President Trump wants to deport illegal immigrants, but, paradoxically, he doesn’t want certain industries to lose illegal immigrant labor. As a result, DHS recently decided it would not conduct worksite investigations or operations on the agriculture, restaurant, and hotel industries.
The new policy is a form of “administrative amnesty” for illegal workers in those industries. As with any amnesty, the recipients are allowed to remain in the U.S. for now. However, their new status comes not from Congress changing the law, but from the administration declaring it will not enforce the law against them.
How large is this amnesty? Having recently written a report on the illegal immigrant presence in each census-identified occupation, I reran the numbers based on the industries that Trump selected for protection. The results show that about 12.5 percent of illegal immigrants are covered. Since the Center for Immigration Studies estimated that there were 15.8 million illegal immigrants in the U.S. in January, that implies 2 million amnesty recipients.
As large as that number sounds, it only begins to measure the damage to immigration enforcement. For one thing, the amnesty signals to illegal immigrants that self-deportation is irrational. Because DHS manpower is limited, meaningful reductions in the illegal population require voluntary returns as a complement to direct removals. Illegal immigrants may indeed leave voluntarily if they believe their employment opportunities have diminished and their chances of forcible removal have increased. Administrative amnesty teaches them the opposite — if they find a job in a favored industry, the authorities won’t bother them.
The same logic applies to potential illegal immigrants who are considering a visa overstay or an unauthorized border crossing. Tough talk about enforcement may have deterred them before, but now they know that, once here, they can stay as long as they find a protected job.
Exempting whole classes of illegal immigrants from deportation also changes the terms of the debate, distracting from the more fundamental problems with mass immigration. DHS insists that it will still focus on deporting the “worst of the worst criminal illegal aliens,” but this is the platform that Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris ran on. It suggests that illegal immigrants are fine as long as they have not committed violent felonies, which of course the vast majority have not. What about the flouting of our immigration laws, the job competition with natives, the disincentive to automate, the added cost of government services, and the assimilation challenge? These are the grounds on which deportations need to be justified.
Finally, administrative amnesty is bound to enhance the cynicism that voters feel about politics. It sometimes seems that when it comes to immigration enforcement, politicians will support all measures except the ones that work. In this case, it’s jobsite enforcement that works too well, and that’s why the administration is limiting it.