During his recent campaign, President-elect Donald Trump committed to deporting the 10-11 million unauthorized migrants estimated to be living in the United States. While this commitment was popular enough to help secure his re-election, prospective deportations of that scale have been the subject of severe criticism from many quarters ever since he first proposed them in 2017, when the New York based Center for Migration Studies argued that the process would require hiring “thousands of new immigration agents,” would cost “upwards of half a trillion dollars,” and could take “20 years” to complete. Indeed, those figures would be considerably higher if based on the actual number of unauthorized migrants, now estimated by the Center for Immigration Studies, based on the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey, to be over 14 million.
I believe that the 2017 and more recent critiques will prove to be nonsense, in part because they do not account for some of the most important tools that are already available to the president or that could quickly be put at his disposal. In late 2020 then-President Trump’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS) drafted a regulation (“G-Verify”) that required the online filing of Form I-9, a form that must be completed by the U.S. employer of any alien worker, detailing the employee’s documentation of his authorization to work in the United States. Unfortunately, under current rules, Form I-9 may simply be stored at the workplace by the employer in the very unlikely event a federal employee might someday show up to look at it.
The 2020 regulation was drafted too late in the year to be published, but nothing stands in the way of issuing G-Verify as a proposed regulation after President Trump resumes office on January 20, 2025. Arguably, G-Verify should be expanded to require that copies of all Forms I-9 that have previously been stored, rather than filed online, be promptly shared with DHS. In that event, within the president’s first year in office, DHS would be in a position to identify and begin removal proceedings for nearly all unauthorized workers who had disclosed their non-citizenship to their employers.
Although the G-Verify regulation would not disclose the presence of aliens who had failed to disclose their non-citizenship to their employers, Congress already has under consideration the bipartisan “Mandatory E-Verify Act of 2024,” which would require all new hires to submit a photo ID to their employers and require the employers to confirm the validity of the new hire’s Social Security Number with the SSA. The Center for Immigration Studies has persuasively argued that the SSA and DHS, without new legislation, could themselves implement a regulatory version of E-Verify.
Of course, G-Verify and E-Verify would not capture unauthorized migrants who work “off the books”. However, lawful employees, business competitors, customers, or even family members who are aware of this unlawful practice might be willing to report the employer’s criminal practice to DHS in return for a small (say $2,000) reward and a promise of confidentiality.
Once an unlawful migrant employee has been identified by G-Verify, E-Verify, or a rewarded informant, removal proceedings would more often than not be unnecessary since it would be in the employee’s interest to repatriate voluntarily rather than face potential criminal penalties and forced deportation. For the majority of unauthorized migrants, who are Mexican nationals, voluntary repatriation would be relatively easy and inexpensive. Voluntary repatriation of non-Mexican migrants could be incentivized by implementation of a “Voluntary Repatriation Program,” described in the G-Verify regulation, which would spare unauthorized workers who turn themselves in from prosecution, assist them in securing travel documents from their consulates and safe transportation to their homelands, and possibly even covering otherwise unaffordable transportation costs.