New Orleans restaurant Taqueria Guerrero late last year announced its indefinite closure in advance of an ICE crackdown in the city. Credit: Wikimedia Commons / Infrogmation

Texas restaurants are the latest businesses to warn that the Trump administration’s mass-deportation crackdown is cutting into the bottom line.

A new economic report by the Texas Restaurant Association found that 36% of restaurants surveyed statewide said they lost employees this year due to increased immigration enforcement. Another 28% said they experienced a drop in job applicants.

Those warnings come as fewer than half of Texas restaurants said they have the workforce they need to be successful.

“We can’t get the labor to run our restaurants,” Texas Restaurant Association CEO Emily Williams told Houston TV station KHOU. “It’s leading to the loss of businesses across the state.”

Beyond the trouble keeping and recruiting workers, 28% of the surveyed businesses said they have experienced a decline in traffic because some customers are afraid to go out in public.

“People are afraid to go out, afraid to work, and they’re not spending money,” Williams also told the station.

TRA has urged the White House and Congress to grant work permits to long-term immigrant workers. Other top food-industry organizations, including the National Restaurant Association and the James Beard Foundation, have made similar requests.

Immigrants make up 22% of Texas’ restaurant workforce, according to TRA, which notes that figure doesn’t include undocumented people, whose employment status is harder to track.

Williams told KHOU the worker shortage isn’t just dealing a blow to restaurants but also hurting related industries such as hotels, meatpacking and agriculture. Despite the Trump administration’s repeated claims that U.S.-born workers will step up to fill the positions, Williams said that’s not happening.

“No, we have not seen a major resurgence of U.S.-born workers taking these jobs — especially in agriculture,” she said.

Texas politics is a mess. We make it a readable mess.

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Sanford Nowlin is editor-in-chief of the San Antonio Current. He holds degrees from Trinity University and the University of Texas at San Antonio, and his work has been featured in Salon, Alternet, Creative...