The Department of Homeland Security is offering what it calls “historic travel assistance” and a “stipend” for voluntary self-deportation. That is, if you’re an illegal immigrant volunteering to leave the country, DHS will cut you a check for $1,000 and give you a free plane ticket to your home country.
This is the kind of experiment worth trying. Because the Biden administration essentially waved in millions of people who have no legal right to reside in the United States, it is natural to look for ways to get illegal migrants to move themselves out of the country in a way that is orderly, humane, and quantifiable. Involuntary deportation soaks up expensive man-hours of ICE agents or other law enforcement. Most noncitizens will insist on legal proceedings in overworked, overscheduled, and deliberately overwhelmed courts. The Trump administration must find ways of flipping the incentives and getting voluntary movement over the border in the other direction.
But we are skeptical that $1,000 and a plane ticket are enough to motivate anyone who wasn’t already thinking of leaving the United States. The Trump administration has tried to combine this with sticks — a threatened $998 per day fine on those who overstay while under deportation orders. Or, the fear of ending up in a Salvadoran prison.
But those fears will not strike the vast majority of illegal immigrants residing in the United States, who realize all too well the limits of our enforcement resources. The key to self-deportation is to reduce the pull of the jobs magnet. We’re a rich country, and many illegal immigrants are making more than $1,000 a week. Mass self-deportation will not happen unless illegal migrants believe they cannot reliably earn good money here anymore and are becoming a burden on their relations who do live and work here legally. That means stepped-up worksite enforcement. It also means Congress should pass E-Verify.
Failing that, there is an administrative alternative that employers may ultimately prefer. In the final months of Trump’s first administration, acting DHS secretary Chad Wolf drafted an Interim Final Rule that required U.S. employers to file online the Form I-9 that the law requires them to fill out and keep on-site for every newly hired alien. Filing online would allow DHS to quickly alert an employer whether the alien worker is actually eligible to work, and it is against the law for an employer to “knowingly” hire an illegal alien. This system has been dubbed “government-verify,” or “G-verify.”
The Biden administration created this mess through a comprehensive neglect of the laws that distinguish between citizens and aliens. And so the Trump administration must use every tool at hand. The timid might counsel the administration not to create more messy headlines or provoke the employers of illegal aliens (some of them political donors) with dramatic steps to enforce the law. We would remind the administration that Trump’s political ascent is attributable to a profound and widespread mandate given to him by the American public to bring order at the border and restore a society in which everyone competes on the same terms under the same law.