A new study finds the Houston metro area is home to more than a half million illegal aliens, placing the city third behind only New York and Los Angeles. Dallas-Fort Worth ranks fourth with 475,000 illegal aliens. Austin rounded out the top 20 with 100,000.
Still, Mayor Sylvester Turner continues to insist Houston is a welcoming city, not a so-called sanctuary city.
“No one has deemed us to be,” he told reporters last week. “We're not a city that divides families, we're a city that values families.”
“HPD is not going to be ICE, we're not INS, we're not going to violate the laws handed down by the United States Supreme Court which says you can't profile people.”
Jeffrey Passel, senior demographer at the Pew Research Center, says a majority of illegal aliens are attracted to places like Houston, Dallas, New York and L.A. because of employment opportunities.
“Largely working in construction, hotels and service industries,” he says. “Enforcement is then a matter of who decides to go after and arrest these people.”
“We have data going back 10 years for these metro areas, and Houston is consistently ranked either third or fourth, it sort of flip-flops with Dallas.”
Passel went on to say that research has shown illegal aliens do shy away from areas where, at the very least, E-Verify is enforced.