As the Battle of Minneapolis dominates headlines, I’m worried that even after electing Trump, we have failed to make the essential point on immigration.
As the Battle of Minneapolis dominates headlines, I’m worried that even after electing Trump, we have failed to make the essential point on immigration.
T he political class has taught me to take whatever I can get from them. I’ve been writing in favor of immigration restriction and the enforcement of immigration law for more than two decades now. At first, I felt as if I were shouting at an implacable bipartisan consensus. Elites benefitted more from immigration — which is a boon, possibly a necessity, for DINK (dual income, no kids) households to maintain their mirage of upward mobility. As a result, the two parties were able to protect the issue from serious input by the public. Then I saw how, in 2006, the public was able to put the fear of God in Congress and shut down comprehensive immigration reform.
Twenty years later, I’m glad that Republicans have finally been polarized into enforcing the law. I’m grateful that the Biden wave of immigration is being turned back by vigorous enforcement. I’m gratified to see political reality reflected in the jobs numbers. We don’t need to create 150,000 jobs a month if we’re not negligently letting in 200,000 illegal immigrants a month. A jobs report of 50,000, which we once thought of as “soft,” turns out to be enough to keep unemployment low.
But as the Battle of Minneapolis continues to dominate headlines, I’m increasingly worried that even after electing Trump, we have failed to make the essential point on immigration. We have made a strong show at the border, and we’ve turned sanctuary cities into a violent and tragic drama, but we have failed to become one people, living under republican norms.
What offends about illegal immigration isn’t the pluck of the immigrants. It’s that illegal immigration is a tool for creating a second-class labor pool, one that uses the legal black zone of under-the-table labor, unprotected by labor law, to offset a high quality of life for a certain subset of people. The arrangement condemns Americans in certain fields to compete with illegal wages and workers, or to vacate fields altogether. Over the course of my lifetime, one of the largest social changes is the radical expansion of jobs and vocations that Americans have ceased doing because patterns of law enforcement and predictable effects of sociology mark certain professions as for “immigrants only.” The Republican Party was founded in part because slavery offended the republican ideal, and it championed “free labor and free men.” Because illegal immigrants lack the protection of our just laws, they are in some sense unfree labor and unfree men.
This has massive implications for the social order. It means that some portion of our neighbors are less likely to turn to law enforcement, or even insurance companies, to handle lawlessness or accidents. It creates a two-tiered society that offends our commitments to republican equality before the law. It has the effect of racially stratifying and linguistically dividing the domestic labor market.
We all know what kinds of jobs depend on illegal labor: industrial laundries, meatpackers, certain Big Ag industries, hotels, etc. The way to turn this off, as immigration restrictionists have explained over and over again, is 1) to pass E-Verify so that employers instantly know the status of their hires; and 2) to expand worksite enforcement, including punishing illegal employers. But we’re not getting much of either tactic.
There was a period from mid-June 2025 to November 2025 where the administration lifted a pause on ICE arrests at farms, hotels, and restaurants. Ben Smith reports that employer-side immigration lawyers have told him that if anything, federal scrutiny of employers has slowed since September of last year, when a raid on a Hyundai plant in Georgia turned into an international incident. Since that time, ICE has announced only three worksite cases, involving 74 people. Trump has expressed sympathy for hoteliers and agribusiness employers who hire illegal labor to keep the price of rooms and food lower.
If restrictionists are going to spend their political capital, they need to be making the right purchase with it. And that purchase is our republican inheritance. Allowing negligent enforcement to enrich criminal employers and combine with market forces to create more economic racial hierarchies is a disaster. And it’s not just the employers, but a whole phalanx of NGOs and astro-turfed civic organizations that profit from this lawlessness. It’s these people — often politically well-connected — who need to face justice. Otherwise, this era of restrictionist ascendancy will have been in vain.