I want to get a July 4th weekend Ethics Alarms multi-issue post out, and this probably belongs there, but for the love of God, I can’t wait.
I just heard one of the MSNBC talking heads agree with a typical guest on the network (“you know: morons”)by pointing out that Joe Klein, the “legendary TIME columnist” (who wrote “Primary Colors,” the best-selling roman a clef about the Bill Clinton cabal and lied about his authorship), had written on his substack that ICE deporting “innocent illegal immigrants” who have been living here for many years and “only came here to have a better life” “makes the country weaker.”
Will we never be able to sound the death knell for that hoary, dishonest rationalization? How can anyone still be saying that, and worse, how can anyone be so cretinous as to quote it as if it is some kind of revelation?
ONE: There are no “innocent illegal immigrants” who are adults. It is impossible to “innocently” enter the United States illegally. This is so obvious that it shouldn’t have to be repeated or explained.
TWO: The fact that one of these illegals has been living here for “many years” means that a non-innocent individual has been violating our laws that entire time, even if they haven’t engaged in drug-dealing, rape or other felonies. They are just as culpable as they would have been in they were nabbed in the act of breaking out immigration laws.
THREE: ALL thieves, embezzlers, traitors, adulterers, bigamists, identity thieves, extortionists, blackmailers, frauds, drug dealers, counterfeiters, tax cheats and even murderers commit their crimes to “have a better life.” If that’s an excuse for illegal immigrants, it’s a mitigation for illegal immigrants too, and it’s not.
The next person who says any of that garbage in my presence had better be ready to duck, because I’m going to train myself to projectile vomit at will as my automatic response to “innocent illegal” or “They just want a better life.”
Ethics Alarms 
There is a simple litmus test for “illegal immigrants” that came here for a better life, and it is the one thing that can protect them from deportation. Paying Taxes. If they have filed an State and Federal Income Tax every year since they arrived (yes you can file as an illegal) then they are proving they want to be productive members of society. That doesn’t guarantee they won’t be deported but they can make the case that they were following all the other rules. If they do file, they will be paying the highest tax rates because nothing was being held back toward taxes.I have yet to meet an illegal alien that does file tax returns. (I grew up in a very ethnic/Spanish area).
Nope. The one thing that saves them from deportation is legal status. Period.
jvb
They aren’t actively paying taxes in any conscious manner. Payroll taxes are automatically deducted and are a function of any company’s staff on behalf of an employee.
Then there are industries that pay cash only, like construction, from my experience, those guys don’t pay taxes.
what part of ILLEGAL doesn’t Congress, Senate, Supreme Court Justices, and everyday citizen understand?
EVIDENTLY THE ADMINISTRATION DOES NOT UNDERSTAND EITHER. UNLESS THE ADMINISTRATION HAS CHANGED IT’S MIND AGAIN. THIS ADMINISTRATION DECIDED FARMERS AND HOTELS COULD STILL DETAIN THEIR ILLEGALS.
Wait, has ICE been specifically instructed to avoid raiding those places? When did that happen?
https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5375717-trump-temporary-pass-migrant-farm-hotel-workers/
https://www.nationalreview.com/2025/06/trumps-farm-and-hotel-amnesty/
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/06/12/trump-immigration-migrant-farmers-hotel-workers-deported/84166061007/
Given that both articles are written by organizations that have shown that they will cast Trump in the most negative light possible I believe that intelligent human beings can understand that from time to time it may be necessary to alter your game plan to reach a desired result.
The issue of illegal immigration is not new. Bush talked about compassionate conservativism and avoided the issue while Biden opened the flood gates. DACA was Obama’s method for kicking the can down the road. When confronted with a huge problem, no manager will lay out a perfect plan of attack. Planners are often faced with unforeseen issues that require adjustments. Subordinates may not completely understand the subtleties of discreet prioritization.
First I don’t see much of a policy shift. Telling ICE to focus on things other than farms and hotels means that he wants the focus to be on people who abuse our people and our system of benefits. There will be plenty of time to bring everyone into compliance so the focus needs to be on those who are involved in identity theft and other crimes. Every decision requires a choice. Trump is simply saying choose wisely because repatriation of the 20-30 million illegal aliens to their home countries will take far longer than his term so he wants the impact on his watch to be a substantial benefit to the electorate.
The article says had the farmers and hoteliers used E-Verify they would not have this problem that may be the case but when past administrations gave the green light to the influx of illegal migrants. The very Neo-Cons at National Review never had a problem with illegal aliens in past Republican administrations. Any temporary pass given to these two industries is more likely to be a result of evaluating the impact on the overall economy if hotels had to shut down because rooms cannot be cleaned or food suppliers cannot produce sufficient amounts with the supply of labor available to them RIGHT NOW. To assume that two industries that became addicted to hiring foreign nationals (legal and some illegal) because of past policies of allowing the problem to grow for political reasons can simply supplant an army of foreign workers with legal ones in the immediate time frame lacks an understanding of labor markets.
Trump is using every tool he has to combat illegal immigration. He is giving people an opportunity to self-deport with the possibility of future legal entry, ICE is rounding up as many as it can with a focus on those committing ongoing crimes, and now he is publicly opening Alligator Alcatraz to reinforce his self-deportation efforts. All this while contending with grandstanding legislators who cozy up to alleged human traffickers and gang members and judges who issue nationwide injunctions stopping Trump and his agenda.
Chris,
This is an excellent counterpoint. I have been somewhat skeptical of late regarding the Administration’s intent: is it really committed to rooting out as many people here illegally as possible, or is it just paying lip service to the campaign promise and making a show of getting serial criminals out while letting everyone else go?
I hope the Administration is operating as you suggest. If it isn’t, there isn’t likely to be another one that will.
Joel,
I’m going to add some numbers to what Chris said, and in this I’m taking a page from Holly Mathnerd, who did some calculations in one of her Substack articles on judges processing illegal immigrants, and just how overburdened immigrants judges currently are.
A quick Google search said there are somewhat more than 20,000 ICE agents, and that they made 65,000 arrests in Trump’s first 100 days. This amounts to 0.0325 arrests per agent per day. Let’s assume for sake of argument that each ICE agent forgoes weekends and holidays and really buckles down and makes 1 arrest every single day. It would take 1.6 years to apprehend the 12 million illegal immigrants that flooded in during Biden’s administration. But there are millions more illegal immigrants that are in the US, and I believe estimates put them at 30 million or so. That would take every ICE agent arresting an illegal immigrant a day for 4.1 years. That rate is simply not tenable, and even so, it would take beyond Trump’s presidency to accomplish.
Given the limited resources and time, it makes a great deal of sense for Trump to triage, placing the worst of the worst at the top, since it those whom most people are most concerned about. No, people in general are not overly concerned about the “innocent” illegals, or at least not as individuals. But the rapists, murderers, traffickers, drug dealers, and fraudsters? Those really have the public attention, even if they are a tiny minority of all the illegals, so it makes sense to target them.
Another factor to consider is that Trump’s policies are also targeted at closing the border, so that the flood of illegals finally subsides, and making life sufficiently uncomfortable for illegals that they choose to self-deport. If I understand correctly, estimates put self-deportation under Trump’s administration close to 1 million, based upon the decrease of foreign-born workers on payrolls.
Finally, it doesn’t seem feasible to assume we’re going to expunge all illegal aliens, even with all the methods available to us. I think it is very reasonable to, once the border is secure and the worst of the illegals deported, to work to bring the rest out of the shadows with a path to citizenship. I personally think that there should be some minor penalties attached to such path to citizenship, but I’d rather those illegals be documented and integrated than continue to subsist in the nation’s underbelly.
Thanks for crunching the numbers Ryan
Over and over again, the political left shows me reasons that support the following statement…
The political left’s tactics are the epitome of “The Boy Who Cried Wolf” story.
I know the signs of what NOT to believe, do you?
Wanna see some delusional projection, watch this video…
That video was in his blog “Thoughts About July 4th As Donald Trump Endangers America, Blogging Resumes Next Week
Donald Trump endangers America, these people are completely out of the friggin’ minds.
EVEN IF they “just came here for a better life” they are still knowing accomplices to all the others who are using the millions who cross as cover to do what they want. You are in a horrible place. You pay $1,000 to have some shady characters (and they are shady to do this) to move your kid into the US hoping that they’ll arrive here and “have a better life” but most don’t. Most arrive here and go missing. I was part of a webinar about what to do if your H2A visa worker is arrested without their papers and they said ICE is actively looking for 300,000 children who crossed over and were somehow accounted for at the border and are now missing. If you “come here for a better life” you have to willingly acknowledge that others who come with you won’t be so lucky. Their misfortune is on those law abiding citizens hands. Look the other way, ignore it, pretend you’re being nice but know the most vulnerable are not “getting a better life”.
I am afraid even Donald Trumps is loosing the plot, as the President announced last Sunday that he is developing a temporary pass for illegal aliens working in the farming and hospitality industry.
https://thefederalist.com/2025/07/01/if-trump-lets-farm-workers-evade-immigration-laws-expect-the-whole-world-to-claim-farm-worker-status/
In my opinion this is ethically wrong for various reasons:
Politically it is unwise because:
I am afraid that the GOP is making a classical error, namely prioritizing interest of certain businesses about the interests of the man in the streets who actually are eligible for the vote.
CVB I wont challenge anything you wrote. I will comment on the following statement.
“The electorate voted Donald Trump as President with the expectation that he would deport all illegals if possible. Various polls confirm that this position is still popular. Trump will therefore alienate his base.”
This is the problem with many members of the electorate. Trump is in office for just 4 years and the public needs to understand that all he can do is remove as many as he can without creating worse problems. Farming and Hospitality industries are historically populated with legal temporary workers as well as the illegal. Construction and Landscaping on the other hand are not and therefore there is no free temporary pass for those. Even in the Ag sector, the temporary worker is not given permit to work in a food processors like Tyson. Resort towns on the East Coast are staffed seasonally by many eastern European young people and ICE raids to locate a few illegal aliens would do more harm to the local communities than the benefits gained from the capture of a person whose only crime is being here and working illegally. There are bigger targets whose cost/benefit analysis indicate that those targets deserve higher priority.
The idea that people can claim they do farm work is not going to fly. Trump is not giving individuals the right to claim they are farm workers he is promoting the idea that raids on hotels and farms will pushed down the list of where ICE will target.
If voters expected that Trump would simply round up every non-white person walking the streets and locking them up if the cannot prove they are legal residents we have a far bigger problem with that group than with any labor market distortions that illegals create. It is one thing to replace a few workers immediately but quite another to have no one show up to work because they fear they will be deported even if they have a legal right to be here and work.
The progressives are instilling that fear into the populations who work in the Ag sector. You cannot blame Trump for the reality that progressives rely on fear to control the less informed. The progressives know that instilling fear works to their advantage so they have no problem using it.
Trump is not prioritizing certain businesses over the interests of the man on the street he is prioritizing who and what his scarce forces are to focus their efforts in the near term.
And there is of course the interesting case of Elon Musk, briefly co-President and First Buddy, now being threatened with deportation himself…(Trump says “he’ll take a look at it). And Elon and Miller have reason to dislike each other, so….
Elon DID apparently violate immigration law by working without an employment visa. And then there’s the drug use…. Which is one of the big threats from immigrants!
Now, Elon IS a naturalized citizen, but what about denaturalization? That’s being proposed to deal with the outrage of running a successful primary campaign while Muslim, so maybe?
Now now, Holly, I know you know better than all that. “Being proposed” is classic fake news fodder for fear-mongering. During the Civil War, William Seward “proposed’ that Lincoln declare war simultaneously on England and France to the nation would re-unite against a common foe. It was a dumb idea, and Lincoln ignored him. Nobody’s going to deport the Muslim Communist: the idea is to highlight how un-American he is—and he is spectacularly un-American in his political and economic values. Similarly, Trump loves making threats that have no reality behind them.The chances that he’ll try to deport Musk are less than zero, and only the Trump deranged who refuse to acknowledge his ability would believe this threat any more tha his threat to lock up Hillary.
It’s fun to argue from the Crazy Zone, but not productive.
Indeed. Far too many people are fixated on the whole “Lock her up!” nonsense, overlooking the fact that he did not lock her up. It wasn’t because she wasn’t guilty either. It was painfully obvious that she was guilty as sin. Trump later admitted it would be difficult to prosecute her because of the optics. It certainly didn’t stop the Democrats from trying to do the same to him even as they derided the chant coming from his followers.
It’s like a twisted version of the Parable of the Two Sons from Matthew 21:28-31A: ““What do you think? There was a man who had two sons. He went to the first and said, ‘Son, go and work today in the vineyard.’ ‘I will not,’ he answered, but later he changed his mind and went. Then the father went to the other son and said the same thing. He answered, ‘I will, sir,’ but he did not go. Which of the two did what his father wanted? ‘The first,’ they answered.”
In Trump’s case, the parable becomes a negative comparison, close to the Rationalization “It’s not the worst thing” which I realize I keep skirting near of late. Who said he would do it and didn’t? Who said it was wrong and did it anyway? Who’s the actual threat to democracy here?
Bingo! You have correctly an important element of the Trump / Miller strategy. Well done. And yes, they definitely know how to work the bad news media — the guy is a reality TV star, after all!
BTW, on the “un-American” trope: you have views, I have views, many Americans have views. We are Americans with views. You are not “more American” than I am because you (naturally enough) like your views better. Same same. Me too. General human quality.