Shortly after his swearing-in, President Donald Trump told supporters that he felt immigration was the “No. 1 issue” that led to his victory, more important than inflation. This is no doubt why he got off to a strong start on immigration Monday with a series of executive orders and other actions. Trump will be an enormous improvement over Biden on immigration. But much of what he is doing is returning to the status quo ante—as a colleague of mine has noted, even “mass deportation” can be seen as a return to immigration normalcy. After all, in 2014 under President Barack Obama, ICE’s Enforcement and Removals Operations directorate deported nearly 316,000 people.
As important as it is to unwind bad Biden policies and reverse their consequences, returning to the border and immigration situation of January 2021 isn’t enough—much remained to be done even then. What should we look for over the next days and weeks to see if Trump 2.0 will represent a real advance beyond Trump 1.0?
One issue to watch is parole. The new administration immediately suspended the entrance of inadmissible aliens via Biden’s unlawful mass-parole programs using the CBP One app. Immigration parole is a narrow power given by Congress to the president to let in people who are inadmissible; it was intended to be used in a handful of cases, such as in a medical emergency or the need for an inadmissible alien to testify in court. Biden’s two mass-parole programs—one at the Mexican land border for people from any country and the other for nationals of Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela to fly directly into the interior—have resulted in the settlement of about 1 million people who have no right to be here.
Parole was one of the tools the Biden administration used to freelance a parallel immigration system to evade the numerical limits on immigration established by Congress. Under Biden’s watch, more foreigners were released into the country via this system than through legal immigration.
Ending these programs is essential. But what’s stopping the next Democratic administration from just starting them up again, or using parole as a pretext for something even worse?
We’ll know the new administration is serious about locking in change if it makes a push in Congress to restrict the use of parole by future presidents. Various means of doing this have been proposed, such as specifying the reasons for which an alien may be paroled into the country and placing a numerical cap on the number of parole grants. But whatever form it takes, the administration will need to follow up this week’s cancellation of the Biden programs with a serious push for legislation to limit presidential power in this area.
Another indicator of a commitment to making new gains, rather than just undoing the reverses of the past four years, regards asylum. One of Monday’s executive orders restored Remain in Mexico, the program that sent third-country border-jumpers claiming asylum back to wait in Mexico for their hearings, rather than releasing them into the country in the hope they won’t abscond.
Remain in Mexico (formally known as the Migrant Protection Protocols) was very effective in 2019 in halting the spike in illegal border crossings by non-Mexicans. But it is, in the words of Christopher Landau—US ambassador to Mexico at the time, and currently nominated to be Deputy Secretary of State—a “second-best approach,” since it still accepts the idea that people who pass through multiple countries before reaching the United States should be allowed to apply for asylum.
But anyone who has passed through Mexico, let alone all the other countries along the way, is by definition an ordinary migrant rather than a genuine asylum seeker, because the latter would—like Jews fleeing the Nazis or Armenians escaping the Young Turk genocide—settle for any port in a storm.
If the new administration is set on real change rather than just reprising its greatest hits, we should see a plan to end asylum for illegal aliens as a matter of law. But since there will always be some whom we can’t or don’t want to deport back to their home countries, such a change would necessitate arrangements with other countries willing to take them. I like to call this Remain in Mongolia, though any country, or countries, would do. Illegal aliens claiming a fear of being returned to their home countries as a defense against deportation would not have their claims even considered by American authorities, but instead would be sent to Mongolia (or Paraguay or Namibia or some other cooperative country) and request asylum there.
The specifics of such a policy are not the point of this analysis; rather, the issue is whether the Trump administration will seek to change the asylum paradigm rather than simply try to limit its problematic effects.
Worksite enforcement is another thing to keep an eye on. Immigration Czar Tom Homan has said “you can count on worksite enforcement coming back,” and I believe him. This is essential because most illegal aliens aren’t gang members or drug dealers, and focusing exclusively on criminal aliens as a matter of policy would be a de facto amnesty for those illegals who stay out of trouble.
If the White House is genuinely serious about cementing the ban on hiring illegal aliens as a long-term deterrent, we will see some kind of push for mandatory verification of employment eligibility.
E-Verify is a free online system that allows employers to check whether new hires are telling the truth about being authorized to work. But only about half of new hires are currently screened because the program is voluntary for most employers. So illegals, most of whom work on the books with fake or stolen identification, are naturally in the other half.
“Lasting change is needed.”
Here, too, there are varying approaches, from legislation mandating use of E-Verify, to mandating it administratively, or a different approach altogether, dubbed “G-Verify,” wherein Social Security, IRS, and DHS would do the verification on their own, without requiring any extra steps from employers when they file payroll information for new hires.
For our purposes here, the issue is not the specific approach, but whether the White House makes employment-eligibility verification a priority.
The same choice exists in other areas of immigration policy. For instance, the White House has suspended refugee admissions for at least three months to allow for a thorough reassessment of the program. So far, so good. But merely playing the refugee-resettlement game better isn’t enough. Trump needs to change the game. To that end, look for the president to withdraw from the UN refugee treaty known as the Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees.
If Trump succeeds only in undoing Biden’s immigration damage, that itself will be an accomplishment. But lasting change is needed to escape the policy ping-pong of each new administration undoing its predecessor’s executive actions. The next few months may tell whether the new administration will be satisfied simply with playing clean-up on immigration, or aspires to something more.