89th Session Ratings

Rep. Schatzline’s amendment would require entities funded under the proposed Texas Innovation and Technology Program to participate in the federal E-Verify program to ensure that all new hires are eligible for employment in the United States.

This amendment is also common sense. If the State is going to provide taxpayer dollars to private businesses, it should ensure that these businesses’ hiring practices are being conducted in accordance with federal law. Taxpayer dollars should not be used to

Rep. Button supported this amendment, and it passed with 89 votes.

HB 1268 and its companion bill SB 209 by Sen. Royce West did not ultimately pass into law.

Rep. Martinez Fischer offered an amendment to Rep. Olcott’s Motion to Instruct on SB 1 (explained below), the state budget, to instruct the House budget conferees to support moving Amendment No. 59 by Rep. L. Garcia from Article XI (where it would not likely be funded) to Article I. 64 members recorded a “no” vote on this Amendment during consideration of SB 1.

Amendment No. 59 sought to commission a study on the Economic Impact of
Immigration to the State. However, it only explicitly included the impact on the
workforce, tax contributions, and consumer spending.

This is a plainly one-sided study of the impact of immigration. It does not study the increased cost of goods such as housing and health care due to increased demand, the cost of providing government services and subsidies, etc. It also makes no distinction between legal and illegal immigration.

Despite Rep. Martinez Fischer’s insistence on the floor that this was only fair, Rep. Olcott’s amendment contained in his motion to instruct was much more narrowly tailored to only a few categories of spending on illegal aliens residing in Texas.

HB 1268 by Rep. Button sought to create a Texas Technology and Innovation Program to foster job creation and economic development in cutting-edge industries by matching or supplementing money received through a federal funding program.

Rep. Tinderholt’s amendment would require that at least 75% of the employees at businesses receiving these funds must be United States citizens (up from the 50% required for the federal program) and that any company receiving funds must disclose employee citizenship data including the percentage of employees who are United States citizens and the current immigration status of any employees who are not United States citizens.

This should not have been controversial. If the State is going to provide taxpayer dollars to private businesses to fund job creation, those jobs should go to United States citizens first. It would add insult to injury to have Texans who are already struggling have their taxes spent on the importation of foreign labor into their communities.

Unfortunately, because Rep. Button opposed this amendment, the vote failed, but several members quickly issued journal statements supporting Rep. Tinderholt’s amendment. If these journal statements had been included in the original vote, the bill would have passed.

HB 1268 and its companion bill SB 209 by Sen. Royce West did not ultimately pass into law.

SB 17 by Sen. Kolkhorst was the landmark ban on hostile foreign land ownership from Director of National Intelligence (DNI) designated countries, including China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia.

Rep. Shaheen’s amendment changed the scope of the ban to only include citizens of designated countries who were unlawfully present in the United States.

This amendment would significantly shrink the class of foreign nationals subject to the ban on land ownership, including the vast majority of those who are conducting espionage while they are in the United States. For example, the Chinese Communist Party is known to exploit our student visa program to conduct espionage and even intellectual property theft.

With this amendment, any foreign national from a designated country who is lawfully present in the United States for any length of time would be able to purchase real property of any kind in Texas.

This amendment unfortunately passed with only 19 votes against, but 17 more
members issued journal statements indicating a “no” vote. After the amendment offered by Rep. Money on third reading (see below) received over 80 votes, this language was removed from the conference committee report by the House and Senate conferees.

We decided to score both Amendment 4 on second reading and Amendment 2 on third reading to give credit to the members who wisely opposed this amendment, which would have significantly hampered the effectiveness of this legislation had it passed into law.

Rep. Little’s amendment would reduce the lease term permitted under SB 17’s hostile foreign land ownership ban from 100 years to 1 year.

This amendment corrected a necessary loophole in the ban wherein a person or entity with ties to hostile foreign governments could acquire control of land for up to a century, which would have, in effect, a similar potential for espionage or other forms of foul play as ownership.

A one-year lease ensures that legitimate visa holders from designated countries can acquire housing but would not be able to acquire the exclusive use of real property for a long period of time, reducing potential harm by bad actors.

Rep. Little’s amendment sought to strengthen the ban on hostile foreign land ownership that had been weakened by Rep. Shaheen’s amendment by extending it to any member of the ruling political party of a DNI designated country or its political subdivisions.

Rep. Schatzline’s amendment adds a section from the House companion to SB 17, HB 17, which would allow the Governor to add and remove additional countries to the list of designated countries covered by the hostile foreign ownership ban after consultation with the Texas Homeland Security Council.

The purpose of this language is to allow the Governor to respond to emerging threats to national and state security faster than the annual DNI report could be issued.

Rep. Money’s amendment adds the criminal and financial penalties for violations of the hostile foreign land ban that were originally included in HB 17, the companion bill to SB 17.

As passed by the Texas Senate, SB 17 would have returned any proceeds from sale of properties divested from hostile foreign owners back to the owners. In our testimony before the Texas Senate Committee on State Affairs, we pointed out that hostile foreign actors would consider this simply the cost of doing business.

As amended, violations of the ban would result in a State Jail Felony and a financial penalty of the larger of $250,000 or 50% of the sales price. We feel that this is an appropriate deterrent.

This bill was the landmark ban on hostile foreign land ownership, an issue that had been talked about since SB 147 from the 88th Session died in the House Committee on State Affairs without a hearing after passing the Texas Senate on a bipartisan vote. This issue was also one of our ten 89th Session Legislative Priorities we issued at the beginning of the year.

Two years later, both the House and the Senate came into the session awarding
measures to ban hostile foreign land ownership with priority status.

Although SB 17 was weakened in scope by the Shaheen amendment, the subsequent strengthening amendments and the prospect of strengthening the bill in conference committee made this bill worthy of passage on second reading.

Ultimately, the bill that Gov. Abbott signed into law was among the strongest state bans on hostile foreign land ownership in the nation.

Rep. Money’s amendment sought to repeal the language added in Rep. Shaheen’s amendment on second reading. In his presentation, Rep. Money laid out how this amendment materially weakened the ban on hostile foreign land ownership, and he claimed that he thought many who voted for the Rep. Shaheen’s amendment did not completely understand what they were voting for, a claim bolstered by an unusual number of journal statements issued by members following the vote the previous evening.

Because amendments require 100 votes on third reading, this was doomed to fail from the outset, but the fact that the amendment received 84 votes, including every voting Republican member except for Rep. Shaheen and Rep. Button, sent a clear message to House and Senate conferees that this language should be removed from the final bill.

Indeed, the conference committee report removed the language from Rep. Shaheen’s amendment, and Rep. Money’s efforts ultimately resulted in a more comprehensive ban on hostile foreign land ownership being signed into law by Gov. Abbott.

SJR 37 proposes a constitutional amendment clarifying that only U.S. citizens are eligible to vote, even in local elections.

The last few years have been marked by efforts across our nation’s metropolitan centers to extend the franchise to some degree (typically in local elections) to non-citizens.

In order to remove all doubt that only citizens are eligible to vote in Texas, Sen. Birdwell authored SJR 37, which ultimately passed the House and Senate and will be decided upon by the voters this November.

This is a rather obvious vote, and protects the concept of popular sovereignty, the basis of the legitimate exercise of power by our government. Any efforts to erode citizenship and to extend the rights and privileges thereof to foreign subjects must therefore be opposed at every turn.

HB 2858 sought to create a state-sponsored work visa program that would task the governor with requesting a waiver to negotiate and enter into agreements with governors of the various Mexican states to create a temporary guest worker program to fill jobs identified by the Texas Workforce Commission.

That this bill reached the floor before any significant border security or immigration enforcement legislation is an indictment on the leadership in the Texas House. This bill was given a hearing by State Affairs Chairman Ken King while other key legislation, including a universal E-Verify bill, died without a hearing.

Our position is simple: we oppose any new proposed work visa program before our border is fully secured and the millions of illegal aliens residing in the United States are returned home.

Domestic employment has only this year recovered to pre-pandemic levels, according to data from Bureau of Labor Statistics Community Survey, and we still have a near record number of working-age men out of the workforce.

We strongly opposed this legislation and celebrated its demise on the floor of the Texas House.

SB 243 by Sen. Flores sought to significantly strengthen regulation of migrant labor housing facilities utilized for seasonal agricultural workers. It also created a penalty not only for violations of facility standards, but if a worker residing in these facilities was not authorized to work in the United States on an H-2A visa.

Rep. Hopper’s amendments would give the Texas Attorney General the power to initiate an action to collect this civil penalty without a request from the Texas
Department of Housing and Community Affairs.

This language would allow for additional oversight of migrant housing facilities by a statewide elected official rather than leaving the initiation of such proceedings in the hands of unelected bureaucrats.

SB 243 ultimately passed the Texas House and was filed without Gov. Abbott’s
signature. It is effective September 1st of this year.

Rep. Hopper’s amendment would have appropriated proceeds from fines for violations of the bill’s migrant housing facility regulations to “support border security efforts through the Local Border Security Program or the Operation Lone Star Grant Program.”

Since this bill created a penalty for migrant housing facilities housing alien laborers who were not authorized to work under the H-2A visa program (such as illegal aliens and aliens committing visa fraud, such as aliens on tourist visas illegally obtaining employment), we believe that this is a fitting way to direct these funds.

Reps. Spiller and Louderback introduced a floor amendment to substitute a
substantially different version of SB 8, which would require certain county sheriff departments to enter into ICE 287(g) requirements with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

As passed by the Texas Senate, only counties with over 100,000 population would be covered by this requirement, but this amendment would extend the requirement to all county sheriffs who operate or contract a jail (currently 234 of the 254 Texas counties).

The amendment also reworked the way in which the state provided funds to defray the costs of implementation to counties, including the introduction of a reimbursement program.

Requiring 287(g) participation for all law enforcement entities in the state was a legislative priority of ours this session, and this expansion of the scope of SB 8 was a significant improvement from the Senate version. The only potential weakness of this version was that the grant/reimbursement program could only be applied toward the Warrant Service Officer (WSO) model of the 287(g) program, which is considered to be the least comprehensive of the three currently offered by ICE. Any other models would have to be funded out of county funds or federal grant programs.

SB 8, as amended in the Texas House, would require the sheriff of each county that operates or contracts a jail (currently 234 of the 254 Texas counties) to enter into an ICE 287(g) Delegation of Immigration Authority agreement with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

This agreement, if agreed to by the federal government, would grant limited federal immigration authority to designated and trained officials, under the supervision of federal immigration officials.

The Trump administration has stated that local and state law enforcement participation is vital to enforcing our nation’s immigration laws through mass deportations of illegal aliens, and we wholeheartedly agree.

Requiring all Texas law enforcement entities to participate in the ICE 287(g) program was one of our ten legislative priorities this session, and this bill goes a long way towards accomplishing that goal.

SJR 1 proposed a constitutional amendment that would require denial of bail (after a probable cause hearing) to an illegal alien accused of committing crimes such as murder, human trafficking, sexual assault, aggravated robbery, or other serious offenses.

Illegal aliens who have committed serious crimes, including the accused murderers of Jocelyn Nungary, have not been denied bail despite their immigration status constituting an obvious flight risk.

This is a constitutional amendment that would address a pressing need for the safety of our citizens.

After the passage of SB 8 through the Texas House, bill author Sen. Schwertner moved not to accept the House amendments to the bill.

The conference committee increased the amount of the state grant to counties and eliminated the House reimbursement in order to prevent abuse of this program by counties performing the bare minimum compliance with the law after initial approval.

Importantly, the grant program in the conference committee report is available for all models of the 287(g) program, not just the Warrant Service Officer (WSO) model.

The conference committee report kept the wide applicability of the House version. All in all, this is an extremely strong step that will, with proper follow-through, greatly enhance our state’s participation in internal immigration enforcement which is sorely needed after more than 10 million nationwide border encounters since January 2021.