The Upside of Immigration

It’s early yet to know whether President Trump’s decision to dial back his immigration enforcement program in Minnesota signals a de-escalation of his drive to deport the millions of illegals who flooded across the porous border under the Biden administration. Yet it’s hard to avoid noticing that the announcement by the border tsar, Tom Homan, came but a day after the news of higher than expected job growth during the previous month. After all, the report showing that employers in January added some 130,000 jobs and unemployment fell, to 4.3 percent, reminds that a thriving economy needs a rising labor force. Plus, too, feature the statistic, in the fine print of the Labor Department’s report, that there were at the end of last year some 6.5 million job openings in America. That speaks to Mr. Trump’s insight that “we need people” to help fill the ranks of America’s workforce. It’s not our intention here to deny the ferment on the right, and even among Mr. Trump’s own movement to Make America Great Again, over getting immigration policy right. The context of this debate is the record-high level of illegals, about 14 million, who were living in America as of 2023. That peak was reached in part because of President Biden’s neglect of border security, an issue that helped propel Mr. Trump to victory — and a second term. Mr. Trump has succeeded in his campaign pledge to regain control of the borders, bringing the Biden wave of illegal migration nearly to a halt. Yet divisions persist over how much legal immigration we need, and how far the president should go in his deportation campaign. The White House says that some 2.5 million illegals have already left the country via removal or by voluntary self-deportation.The White House’s success in encouraging illegals to depart is underscored by a report from CBS News that self-deportation is reaching record highs. Some 28 percent of illegals who were disputing their removal “are giving up their cases and voluntarily leaving the country,” CBS reports. That amounts to “a higher share than in any year prior,” according to CBS News’s “analysis of decades of court records.”Yet the contention that arose in Minnesota during Mr. Trump’s “Operation Metro Surge” could suggest that there are diminishing returns in attempting the kinds of mass roundups of illegals encouraged by, say, the White House’s domestic policy adviser, Stephen Miller. The push to enforce immigration law — a constitutional duty of the president, to be sure — was “the largest DHS operation ever,” the agency reported.The very scale of the enforcement effort sparked pushback from activists, fanned by liberal politicians and the press, and the deaths of two protesters led Mr. Trump to dispatch Mr. Homan to Minnesota. Mr. Homan’s announcement today could mark an opportunity for the White House to recalibrate its position on an issue that is dividing the country — and has run the risk, we’ve noted, of tarnishing Mr. Trump’s achievement at the border.One can see that a balanced policy on immigration would, as these columns have advocated, stress the importance of a secure border while encouraging the legal flow into America of what we like to call “human capital.” In other words, the hard-working strivers who compose the labor force that fueled America’s rise to global predominance. After all, an economy showing signs of a Trump boom, and adding jobs at a rapid clip, needs a growing work force.

The Upside of Immigration

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