Donald Trump's immigration plan needs a hard reset
On illegal immigration, President Donald Trump just rapidly executed a rare maneuver: the flip-flop-flip.
His administration has spent months talking, and acting, tough on 'mass deportation.' But on June 12, he said that to avoid economic pain he would exempt farms, hotels and restaurants from worksite raids to enforce the immigration laws. In response, the Department of Homeland Security suspended such raids. Then, on June 15, Trump signaled that he was going to take back the exemptions: Mass deportation was back on, especially in places where Democratic officials refuse to participate in enforcing the law. The next day, the department confirmed that raids were back on.
We're used to slapdash inconstancy from Trump. But his ambivalence is understandable and widely shared. On the one hand, the presence of millions of undocumented immigrants in the U.S. makes a mockery of our laws and outrages much of the public. On the other, many industries have come to rely on them and their sudden departure would disrupt the economy, just as Trump said. Those dueling impulses are why the past few decades have seen tough laws and lax enforcement.
Trump's most recent idea for splitting the difference — cracking down in blue areas of the country but not red ones — would not improve matters if seriously pursued. What would it mean, to start with, for the rural parts of liberal states with sanctuary laws? California has a lot of farms. Besides, it doesn't make sense: Trump's position would be that illegal immigrants are both a scourge and must be kept living among his supporters — the very people most exercised about their presence in our country.
But going full speed ahead on raids everywhere will continue to cause the difficulties that led Trump to consider backing off. The economic costs will fall on his supporters and opponents alike. The administration's methods of enforcing immigration law also seem to be generating public opposition (although Trump has the great advantage of facing a Democratic Party that voters do not believe is committed to fighting illegal immigration). It is suffering defeats in court based on its dubious interpretation of such laws as the Alien Enemies Act. Meanwhile, Trump isn't coming close, by his own administration's count, to deporting the millions of illegal immigrants that he has led many MAGA voters to expect.
There is no way for Trump to meet those expectations or avoid difficult trade-offs. What's peculiar is how uninterested he has been in a policy that could ease those trade-offs: preventing illegal hiring in the first place rather than addressing it only after the fact.
From time to time, Trump has endorsed making large employers use the E-Verify system to ensure that anyone they hire has legal authorization to work in the U.S. But he barely pushed for it in his first term and has done even less in his second.
A broad E-Verify mandate would have multiple advantages over what he's doing. It would turn off the jobs magnet for crossing the border illegally or overstaying a visa. It would change the balance of incentives for undocumented immigrants between staying and returning home, with more of them 'self-deporting' in a way that avoids the litigation and costs of government roundups. Because the policy would apply to new hires instead of existing employees, it would also come with a built-in limit to the economic disruption it would cause. Finally, it would allow more direct enforcement efforts to prioritize criminals and lean less heavily on workplace raids.
It's not a perfect policy. E-Verify would impose hardships on some undocumented immigrants — and which ones would depend on the vagaries of the labor market. Some employers would still resist. Some Trump supporters would be unhappy that the policy would, at least tacitly and temporarily, tolerate a large, continuing undocumented population. And the system would make errors.
Existing law arguably allows the president to implement mandatory E-Verify on his own. Or Congress could put it in law, ideally pairing it with legal status for people who have spent most of their lives here after coming illegally as children.
Alternatively, Trump's efforts at enforcing immigration law inside the U.S. could go the way of the U.S. DOGE Service: inflicting pain and polarizing the public in return for very little lasting progress on his stated objectives. He already seems to grasp the need for a course correction. He just needs to make the right one.
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