Trump rediscovers comprehensive immigration reform

It's still the right answer after all these years

Late last week, in between doing dozens of different crazy and repulsive things, Donald Trump posted something sensible about immigration on Truth Social, making the point that untargeted deportations of gainfully employed illegal immigrants have a negative impact on the American economy and is, in fact, probably a bad idea.

Initially, it seemed like this tweet was going to be followed up with new policy guidance but then the White House seems to have reversed course on its reversal of course.

As best I can tell, there is just a difference of opinion between people like the Agriculture Secretary who are thinking about economic outcomes and Trump’s team of immigration hawks who don’t really care. We have specific reporting that Stephen Miller was furious that ICE wasn’t arresting more people and told them they should start going to Home Depots and picking up day laborers. This speaks to precisely what used to be the core of the immigration policy debate in the Bush and Obama years. During Obama’s first term, in particular, the US had very low levels of illegal immigration for a few reasons: border security was beefed-up during Bush’s second term, the American labor market was weak so there was less incentive to come here, and the asylum loopholes that became prominent under Trump and Biden hadn’t really been discovered and exploited yet. And the Obama administration decided to target enforcement resources in a way that minimized economic costs — that meant lots of speedy removals of recent border-crossers and lots of people being picked up out of jails around the country.

Mitt Romney, in the 2012 campaign, articulated what today is Miller’s view, that this kind of targeted enforcement isn’t enough.

The Romney/Miller view is that there are too many illegal immigrants living and working in the United States to artisanally deport them one by one, so we should instead create circumstances under which they are incentivized to “self-deport.”

In a self-deportation paradigm, it’s not just that targeting is unnecessary, it’s actually counterproductive — ICE agents instead need to be raiding restaurants and Home Deport parking lots. The goal of enforcement isn’t to maximize the number of people caught, and it’s certainly not to make sure we’re catching the worst of the worst. It’s to make as many people as possible feel unsafe. Arresting people as they voluntarily comply with orders to appear in court is a good strategy because it makes people give up their hope and stop trying to work within the system.

I think a lot of conservative public policy ideas are really half-baked and stupid.

The contemporary American right has this grand social vision of trying to refashion the United States into a more churchgoing, gender-traditionalist society, where everybody has tons of kids. And I don’t think they have any idea about how to make this happen. One reason they keep getting bogged down in wildly inaccurate nostalgia economics is that getting the sign reversed in terms of the relationship between prosperity and stay-at-home moms helps cover for the fact that none of their ideas make sense.

The self-deportation plan, by contrast, I think does more or less work. If you tell ICE not to worry too much about criminals and not to show any leniency to even the most sympathetic cases, then I think that does maximize the odds that people will leave voluntarily.

The problem, as Trump was saying at the top, is that the consequences of it working are really bad.

The fundamental paradox of immigration enforcement

When it comes to immigration, I think both sides keep getting wrapped around the same axle:

• All Republicans ever want to talk about is illegal immigrants who are also violent criminals, as if they have no understanding that the vast majority of people who overstay visas or sneak across the border to make bogus asylum claims are doing so because low-wage American jobs are high-wage relative to their home countries.

• Democrats never want to acknowledge that precisely because most people who immigrate illegally do so for sympathetic reasons, if you want to deter people from doing it in huge numbers, you have to be mean to people whose cases are objectively sympathetic.

Both sides would like, for different reasons, to live in a world where very few people are interested in immigrating illegally to the United States in order to work under the table as maids or farmworkers or construction laborers. From a conservative standpoint, if it’s all MS-13 gangbangers and welfare cheats, then mass deportation is a win-win for law and order and the economy. And from a progressive standpoint, if the number of sympathetic migrants is low, then you can just be nice to all of the people who deserve kindness, and there’s no problem.

The reality is very different. The United States is a lot richer than the global average, and many countries are much poorer than average.

What counts as a low-paid job in this country is a great living relative to what huge numbers of people make around the world. What counts as dingy, overcrowded housing with an inconvenient commutes in this country is fine compared to what so many people elsewhere endure.

There are just tons and tons of people who would like to come here for the exact reason that my various ancestors came here in the days before national quotas — it’s a way to improve your standard of living and to give your kids greater opportunities. The conservative notion that it’s all killers and rapists is a ridiculous lie. Of course there are people who come here illegally and commit crimes, just as there are plenty of native-born Americans who commit crimes.

But it’s overwhelmingly people just trying to work for a living.

The flip side is that if we allow everyone whose situation is sympathetic to immigrate, we’re going to get a ton of immigrants. I don’t really have a problem with that, and I was not personally put off by the increased immigration during Joe Biden’s presidency. But even at its peak, “immigration should be increased” was a minority view, and when the surge happened, it generated demands for less immigration. That’s part of how we got here.

So Trump really clamped down hard on the border, which Biden was already in the process of doing. But Trump did it with even more credibility and it’s basically what people wanted.

But now they’re left with the enforcement question: Do they do the thing that aligns with the political rhetoric and maximize deportations of new arrivals and criminals? Or, do they try to implement the self-deportation vision and cast as broad a net as possible, sweeping up innocent people in order to terrorize other innocent people?

Mass deportation makes Americans poorer

I’m always a bit vexed by David Leonhardt’s arguments that Democrats should be more restrictionist on immigration because immigration is bad for working class Americans.

• On the one hand, I don’t think that this is true, factually, as a matter of economics.

• On the other hand, I do think that as a matter of pragmatic politics, Democrats should be more restrictionist on immigration.

• I understand that if you’re trying to persuade Democrats to change their mind, that “you should give in to an irrational panic” is a worse argument than “restrictionism will help working class Americans.”

So I’m glad that Trump said what he said earlier about the people working on farms and hotels, because I think he has this right.

Imagine there’s a Mass Deportation button on Trump’s desk, and he could just fire off executive orders causing 11 million or more people to vanish from the country. What happens if he pushes it? Well, at first blush we have fewer people around to harvest crops, so farmers start offering higher pay to get more people to go work on the farms. That raises the price of food, making the majority of Americans worse off. It’s also only so expensive that any given food product can become before it’s cheaper to import it from abroad instead. So total agricultural output is going to fall, and America’s terms of trade are going to get worse, which again makes most people worse off.

And those new farmworkers, where did they come from? Maybe they were working in restaurants. A bunch of their colleagues got zapped by the deportation button, and in the chaos, some restaurants closed down, so the American citizens who worked there go to work on farms. America as a whole ends up with fewer restaurants, which is just as well, because food is more expensive and fewer people can afford to eat out. Chefs and other people with specialized skills end up working for lower pay as gardeners and maids, replacing immigrants who’ve been snapped away.

It’s a vision of a country that is, on average, quite a bit poorer than the current country.

What you can say for it is it might be less unequal, because illegal immigrants basically only work in low-wage sectors since it’s hard to work under the table as an AI researcher or a surgeon. In most contexts, conservatives understand that reducing inequality in ways that make most people poorer is not actually a good idea. But the good news is that any inequality-increasing impact of low-wage immigrants can be easily offset by admitting more high-wage immigrants. If we allow more doctors and scientists and engineers to come work here legally, that’s pro-growth and pro-equality.

I think the reason to limit immigration is that most people want to limit immigration.

And since we are not going to have unlimited immigration, it’s better to make the immigration selective rather than random or even negative-selected, as you get when people are working under the table. But it’s still true that removing millions of people who are already in the labor force is going to deliver a blow to the economy, which is why Trump didn’t really try in his first term and why Bush and Obama pushed for a comprehensive immigration reform solution.

The solution is the same as ever

The long-sought comprehensive immigration reform compromise will have to contain some version of the following elements:

1. Stricter enforcement, including both border security and e-verify and other measures to make it harder for employers to hire workers who are here illegally.

2. A program of legalization, whereby people who can demonstrate they’ve been here for a while and/or have some substantial links to the community and no criminal record can secure legal status — probably including the payment of fines or other monetary penalties.

3. A shift in forward-looking legal immigration to make it easier for employers to meet labor market needs and/or to improve the skill ratio of the future flow of immigrants.

What exactly those look like is always up for debate. Democrats, for example, traditionally insisted that (2) had to feature a full path to citizenship, which a lot of restrictionists interpreted as a cynical scheme to manufacture more voters. Now that Republicans do better with Latinos, maybe they won’t object so strongly. Alternatively, maybe Democrats won’t fight for it as hard and would be willing to settle for work permits. I’d be happy either way.

On (3), I personally think that a program to expand the number of low-skilled temporary workers could be a good way to achieve the economic benefits of immigration while mitigating some cultural concerns from the right. I know a lot of people object to that idea, but in many ways I think it’s the most practical solution, especially since it’s one we can dial up or down with the state of the labor market.

But regardless of the details, hear the point: As much as Democrats completely squandered the trust of the American people with a bone-headed response to a flood of bogus asylum claims, even Donald Trump recognizes that the hard-core immigration hawk concept doesn’t make sense for the economic well-being of the American people. The leading alternative to that concept — comprehensive reform that legalizes a large share of the existing illegal population and lets immigration authorities focus on border security and criminals — has always been the only solution.