Written by Noah Carl.
Illegal immigration is a blatant violation of the rule of law (the clue being in the word “illegal”). Hence anyone who believes in the rule of law ought to oppose illegal immigration and ought to be in favour of removing illegal immigrants.
Reasonable people can disagree about legal immigration. But I don’t really understand how you can support illegal immigration unless you reject the idea of borders entirely. Even Bryan Caplan opposes open borders in certain cases, such as for the state of Israel, so he doesn’t believe in them as a matter of principle.1 Practically no one does outside of fringe anarchist circles.
And, yes, there are categories of illegal immigrants that should be exempt from removal, such as individuals who were brought into the country as very young children (and were therefore not responsible for the crime of entering and then remaining in the country illegally). But the majority should presumably be removed. No one who accepts the idea of borders (i.e., no one except fringe anarchists) can seriously defend the policy: “illegal immigration should be a crime, unless you’ve already committed it”.
Having established that most illegal immigrants should be removed from the country, the question arises of how to achieve this with the least possible disruption and infringement of civil liberties. Which brings us to the present situation.
Donald Trump’s administration has decided that the best way to remove illegal immigrants from the US is to send gangs of heavily armed men wearing civilian tactical gear and face coverings into American cities to literally grab people off the street. This ill-conceived strategy has been accompanied by a steady output of cringeworthy memes posted on government social media accounts.
Unsurprisingly, the policy has resulted in several deaths, massive left-wing protests and sharply declining poll numbers — all without a great deal to show for it in terms of total deportations. Which makes it difficult to avoid the conclusion that it is partly theatre.2
A far more effective policy would be something like mandatory E-verify for all employees, combined with frequent audits (that needn’t involve armed men in unmarked cars) and heavy fines on offending businesses. Indeed, research shows that even the current, limited E-verify system has a sizeable impact on illegal immigration. Mandatory E-verify would also get around the problem of “sanctuary cities” by making employers responsible for checking workers’ legal status.3
So why haven’t the Republicans tried to push such a policy through Congress? I think the reason is simple: it’s overwhelmingly opposed by business lobbies.
There is a narrative, which has become popular in MAGA circles, that the big driver of illegal immigration is the left’s desire to replace Americans with foreigners because they hate white people and/or because they know that foreigners vote Democrat.4 And of course, there is some truth in this.
However, it ignores the more important role of business lobbies — something restrictionists used to recognise. Back in 2017, veteran conservative commentator John Derbyshire quipped, “The desire for cheap labor explains 95 percent of U.S. immigration policy. The other five percent is sentimentality.” He might have been slightly exaggerating with the percentages, but the basic point is right.
There have been several past attempts to get a mandatory E-verify law through Congress, but none were successful. If you read the Congressional testimony surrounding these proposals, you find that the most common objection concerns the supposedly devastating effect they would have on the labour market.
As one Congressman opined in a 2011 debate, “In agriculture where 75 percent of the jobs are filled by undocumented immigrants, E-Verify would decimate the agricultural economy”. Or as another remarked more recently, “E‑Verify would result in hundreds of thousands of unfilled farm jobs and would leave unpicked crops rotting in the fields”. Note the objection here: it’s not that the system wouldn’t work; it’s that it would work too well. There would be no one left to pick the crops!
You have to remember that, from the perspective of an employer, illegal immigrants are pretty much the ideal workers: they have little bargaining power (owing to the threat of removal) so will readily accept low wages, long hours and poor working conditions.
Which is why Karl Marx privately criticised mass labour migration. In an 1869 letter, he denounced the bourgeoisie of America for expropriating public land and “importing Chinese rabble to depress wages”. And in an 1870 letter, he observed that “Ireland constantly sends her own surplus to the English labour market, and thus forces down wages and lowers the material and moral position of the English working class”.
Trump did at least float a mandatory E-verify law during his first term, though it never got off the ground. So far as I’m aware, no such proposal has been put forward during his second. This is almost certainly for the reason I mentioned, namely opposition from business lobbies. To quote a recent article:
Republican lawmakers outnumber Democrats 5-to-1 in Idaho. They’ve blasted illegal immigration, and Governor Brad Little has deployed state troopers to the “lawless southern border.” But they’ve also pushed back against attempts to require E-Verify. Agriculture is one of Idaho’s top industries5
The truth is that powerful interests aligned with the GOP do not want large numbers of illegal immigrants to leave the country. As the article notes, “mass deportations or mandatory E-Verify programs would create critical labor shortages unless they are paired with new legal pathways for immigrant workers”. If Trump were serious about substantially reducing the illegal immigrant population, he and his Congressional allies would openly confront these interests. The fact that they don’t is revealing.6
None of this should be taken to imply that Kamala Harris would have been better on the issue of illegal immigration. It is rather that Trump and the Republicans are less serious than they claim.
Noah Carl is an Editor of Aporia.
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He correctly recognises that open borders would cause a civil war in Israel but apparently does not apply the same logic to other countries. (Even if open borders didn’t immediately cause “civil war” in a country like the US, it would obviously cause conflict.)
According to the latest estimates, there were 230,000 “interior removals” during Trump’s first year in office, which is slightly less than the 238,000 recorded during Obama’s first year in office (though considerably more than were recorded during any year of Biden’s term). As the Migration Policy Institute notes, “The administration’s singular focus on arrests and deportations has resulted in shock and awe, but the results of its enforcement have remained uneven.”
Nor is it true that the foreign-born population has declined by 2.2 million. Figures published yesterday show that net immigration from July 2024 to July 2025 was 1.3 million — substantially lower than in 2023 and 2024 but higher than previous years. (The Census Bureau projects a further decline to 0.32 million in 2026.) Immigration therefore has fallen under Trump, but the total stock of immigrants is still rising.
This is not to say that zero ICE raids should take place — just that the current policy is counterproductive.
I suspect that Elon Musk’s ill-informed commentary is partly responsible for this. Illegal immigrants do not vote in large numbers (for obvious reasons).
You see the same thing in Texas: a lot of tough talk but no effort to make E-verify mandatory. Some states have made it mandatory for new hires, but enforcement is often lax.
The charitable interpretation is that Trump hasn’t bothered with mandatory E-verify because he knows it wouldn’t get through Congress, but I’m sceptical. In that case, he would presumably be posting on Truth Social about the “traitors in Congress”, as he did in relation to Marjorie Taylor Greene and Thomas Massie.
A reasonably fair analysis except
-what to do while waiting for Congress to legislate for effective eVerification
-what the cathedral does when eVerification is applied in actual cases.
In other words, the regime has too much invested in the status quo to roll over.
What's happening now is the minimum needed to have even modestly effective deportation. Administrative alternatives depend on impossible conditions being met.
"Even Bryan Caplan opposes open borders in certain cases, such as for the state of Israel, so he doesn’t believe in them as a matter of principle.1 Practically no one does outside of fringe anarchist circles."
I can't access the linked-to podcast, but did Bryan Caplan specifically say he opposes Open Borders for Israel? Though I have seen this claimed many hundreds of times, it is always as a critique made on the incorrect assumption that Bryan Caplan is Jewish. I would have thought that the obvious answer from his perspective is that both Israel and Palestine should open themselves to unrestricted immigration from around the world to decrease the salience of their ethno-religious dispute.