Make Employers Secure the Border

This article is from a cover package of essays entitled Ten New Ideas for the Democratic Party to Help the Working Class, and Itself. Find the full series here.

The moment that President Trump puts his hand on that Bible and takes the oath of office,” said incoming Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller to the Fox News host Sean Hannity after the election, “the occupation ends, liberation day begins. He will immediately sign executive orders, sealing the border shut [and] beginning the largest deportation operation in American history.”

Democrats should expect Donald Trump to follow through on that threat. We know from the last time Trump was president that he likes to begin with shock-and-awe exercises of executive power, as with his abrupt ban on travel from seven Muslim-majority countries. And we know he views brutal, inhumane tactics as a deterrent to immigration, which we saw in his policy of migrant parent-child separations.

But Democrats should also expect voters to judge Trump’s second-term mass deportations with as much revulsion as they did his first-term travel ban and family separations, swinging the public opinion pendulum back in their direction. Even though Joe Biden’s administration, and Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign, struggled to mitigate public ire over the record number of border crossings on their watch, Trump’s own brand of chaos will present a fresh opportunity for Democrats. Sooner than you might think, voters will be open to hearing Democratic ideas for solving the immigration mess that would restore order, respect humanity, and reflect the desires of most Americans. 

The solution needn’t be invented from scratch. It’s the same one every Democrat in the Senate, and plenty of Republicans, supported more than a decade ago: tough restraints on employers who hire undocumented migrants combined with generous opportunities for those migrants to become legal immigrants. It won’t disrupt the economy or require mass militarized roundups. And once those disruptions and roundups begin under Trump, it’ll look increasingly appealing to the public.

We know Trump’s plans go far beyond his limited mandate. The 2024 exit poll asked if undocumented immigrants should be deported or given a chance at legal status. Only 40 percent wanted deportation, while 56 percent preferred legal pathways. Clearly, Trump didn’t win the national popular vote or the swing states on the deportation vote alone. He needed a piece of the legal pathway vote to seal his victory, and snagged 22 percent of it. 

And in his first term, we saw Trump lose support, and drag the entire Republican Party down with him, because of his nativist fixations.

FiveThirtyEight began tracking the average of Trump’s first-term job approval rating on January 23, 2017, four days before he imposed the travel ban that detained people at airports, stranded visa holders abroad, and separated families. While his average approval was always below 50 percent, he started his presidency with a level of approval slightly higher than disapproval. However, one week after the controversial ban, Trump’s approval number sunk underwater, and it stayed that way for the rest of his presidency.

Separating families who cross the southern border seeking asylum, a policy publicly announced in April 2018 as “zero tolerance,” did not help Trump’s political standing. Public outrage was so intense that Trump signed an executive order in June instructing the Department of Homeland Security to keep families together (though some separations quietly continued). 

Then, in October 2018, as the midterm election neared, Trump tried to whip up panic about a “caravan” of Central American migrants heading to the American border, relying on a familiar mix of bigoted lies and conspiracy mongering about their intentions. Playing the fear card failed to prevent Democrats from seizing control of the House by keeping the focus on health care. Exit polls showed that a plurality of 41 percent of voters named health care as their most important issue, and three-quarters of them voted Democratic. Only 23 percent cited immigration, and Democrats picked up about one-quarter of those.

Backlash against Trump’s attacks on immigrants continued to build. Gallup polling in the spring of 2020 registered the highest share of people in at least two decades, 77 percent, holding the belief that immigration is good for America. And for the first time since at least 1965, more Americans expressed support for an increase in levels of immigration than for a decrease. 

Yet in the 2020 presidential primary, most Democratic candidates excessively interpreted the shift in public sentiment and rushed to support very loose immigration laws, such as lowering an illegal border crossing from a criminal offense to a civil one. The leftward lurch on immigration didn’t pose a political problem in a general election dominated by Trump’s mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic. But when the Biden administration faced a record influx of migrants, the perception of possessing a lax attitude toward immigration left Democrats vulnerable to attack. 

Biden and Harris tried many different approaches to limit the flow of migration and steer it toward legal avenues. (Recall Harris’s controversial 2021 visit to Guatemala when she told potential migrants, “Do not come.”) In 2024, the administration imposed strict border limits by executive order that dramatically reduced the number of illegal crossings. But their efforts did not register with most voters. Frustration with immigration was not nearly as central to Trump’s victory as was frustration with inflation—75 percent of voters said they had experienced some degree of “hardship” from inflation in the past year. But most voters, 53 percent, sided with Trump over Harris on the question of who they trusted more to handle immigration. And we have anecdotal evidence that some voters with a moderate view on deportations set aside Trump’s vitriol and charitably assumed he would take a narrow approach. For example, The New York Times interviewed an immigrant business owner in Pennsylvania who said, “Me, worried about deportations? No, not one worry. Trump knows he needs immigrants to work. Us, we’re here to work, we commit no crimes.”

Such voters are about to have a rude awakening. Trump’s incoming border czar, Tom Homan, made clear that the administration will not limit deportations to those who have committed crimes inside the United States, but will target anyone who is undocumented. He said on Fox News, “I’ve talked about prioritization of public safety threats and national security threats. But if you’re in the country illegally, you’re not off the table.” To maximize manpower beyond the agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Stephen Miller has said the Trump administration will enlist state National Guard units. If and when Democratic governors don’t cooperate, Miller has suggested that units from Republican states will cross state lines.

Trump is also expected to revoke the legal status of hundreds of thousands of people who were granted “humanitarian parole” or “temporary protected status” after fleeing dangerous circumstances in their home countries. Miller has even voiced plans for a “turbocharged” denaturalization program—stripping citizenship away from the naturalized who have committed crimes or, potentially, for minor transgressions.

The aggressive strategy could hit logistical roadblocks. Since other nations might not readily accept deportees, Miller and Homan have floated various mass detention options, which are easier to talk about than to build and manage. Trump’s competence in carrying out nativist policies is highly questionable; in his first term, despite the cruel tactics deployed, illegal border crossings rose during the pre-pandemic years, and the pace of interior deportations trailed his predecessors. 

Yet harsh tactics can still inflict harm on undeserving people who only want the opportunity to join the American middle class and contribute to our economic growth. And most American voters don’t want their government to break up families and disrupt local businesses reliant on immigrant labor. At the same time, they also didn’t want the disturbances experienced during the Biden administration, when surges of migrants strained the ability of state and local governments to provide shelter and schooling. Any Democratic response to Trump’s disruption should involve policies designed to bring order, not further disruption.

Fortunately, the hard work of developing such policies has already been done.

The Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act of 2013 was crafted by a bipartisan Senate group dubbed the “Gang of Eight,” and if you don’t remember it, you will be gobsmacked by some of the cast of characters involved: Jeff Flake (anti-Trump Republican turned Biden administration ambassador to Turkey), Lindsey Graham (anti-Trump Republican turned Trump sycophant), John McCain (Barack Obama’s 2008 opponent turned savior of Obamacare), Bob Menendez (convicted of bribery), and Marco Rubio (anti-Trump Republican and now Trump’s secretary of state appointee).

The bill was held together by a series of interconnected bargains. Undocumented immigrants already here could obtain legal status and get on a path to a citizenship if they had no criminal record and paid penalties. But before people could pursue green cards, border security goals needed to be met, including a 90 percent rate of preventing illegal crossings. At the same time, steps would be taken to clear out a backlog of visa applicants—people trying to enter through legal means. 

And all employers would be required to use the “E-Verify” computer background check system to ensure that their employees were legally documented. As the Los Angeles Times reported in October, “E-Verify is free for employers, with more than 98% of those checked being confirmed as work-authorized instantly or within 24 hours,” but as of today it’s mostly voluntary and rarely used. 

In other words, people who are already here and contributing to America can stay, our workforce would no longer be reliant on illegal labor, and a more orderly system for future immigration would be put into place.

The bill passed the Senate in a bipartisan 68–32 vote. But as anti-immigrant sentiment within the Republican Party grassroots boiled over, Republican Speaker of the House John Boehner refused to bring the Senate bill to the floor. Similar legislation has not been formally considered since.

Earlier this year, a different bipartisan immigration compromise was attempted in the Senate with a limited focus on border security. Republican Senator James Lankford, Democratic Senator Chris Murphy, and independent Senator Kyrsten Sinema struck a deal designed to expedite adjudication of asylum claims and give border security officials more power to turn people away at the border. Senate Republicans sabotaged the compromise with a filibuster, prompted by Trump, who did not want Biden getting credit for a border security bill. 

While most Democrats were prepared to support the bill, some progressive immigration advocates deemed the border provisions too restrictive. But if they were incorporated into a comprehensive bill that also improved the processing of legal visa applications, the restrictions would be more palatable. 

The collapse of the 2013 bill made “comprehensive” a dirty word. Too many compromises gave critics too many targets, so the argument went. But narrower immigration reform bills haven’t fared much better in the last decade. The politics are just as complicated, and the policies can’t work as well when implemented piecemeal. For example, this year a bipartisan Senate bill to mandate E-Verify was introduced but went nowhere, for good reason. If we suddenly imposed E-Verify on every business, without any other fixes to the immigration system, about 8 million undocumented workers would not only lose their jobs but be removed from the workforce entirely. During a period of low unemployment, that would force many businesses to close and risk recession. To avert that risk, mandatory E-Verify should be paired with legal status for existing undocumented workers. It needs to be part of a comprehensive reform bill. 

The problem with stymieing comprehensive immigration reform was never the complexity of the legislation. The problem was and is a Republican Party taken over by nativists uninterested in finding commonsense solutions reflective of the public will. Once Trump reminds us all over again that, when it comes to immigration, he is a chaos agent, Democrats will have a fresh opportunity to show they are the problem solvers.  

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