Loren C. Steffy

As mass deportations and escalating “border security” budgets dominate the headlines, Reconstructing Immigration: How to Rebuild America’s Economic Advantage, shows why America cannot remain a global economic leader without a modern, lawful way to attract, legalize, and retain the workers it clearly needs. It connects the dots between immigration reform, productivity, entrepreneurship, and regional development, giving readers a coherent plan for how the United States can turn a chronic political crisis into a durable competitive advantage. Drawing on construction, agriculture, healthcare, and technology, Steffy makes the case that an enforcement-first system has disadvantaged legitimate workers and honest employers while rewarding the people who exploit it.

Deconstructed: An Insider’s View of Illegal Immigration and the Building Trades is Loren C. Steffy and Stan Marek’s best-selling account of illegal immigration inside the American construction industry. Marek runs one of the largest specialty subcontracting firms in the country and has watched, over forty years, construction work go from a middle-class career to something that traps undocumented workers without overtime or healthcare.

Published by Texas A&M University Press

The first definitive biography of George Mitchell, “the father of fracking,” who perfected drilling techniques that transformed America from being oil-dependent to a major producer. Yet he also created The Woodlands, pioneering sustainable community development. Steffy examines the “Mitchell Paradox”—his conflicting legacy in energy innovation and environmental protection.

Silver Winner — Best New Nonfiction, IBPA’s Ben Franklin Awards

The Last Trial of T. Boone Pickens is Chrysta Castañeda and Loren C. Steffy’s account of the legendary oilman’s final courtroom fight. . Cut out of a Permian Basin deal, Pickens hired Castañeda to sue. In this inside record of the billion-dollar trial that followed, Castañeda  and Pickens take on powerful oil industry adversaries, offering an intimate portrait of a business icon’s final fight and the determination required to win.

The Man Who Thought Like a Ship is Loren C. Steffy’s biography of his father, J. Richard Steffy — a small-town Pennsylvania electrician with no advanced degrees who taught himself to reconstruct ancient ships from their fragments, and became the world’s leading authority on how they were built.

Silver Winner — Best New Fiction, IBPA’s Ben Franklin Awards

The Big Empty is a novel by Loren C. Steffy and a silver winner for Best New Fiction in IBPA’s Ben Franklin Awards. A ranch manager and a semiconductor executive collide on a West Texas highway, and then keep colliding over the future of Conquistador — a dying town one of them intends to save by building a chip plant in it.