Why Trump’s get-tough-on-immigrants strategy will be hard to sustain
Assurances that the administration would focus on dangerous criminals never squared with Trump’s promise of mass deportations.
Shortly after the 2024 presidential election, incoming border czar Tom Homan signaled that President Donald Trump’s deportation campaign would target criminal wrongdoers. Even now, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem insists that federal agents are going after “the worst of the worst,” a tacit acknowledgment that many Americans might want bad guys gone but not peaceful, productive immigrants embedded in their communities.
Assurances that the Trump administration would focus on dangerous criminals never squared with Trump’s promise of mass deportations. There simply aren’t enough violent undocumented immigrants in the United States to deport, and finding them is hard. The immigration hard-liners in Trump’s orbit, led by White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, would not be satisfied with anything like the pragmatic approach previous presidents took — one that acknowledged the nation’s dependence on imported labor and the risks of quickly ejecting a key workforce from the country.
And, indeed, Miller was unhappy with the pace of the administration’s deportation efforts, insisting last month that federal authorities boost immigration arrests to 3,000 per day. The result is the sort of indiscriminate roundups federal immigration authorities are beginning to conduct — and that have attracted protesters to Los Angeles’s streets.
Homan is now promising “more worksite enforcement than you’ve ever seen in the history of this nation.” Unlike the promise to pursue hardened criminals, an easy political sell, Homan’s threat targets farmworkers, construction workers, janitors and home-care aides whom Americans rely on in their daily lives. Some House Republicans are already urging restraint.
There are some 8.3 million unauthorized workers across the economy — accounting for 4.8 percent of the labor force. They make up a little under half of the agricultural labor force and are essential for the child-care industry to function. About 1.4 million unauthorized immigrants work in construction — the only industry that can lower home prices. There were no workplace raids during the covid-19 pandemic because those workers kept America running.
Immigrant labor will become even more vital as the aging American-born workforce continues to shrink. Baby boomers are retiring, and younger Americans are having too few children. Meantime, it’s unlikely they will be pleased when the price of strawberries skyrockets after farmworkers are deported, when the feds go after their babysitters or when their favorite waitress disappears.
Previous presidents have shied from pursuing unauthorized workers for fear not only of harming the economy but also of riling business-sector constituents. In 1998, immigration authorities paused raids in Vidalia onion fields after receiving an angry letter from Sen. Paul Coverdell (R-Georgia) complaining about their “indiscriminate and inappropriate use of extreme enforcement tactics.”
A 1986 law authorized sanctions against employers who hire unauthorized workers. Barring migrants’ access to jobs, the logic went, would virtually eliminate their reason to come. But then the government let businesses off the hook. Required to demand that workers show papers proving their eligibility to work, they faced little penalty when such papers turned out to be even obvious forgeries.
For all his get-tough-on-immigrants rhetoric during his first term, Trump did little to impede businesses from hiring them. In 2017, he even commuted the sentence of an Iowa meatpacking plant executive who had been convicted, during the presidency of Barack Obama, of fraud and knowingly hiring hundreds of unauthorized workers and paying for the fake documents they needed to get jobs. In other words, even Trump has stopped short of attacking the demand for immigrant labor — in which Americans all over the country are in some way complicit — and instead has focused on restricting the supply.
And he might, at least for a while. Migrant crossings into the United States have slowed. Showy, indiscriminate immigration raids — along with the deployment of federal troops to Los Angeles, which was provocative in its lack of need — might scare people from trying to cross the border and encourage those already here to leave, or at least keep their heads down.
Perhaps the president will find a way to nullify the rule that enough demand (in this case for immigrant labor) will eventually attract supply — that is, people coming here to work. That would be surprising and economically painful. It was on these insights that a bipartisan consensus used to rest: that the only way to deal with illegal immigration is to widen lanes for legal immigration, so labor demand could be met by background-checked immigrant workers vetted for their willingness to participate positively in American society. Coupling this policy with better border control and special programs to attract skilled workers would create a comprehensive, pro-growth, anti-irregular immigration policy. Trump has instead narrowed opportunity for immigrants to enter the United States legally.
Many Trump backers are no doubt tired of the conventional wisdom — repeated for decades as Congress failed to respond, with the consensus approach or any other, to more people crossing the border — and of previous presidents’ failures to acknowledge their concerns. Trump’s 2024 win gave them a mandate to get tough, instead. But that strategy will be harder for the country to sustain than it might now appear.