In 2023 when Republican governors shipped undocumented workers to New York and other blue states, The New York Times wrote about the conundrum those workers presented. Employers needed workers and the undocumented population wanted to work, but the law made it legally impossible impossible to hire them.
But there was another challenge. Reporters Jesse McKinley and Luis Ferré-Sadurní interviewed upstate dairy farmer Ray Dykeman, who acknowledged that “he simply could not run his business without migrant laborers, who have long fed his cows, cleaned their stalls and worked their way into his heart.
“‘They’re absolutely phenomenal,’ Mr. Dykeman said. ‘They’re friends and family.’
“But asked if he would take on a group of recently arrived asylum seekers, Mr. Dykeman was dubious.
“‘Do I want to take a chance on a bunch of people that they just trucked in?’ he said. ‘No.’”
That story highlights a common phenomenon. People fear immigrants or people from other races or cultures in the abstract but embrace the ones they know, and a recent Rice University poll shows another application of that phenomenon. Last fall, Rice’s Kinder Institute for Urban Research polled Houstonians to see how their attitudes toward immigration had changed since the beginning of 2025.
“Overall, about 1 in 7 Houston-area residents say they know someone detained and potentially deported in 2025, and among Hispanic residents that number is higher at 1 in 4,” they found. “There has also been a corresponding shift in attitude away from mass deportation with most Houston-area residents, including a majority of conservatives, saying they prefer expanded pathways to citizenship over mass deportation.”
These results come even though Houston has not experienced the kind of crackdown that alarmed residents in Los Angeles, Portland, Chicago, New Orleans and Minneapolis.
The results are consistent with a general trend in favor of finding pathways to citizenship, particularly when the current administration’s treatment of immigrants is militaristic and cruel. That said, part of the point of the Rice study is in its title, “Houston-Area Residents’ Personal Connections to Individuals Impacted by Mass Deportation Efforts.” If people regardless of political orientation have connections to immigrants, they’re less likely to buy the current administration’s horror stories and instead feel empathy toward them as people.
The strategic takeaway from this new poll and the dairy farmer story is that efforts to humanize immigrants and make them more easily understood by their communities will pay dividends. That’s easier said than done since undocumented immigrants tend to keep low profiles because they are vulnerable to legal action, but the more that immigrants are seen as a normal part of our communities, the easier it will be to move toward a more just immigration policy.
Are you having legal issues with Immigration? Do you need legal representation?
