A dispatch from "Katyzuela"
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What is the intersection of oil, immigration, and Venezuela in Katy, Texas?
A visit to a Texas suburb that sits at the intersection of oil, immigration, and Venezuela. I'm David Brancaccio. More refiners of gasoline in the U.S., including Citgo and Phillips 66, are moving to buy Venezuelan crude directly from Venezuelan producers. This as the Trump administration has eased the licensing following the U.S. arrest of Venezuela's leader in early January. Meanwhile, the administration is taking away work permits and visas from many Venezuelans in the U.S. to pressure people to return to their native country. One place where this is playing out is a Houston suburb. Marketplace's Elizabeth Troval reports from Katy, Texas.
At La Pradera Latin Market, a clean, well-lit store inside a dingy strip mall, you can buy Venezuelan coffee, chocolate, and cheese.
How have U.S. policies impacted Venezuelan immigrants in Katy?
This is the most emblematic cheese we have here. It's our handmade cheese.
Lidilin Castellanos pulls a soft white cheese out of the fridge, along with a container of special cream. Well, she shows me around while one of her regulars stops by.
Hello, good friend. Come on in.
Castellanos opened her shop in 2019 to cater to a Venezuelan population that has grown to roughly 75,000 people in the Houston metro area. So many of them live in the small suburban city of Katy. It's sometimes called Katy-suela. Castellanos and her husband chose Katy for the good schools and affordable homes. But this recent wave of immigration is not how Houston's relationship with Venezuela started. Before Houston received tens of thousands of Venezuelan immigrants, it was Americans who sought opportunities in Venezuela. In this training video from the 1950s, an American father is assigned to work in Venezuela's oil fields and is writing back home to his wife.
Dear Ann, Well, here I am at Lagunillas in the oil fields. The offshore wells run along the edge of Lake Maracaibo for more than 40 miles.
In Houston, Rice University professor Francisco Monaldi, who's from Venezuela, often meets Americans who worked there decades ago.
I keep finding when I give a speech here, people that tell me I lived in Venezuela, I was a petroleum engineer.
And now that the U.S. government wants to develop Venezuela's oil sector, we may start to see this dynamic again. Monaldi says U.S. companies are seeing which Venezuelans in places like Haiti might be interested in going back to Venezuela to work in the oil sector.
They know the culture. They have families there. Venezuelans could serve as sort of guides to going into the country.
A stint back in Venezuela at a big oil company may be attractive for some, but for Lady Lynn Castellanos in Haiti... She fears returning to Venezuela would endanger her family. Rebuilding the country will take time, and her kids were raised here. But families like hers may not have a choice. The Trump administration has revoked protections and work permits for hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans.
What products reflect the Venezuelan culture in Katy's markets?
She says even if you have an ID, even if you've had a work permit for years, even if you've followed immigration laws, there's no guarantee you won't be detained and deported. In Katy, Texas, I'm Elizabeth Troval for Marketplace.
Now to news today from the Commerce Department on the U.S. trade deficit, which widened in December, ballooning by nearly a third. The gap for all of 2025 was the biggest on record. Now, that's not the intention of our leaders, but there it is. Some of it had to do with, like everything else, artificial intelligence. Let's check in with Diane Swonk, chief economist at the audit tax and advisory firm KPMG.
What we're seeing is imports of AI inputs to data centers have soared. And part of that is due to, one, the AI arms race and the fact that the administration have given the tech behemoths waivers on AI imports, the inputs. We don't produce them in the United States. We import almost all of them. And as a result, in order to compete in the AI arms race, they had to give tariff waivers for the tech companies to build up their data centers, which is what we're seeing going on.
KPMG chief economist Diane Swonk there.
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