We know Donald Trump can talk the talk on illegal migration. The question is what he would be able to deliver in a second term. In 2016 he vowed to wall off the southern border and send the bill to Mexico. It didn’t happen. Now Mr. Trump is promising to “carry out the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.”
Daniel Di Martino, a native of Venezuela who follows the economics of migration at the Manhattan Institute, is skeptical. “The labor market in the U.S. has been booming, and there’s a high correlation between job openings in the U.S. and illegal immigration,” he says in an interview. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce reported last month that there are still a million more jobs than unemployed workers, and nominal wages have been rising.
Another complication for Mr. Trump is who has been coming. “Twenty years ago, 90% of the people arriving were Mexican,” Mr. Di Martino says. “Today, maybe two-thirds are not Mexican. It’s easier to send back Mexicans. It’s not so easy to send back others. You can’t send to Mexico people who are not Mexican. Mexico is a sovereign country, too, and doesn’t want them.”
Mr. Trump is eager to expel the millions of foreign nationals who have arrived at the border under President Biden and were allowed to enter the country without being vetted. Most are economic migrants in search of employment. Others are violent criminals who are preying on U.S. residents, even if mainstream media outlets are reluctant to acknowledge that. And some have legitimate asylum claims. Regardless of which category they occupy, however, the latest arrivals would be among the most difficult to remove right away.
“Nobody who has a pending immigration court date can be deported until their case is resolved through the immigration courts,” Mr. Di Martino says. “And the people who have dates are the recent people who came under Biden.” Which means that if Mr. Trump deports anybody, it’s likely to be the far more sympathetic cases who arrived decades ago, stayed out of trouble, put down roots and may now have American spouses and children.
Mr. Trump might have designs on reviving “Remain in Mexico” protocols, under which some non-Mexican asylum seekers were forced back across the border and housed in makeshift encampments while their claims were adjudicated. But Mexico has taken a more authoritarian turn since Mr. Trump left office, and it’s uncertain whether the new government’s judicial reforms would accommodate such a policy. Mr. Trump likewise may try to reinstate Title 42, which prevented migrants from applying for asylum during Covid. But that was an emergency measure, and bringing it back might not survive a court challenge now that the health scare has ended.
Mr. Di Martino thinks that the former president would do better to focus on processing current asylum claims more quickly, which would reduce incentives to come in the first place. The Biden administration has spent four years effectively handing out work permits to almost anyone who arrives at the border and seeks asylum, credibly or not. Why not build more detention centers along the border, hire 1,000 more immigration judges to handle the backlog, and reduce the wait time for processing a claim from years to a few months, or even a few weeks?
“People come illegally because they know they will be released until their court date, which could be years away,” Mr. Di Martino says. “If we could adjudicate the cases more quickly, people would stop coming at such high rates.”
Mr. Trump wants the asylum system reformed to make it harder to game, but he’s up against left-wing Democrats who would just as soon erase the border and have America take all comers, no questions asked. Mr. Trump’s instincts are correct, but reforming asylum law is impractical in the short term given the partisan divisions in Congress. It would require either ending the filibuster, which is a horrible idea in general, or securing 60 votes in the Senate, which Republicans won’t have. By contrast, expanding the number of detention centers in border states and hiring more immigration judges simply requires allocating more money, something that could be done with only 51 votes in the Senate.
The border is a priority for voters this year, and polling consistently has shown that they trust Donald Trump far more than Kamala Harris to handle the issue. If Mr. Trump is elected to a second term, the current administration’s disastrous migrant policies will have played an outsize role. No one expects Mr. Trump to dial down his grandiose deportation rhetoric between now and the election, but if he wins, reality will set in at some point. Voters deserve to know what is and isn’t doable on day one.
