Trump’s said this sort of thing before.
President Trump told Ross Douthat on 60 Minutes that he now favors giving amnesty to illegal aliens who’ve been here for many years, and that his mass deportation push was too sweeping.
Whether or not you think amnesty is a good idea, I wouldn’t get too excited about the president’s comments.
First of all, he’s said this sort of thing before. Only those of us who follow this stuff for a living probably remember the 2018 White House meeting where he agreed to support legislation to amnesty “dreamers” (illegal aliens who came as minors) with no strings attached. In the event, the House did consider a bill to amnesty dreamers, but in exchange for a number of policy reforms to legal and illegal immigration; it came close in the House but failed both because Speaker Paul Ryan sabotaged it and because not a single Democrat voted yes.
I have long advocated enacting targeted, piecemeal amnesties in exchange for specific needed reforms, as opposed to the “comprehensive immigration reform” approach which has always failed. But does anyone think the incoming Democratic House — full of members who think they’re going to win the presidency in two years and be free to do what they want — will be willing to compromise with Trump and pass a bill that packaged amnesty with reforms like limits on parole or asylum, or the end of the visa lottery?
By the way, here’s the DSA immigration platform:
End ICE detention and deportations and punish federal agents’ brutality. Legalize migration, grant amnesty for all immigrants regardless of status, provide a path to citizenship for all permanent residents, and end visa caps and quotas.
The Abigail Spanberger-style “moderates” might quibble with the wording, but this is the mainstream Democratic Party’s de facto immigration plan, and there’s no way they’re going to be willing to engage in compromise lawmaking with the Bad (and now diminished) Orange Man.
On the other point, the president was correct that DHS’s immigration enforcement push did not have the optimal balance between “body-armor” and “briefcase” approaches. There will always be a need for men with badges and guns to arrest illegal aliens. But even after Tom Homan took over immigration enforcement after Minneapolis and turned the heat down, there is still an imbalance: Where are the audits of employer personnel records, which require no guns? Where are the letters from the Social Security Administration notifying employers that the payroll information they submitted doesn’t match the agency’s records? Vice President Vance, in his post-election tweet, specifically backed targeting the employment illegals — which was notable, because little is happening. And it’s not happening because the president — not to mention various members of the cabinet — don’t want it to happen because it would inconvenience employers.
I haven’t been told this specifically, but my sense is that the immigration hawks in the admin knew that if the illegal population was going to shrink it would have to be mostly through self-deportation. But they also knew the president would never back the primary means of persuading illegals to go home on their own: drying up access to jobs (which has the added benefit of not being photogenic and hard to mount protests against). And so the hawks appear to have figured they’d have to settle for scaring illegals with the enforcement theatrics of Noem to see if that would generate self-deportation. And it did, to a degree, but it wasn’t sustainable.
And the president’s 60 Minutes comments are proof of its unsustainability.