The Immigration Bills We Need

Congress can turn Trump’s signature issue into a long-lasting win for the country.

While the government shutdown grabs all the headlines, President Trump and Republican congressional leaders should be planning now to tee up an immigration bill as soon as it’s over.

Immigration has always been Trump’s signature issue. Other policy stances, such as his distrust of overseas adventurism and global trade, have helped, but none is as central to his appeal as his desire to end illegal immigration.

That more than anything else allowed him to leapfrog a host of Republican opponents in the pivotal 2016 primary campaign. It is a huge reason why he retained the support of the GOP base between his two terms, and the chaos President Biden’s policy unleashed on the Southern border is perhaps the single biggest reason why Trump won the popular vote last year.

Now it’s time for Congress to step in with legislation to prevent a Biden-style border disaster in the future. Such a bill (or bills) could include any number of items, but two stand out: one is forcing employers to verify the legal status of their workers, and the other involves increasing the tax on remittance payments migrants send to their home countries.

Regarding the former, it likely would surprise most people to learn that employers are not required to verify whether the people they hire are legally eligible to work. The Simpson-Mazzoli Act of 1986, the most recent comprehensive immigration bill to pass Congress, established penalties for employers who knowingly hire illegal immigrants but only requires them to collect documents that appear to pass muster. It does not require them to check if those documents are actually valid.

The federal government has also created E-Verify, a database that allows all employers to check the validity of the documents prospective employees must present. While some states require large employers to use this service, most do not. As a result, a significant trade in phony or stolen Social Security numbers allows millions of illegal immigrants to work for employers who simply choose to look the other way.

The easiest way to stop, or at least significantly reduce, this traffic is to require all employers, regardless of size, to use E-Verify. Many employers will howl that this imposes significant compliance costs on their often-small businesses. That plea, however, will fall on deaf ears when it comes to Trump’s coalition.

A second way to get at the same result would be through IRS audits. All businesses deduct wages and other payments they make on behalf of their workers, and all withhold payroll taxes that fund Social Security and Medicare. Such payments must include each worker’s Social Security number in order to establish their eligibility for these programs. These payments give the IRS the information it needs to crack down on illegal employment—if it is authorized to do so.

Legislation should expressly mandate that the IRS prioritize audits to ensure that business income tax deductions are only given for employees who are legally able to work. Audits that uncover payments for non-legal workers would result in a disallowance of those deductions, and hence an increase in the taxes owed.

This arguably could be accomplished by an executive order since Trump oversees the IRS, but that tactic includes two shortfalls. First, an executive order can get held up in court. Anti-deportation advocates would surely forum shop to find a friendly district court judge who will enjoin Trump’s order. Thus the judicial system could delay full implementation for months or perhaps years.

Legislation also prevents the order from being countermanded by a Democratic president. While a successful deportation program would rapidly decrease the number of people working illegally, the problem will always persist so long as employers have no incentive to verify their workers’ legal status.

Employers who rely heavily on illegal labor would find dramatic, perhaps crippling, increases in their income taxes. Faced with that prospect, they will surely do what any company does when threatened with dramatic cost increases: move to eliminate it, in this case by verifying the legal status of their workers.

But the bill should also include firm legal protections for confidential tax and Social Security information. This data should not be turned over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) or any other entity charged with enforcing immigration laws, as doing so would be unnecessary. Instead, the provision will force migrants who find that they can no longer support themselves in the United States with illegal labor to self-deport.

Separately, increasing the tax burden on remittance payments sent overseas can also hasten self-deportation. People who work here illegally so they can send money home to their families will have to decide what to do when less of that money reaches its intended destination. Some will surely find that the juice isn’t worth the squeeze and return home for a more stable way to make ends meet.

The amount of money sent out of this country via remittances each year is staggering. Estimates vary, but in 2022 foreign workers sent at least $79 billion out of the United States. A more recent estimate placed the amount sent using formal channels at $93 billion, with perhaps as much as $230 billion leaving the country when informal methods are included.

This is essentially an additional trade deficit on top of the more widely recognized deficit in goods and services. Other nations send us labor instead of goods, and we pay for it via cash sent back to the labor-providing country.

Viewing remittances in this light reveals the scope of what is happening. America’s global trade deficit in goods and services reached $918 billion in 2024. Adding remittance payments to the total means our true cash deficit topped $1 trillion at a low-end estimate and nearly $1.15 trillion at the high end.

The Trump administration is using tariffs of at least 10% to curb our formal trade deficit. Yet the current tax on remittances is a mere fraction of that amount—just 1%. An immigration bill should treat remittance outflows the same way tariffs treat cash outflows for goods, meaning the rate should be hiked to at least match the 10% global tariff minimum.

These proposals would place Democrats between the Scylla of median voter opinion and the Charybdis of their rabid base. Swing-state Democrats in the Senate will know that the voters who sent them support this, but the donors and activists who dominate party primaries will despise it. Stuck with a Hobson’s choice, many will vote against cloture to avoid antagonizing their base. But this will further paint the entire party as pro-illegal immigrant and against creating a labor market that provides rising real wages to working-class households.

Still Trump’s Signature

Trump’s immigration and border policies remain the most popular of his many policy stances even today. His job approval rating on immigration stands at 46.3% in the RealClearPolitics polling average, a full point above his overall approval. More importantly, his voters love his approach: Per the most recent Economist/YouGov poll, 85% of Trump voters approve of his handling of immigration policy.

That approval even extends to Trump’s controversial tactics used to identify and deport illegal immigrants. A recent CBS News poll found that 48% of Americans approve of his deportation policies, even though a majority thought they were affecting more people than anticipated during the campaign. Support for deporting all illegal immigrants has risen to 56% in the latest Harvard-Harris poll, and other polls consistently show majority or near-majority support for mass deportation despite the media outcry.

Enhancing self-deportation could help Trump should the public become uneasy with his aggressive enforcement measures. Some polls show such discomfort is on the rise. Enhancing more passive enforcement methods will likely maintain public support while increasing the likelihood of long-term success.

These considerations mean Trump should continue placing immigration enforcement on the political front burner. His approach unites his voters and even appeals to some Harris backers while infuriating the Democratic base. It’s simply Politics 101 to emphasize issues like this, which add voters to your coalition while dividing your foes.

Increasing the rate of deportation is also in the country’s economic interests. Illegal immigrants may do some jobs that Americans would shirk from, at least at an economically viable wage, but they also do many jobs Americans would gladly take. Fourteen percent of the nation’s construction workforce, for example, are illegal immigrants, while between 4% and 7% of the workforce in fields such as transportation, retail, manufacturing, and hospitality are also here illegally.

These tend to be very good jobs, especially for people without much formal education. The median salary for full-time construction workers was over $46,000 in 2024, and experienced workers can earn much more.

The most recent employment report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics puts wages even higher for these jobs. The average construction wage was $38.37 per hour, while a manufacturing worker producing durable goods earns $36.20 per hour. Even the retail trade offers an average hourly wage of $24.54. Many working-class Americans would love jobs that paid between $49,000 and $76,000 a year.

Firms that lose illegal labor will need to find American workers to pick up the slack. Once they see that the administration’s enforcement of immigration laws is extensive and permanent, they will do what’s in their interest and hire legal employees.

Immigration vs. Inflation

Pushing immigration enforcement bills is in Trump’s and the GOP’s political interest, as well as America’s economic interest.

Doing so in the face of Democratic opposition also addresses Trump’s weakest position; the perception that he is not doing enough to counter inflation. Concerns over inflation persists despite the fact that headline inflation has declined from 9% in summer 2022 to a bit under 3% over the last year. This concern is probably because wages have not kept up with inflation for lower-paid workers, resulting in tough times for the working class even as inflation nominally declines.

Blue collar workers are the ones competing for jobs with the millions of people who swarmed across President Biden’s open border. Their real wages rose substantially during Trump’s first term as he cracked down on illegal migration. Reinstating that tight labor market through turbo-charged self-deportation should lead again to rising real wages and a declining emphasis on sticky inflation.

Dance with the one that brung you, the old adage goes. The GOP is ascendant today because of its reputation for fighting illegal immigration while increasing real wages and employment for America’s working class. Whenever the shutdown ends, it should take that fight home to congressional Democrats. Whatever Democrats do, it’ll be a win for Trump and his party—and perhaps the nation as well.