Vice President JD Vance warned in his famous post-midterm X post that Republicans would begin advocating for amnesty in the aftermath of the election. He was right, although he didn’t mention that the president of the United States would be one of them.
In a 60 Minutes interview over the weekend, Trump said he’d like to find a deal with Democrats to regularize the legal status of good, hardworking illegal immigrants. Whenever Trump has talked in these terms in the past, or mused about increasing levels of legal immigration, his restrictionist aides have — rightly — pulled him back.
This will probably happen again, given that the president has just made the ur-immigration hawk Stephen Miller his chief of staff. Even if Trump persists, it’s hard to see how there’d be any deal in the offing with Democrats who think they won, in part, on the excesses of the president’s immigration enforcement and have a chance for a trifecta in 2028 that could roll back his immigration agenda entirely. Are they really going to make concessions on enforcement or legal immigration numbers?
There’s no doubt that the administration’s immigration regime hurt among Hispanics voters and the general electorate, as well, although not nearly as much as corruption, prices, and the Iran war. With a vast illegal immigrant population in the United States and limited enforcement resources, the administration has understandably looked to self-deportation as a force multiplier. If there are high-profile apprehensions and deportations, illegal immigrants see that and decide to go home on their own. This dynamic has clearly contributed to a notable diminishment in the foreign-born population in Trump’s second term.
The political problem is that everyone else sees those apprehensions and detentions, and may not like them, especially if they are needlessly combative for the sake of cable-news coverage and internet clicks. This was the approach of former DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, whose subtraction from the administration was a net addition. Border czar Tom Homan took over the immigration portfolio and has tried to avoid headlines, but enforcement has still been overwhelming based on apprehensions in public places.
What’s been missing is an emphasis on what our friends at the Center for Immigration Studies call bureaucratic or briefcase enforcement, the nuts-and-bolts work to track down, warn, and punish as necessary employers who hire illegal workers. Ideally, we’d have a national E-Verify system to instantaneously flag such workers. Still, there’s much that can be done with currently existing tools, and Homan himself favors deploying them.
If we squeeze illegal workers out of the labor market, it creates an incentive for them to leave, since so many came here looking for a job. At the same time, such largely invisible enforcement doesn’t generate occasions for demonstrations and turmoil in the streets.
Yet the president is an obstacle to adopting this tactic. He has sympathy for employers desperate for immigrant labor — since he was one himself — and influential business constituencies will balk at intense workplace enforcement. So, we have the president wildly swinging from supporting splashy actions targeting specific cities to talking about throwing in the towel.
At some point, when the illegal population is down substantially and there’s an enforcement system in place that can’t be ignored or gamed, there will be a case for amnesty for specific categories of illegal immigrants. We aren’t there yet, and we shouldn’t be thinking of giving up after one election loss. Vance implied that it was GOP quislings who would immediately turn to amnesty after the midterm drubbing, but, alas, the call is coming from inside the house.