol during the first half of Biden’s term were sent back to Mexico. That only changed when a federal court ruled the first Trump administration's stricter immigration policy, known as Title 42, was unlawful. The Biden administration ended the policy in May 2023.
USHBC president Javier Palomarez spelled out the difficulties in balancing the needs for greater immigration with the need for greater border security. He noted that immigrants make up a quarter of the Texan workforce.
"But mass deportations and the fear that they’ve caused have disrupted cornerstone industries that we represent at the at the United States Hispanic Business Council," Palomarez said. "At the same time, our business owners will be the first one to tell you that we must have a secure border and we must be able to control the influx of immigrants into this country. It is an issue that ... administration after administration has not been able to solve this."
Paxton's Democratic opponent in the Senate race, state Rep. James Talarico, will address a USHBC forum in Edinburg on Wednesday.
Other major issues Paxton addressed with Palomarez included energy, inflation, and health care. In the case of the last, Paxton spoke of his own experience with the military health care system his family had when his father served in the U.S. Air Force, and he recounted the childhood eye injury that left his vision partially impaired to this day.
"It had a dramatic impact, and it also impacted me in understanding a government health system that isn’t really designed necessarily to be efficient, cost-effective, and then effective from a medical standpoint," Paxton said. "I had to deal with this my entire life because the health care system we had was not adequate enough to take care of something that could have been minor turning it into something major."
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