The profound hypocrisy underlying America’s immigration policy

Opinion Eduardo Porter The profound hypocrisy underlying America’s immigration policy Behind the raids and rhetoric, Trump protects the immigrant workforce he vilifies. June 24, 2025 at 10:10 a.m. EDT51 minutes ago 6 min 51 A Home Depot worker cleans a sign on June 8, after protesters clashed with law enforcement in Los Angeles County. (Jill Connelly/Reuters) If President Donald Trump believes in anything, it must be in the imperative to expel every single immigrant living in the country illegally, right? This is one of his core commitments to the MAGA coalition. It’s why he hired ethno-nationalist Stephen Miller as a deputy chief of staff for policy — to reassure his followers that he will stop at nothing to shield them from the murderous filthy criminals lurking just beyond America’s borders. It’s why his border czar, Tom Homan, promised “more worksite enforcement than you’ve ever seen in the history of this nation” to flush unauthorized immigrants from the workforce. Make sense of the latest news and debates with our daily newsletter But it’s all for show. The swarm of agents from the Department of Homeland Security at a Home Depot in Los Angeles was a performance. Like presidents over at least four decades, Trump understands the business rationale for protecting America’s large and vibrant illegal workforce. He will do nothing to undermine it. There is a little secret that everybody in the immigration enforcement business knows: We have effective tools to prevent unauthorized workers from working. They are not as telegenic as agents in tactical vests running across a Home Depot parking lot to catch a dozen skinny guys hoping to land a plumbing gig. But these tools do have a track record of curbing the incentive that draws people from around the world: available jobs. Follow Trump’s second term Follow That these tools have not been fully deployed underscores the fundamental hypocrisy behind America’s immigration policy. Voters may say they want illegal immigrants to go away. But moms and dads looking for child care, retirees seeking a caretaker, home builders and farmers and landscapers, and everyday shoppers picking up strawberries for their kids’ breakfast — all these people rely on unauthorized immigrants’ work. The story of workplace raids, arrests and deportations of unauthorized workers offers a picture of enforcement designed for maximum drama and minimum effect. In April, Immigration and Customs Enforcement was boasting it had arrested more than 1,000 workers without employment authorization since Trump’s inauguration. That would make for an annual pace of some 4,000 to5,000, compared to over 8 million unauthorized immigrant workers in the labor force. At that pace it will take a while to flush them all out. As the Congressional Research Service concluded in an analysis of the data already 10 years ago: “The values of the various measures for the years shown seem quite small relative to the estimated size of the unauthorized alien workforce.” There is little evidence, moreover, that employers, the main magnet for undocumented immigrants, will face real scrutiny. During his first mandate, Trump did ramp up the audits of I-9 forms that employers must collect from all new workers which attest to their eligibility to work. Still, the audits targeted a vanishingly small share of businesses. The government does have an effective tool to bar unauthorized workers from employment. It’s called E-Verify. It plugs the data collected by employers from prospective workers into government databases to figure out quickly whether they are allowed to work in the U.S. E-Verify has been around since 1996 as a voluntary service. But employers were extra slow to pick it up: Why mess with a system that allowed them to accept whatever paperwork workers supplied and plead ignorance when it proved to be a blatant forgery? By 2006, only 3 percent of new hires were run through the system. But then, several states started mandating its use. By 2015, 31 percent of new hires were queried. And guess what? The employment of workers without legal authorization to work declined significantly: One study estimated that an E-Verify mandate in a state reduced employment by 19 percent among likely undocumented workers. Another study found that the population of undocumented immigrants declined in states that passed E-Verify mandates. Consider Arizona, where the Legal Arizona Workers Act of 2007 mandated E-Verify usage across the state. From 2007 to 2022, the state’s undocumented population fell by half, outpacing its 9 percent decline across the nation. The system is far from perfect. Critics have noted that E-Verify has often incorrectly flagged citizens as unauthorized to work. Others point out that, in the case of Arizona, for instance, other draconian anti-immigrant policies drove the decline in the unauthorized population. While the government does not charge for E-Verify, it is costly for businesses to set up. One study found that compliance with mandates among small businesses was very low. There are economic downsides to E-Verify. It could blunt the labor market by impeding turnover. Since the verification process applies only to new employees, it locks in unauthorized workers who are already on company payrolls. Moreover, a national E-Verify mandate would not follow statewide patterns, which can simply push paperless immigrants in one state to seek employment in another. The fundamental reason it has not been deployed at scale, though, is that we have never really wanted to check closely. All the way back to the 1940s, the Border Patrol would ease up on immigration enforcement during the agricultural harvest. A research paper from 26 years ago by economists Gordon Hanson and Antonio Spilimbergo noted that rising demand for workers in agriculture, meatpacking, apparel and construction led to a pullback in immigration enforcement. For all of Trump’s Sturm und Drang over immigration, by the end of his first term, there were about as many unauthorized workers toiling in the economy as there had been when his administration began. It’s not a bad thing, by the way, that workplace enforcement of immigration law over the years has been mostly for show. Unauthorized workers do not undercut the wages of Americans. The studies of E-Verify programs find that culling the unauthorized workforce, at best, has no impact on the employment and wages of Americans. And at the margins, it probably even hurts them. Immigrants are mostly complements, not substitutes of domestic workers. For example, restaurants that close because of a lack of immigrant cooks will fire the young, American hosts and hostesses who smile at customers and steer them to their tables. The aging of the native population makes immigrant workers even more vital to American prosperity. And the supply of immigrant workers is getting squeezed by reasons that have nothing to do with Trump. Secular forces driving immigration to the U.S. for decades are weakening and even going into reverse. Trump understands the value of a good performance. It is possible that he could convince his MAGA base that he is WINNING! in his war against unauthorized workers. He is, however, a businessman above all — a businessman who has been known to illegally employ unauthorized immigrant workers. Whatever he says, he has no interest in getting them out of the workforce. And he won’t.