President Trump told Ross Douthat on 60 Minutes that he now favors giving amnesty to illegal aliens who’ve been here for many years, and that his mass deportation push was too sweeping.
Whether or not you think amnesty is a good idea, I wouldn’t get too excited about the president’s comments.
First of all, he’s said this sort of thing before. Only those of us who follow this stuff for a living probably remember the 2018 White House meeting where he agreed to support legislation to amnesty “dreamers” (illegal aliens who came as minors) with no strings attached. In the event, the House did consider a bill to amnesty dreamers, but in exchange for a number of policy reforms to legal and illegal immigration; it came close in the House but failed both because Speaker Paul Ryan sabotaged it and because not a single Democrat voted yes.
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On the other point, the president was correct that DHS’s immigration enforcement push did not have the optimal balance between “body-armor” and “briefcase” approaches. There will always be a need for men with badges and guns to arrest illegal aliens. But even after Tom Homan took over immigration enforcement after Minneapolis and turned the heat down, there is still an imbalance: Where are the audits of employer personnel records, which require no guns? Where are the letters from the Social Security Administration notifying employers that the payroll information they submitted doesn’t match the agency’s records? Vice President Vance, in his post-election tweet, specifically backed targeting the employment illegals — which was notable, because little is happening. And it’s not happening because the president — not to mention various members of the cabinet — don’t want it to happen because it would inconvenience employers.
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