President Donald Trump used his cabinet meeting today to outline his plans to recall some of the illegals he is deporting from jobs in the farm and hospitality sectors.
“It is a very big self-deportation operation that we’re starting,” he told the cabinet, adding:
We’re going to work with people so that if they go out in a nice [legal] way and go back to their country, we’re going to work with them right from the beginning on trying to get them back in legally. So it gives [them] a real incentive [to leave]. Otherwise, they could never come back.
The exit and return process may be 60 days, Trump suggested.
In a conversation with Kristi Noem, chief of the Department of Homeland Security, Trump said:
We’re also going to work with farmers that if they have strong recommendations for their farms for certain people, we’re going to let them stay in for a while and work with the farmers and go through a process, a legal process.
But we have to take care of our farmers and hotels and, you know, various, various places where they need the people. And we’re going to work with you very carefully on that. So a farmer will come in with a letter concerning certain people, saying they’re great, they’re working hard. We’re going to slow it [deportation and enforcement] down a little bit for them, and then we’re going to ultimately bring them back.
“They’ll go out [and] they’re going to come back as legal workers. … I think it’s very important,” Trump added.
“Thousands of people have already self-deported,” Noem said. “We have 20, 21 million people that need to go home because they’re here breaking our laws,” she said. “So we’re encouraging [illegal migrants] people … to register, and we’re working on the resources and funding to buy them a plane ticket to send them home,” she added.
Trump is facing pressure from real estate investors and hotel operators whose stock market wealth slumps when pay raises reduce projected profits.
“I’m not super worried about this because I’m skeptical anything’s going to happen,” Mark Krikorian, director of the Center for Immigration Studies, which favors less migration and more productivity, said.
For example, he said, farmers can import as many farmworkers as they wish via the H-2A program, but the H-2B for manual laborers has caps. “H-2A is doable because it’s an unlimited program, but H-2B has numerical caps, and so there’s a limit to how much of that he can do,” Krikorian said.
Trump on deportations: We are going to work with farmers. If they have strong recommendations for their farms for certain people we’re going to let them stay in for a while… we have to take care of our farmers and our hotels and various places where they need the people pic.twitter.com/OQEScOnGkq
— Acyn (@Acyn) April 10, 2025
But regardless of the practical politics, the proposal is also bad policy, Krikorian said:
The President says different things all the time, but if it is applied widely, it makes it much harder for less-skilled workers — immigrants or Americans — to bargain for better wages. It also reduces the incentive for employers, farmers especially, to come up with ways of using less labor [by] using [productivity-boosting] labor-saving technology. If the President just said, “You don’t have to invest money in a lettuce harvesting machine,” why would they do it?
Farmers are reluctant to invest heavily in untested machinery, in part because loans are risky if farm income drops.
If applied broadly, he said, the policy would become an amnesty for the migrant workers and their employers. he said:
“[It looks like] the ‘Touchback’ dodge that was floated a number of times in the previous amnesty pushes, where illegal immigrants would step back into Mexico and then come back into the United States … What they called it in the 50s was “Drying out the wetbacks.” Literally, the Border Patrol would catch people working on farms, would drive them to the border. They’d cross, they’d walk right back and get some kind of farmworker paper and then be delivered back to the farm that they were illegally working at. So this is a long-standing strategy for satisfying employer demand for cheap labor in a way that seems like it’s not condoning illegal immigration, when in fact it is. It is a guestworker amnesty.
The employers get an amnesty as well because they’re not held responsible for the employment of these illegal immigrants. In fact, the government kind of blesses it by giving them back their workers after their sins have been washed away in the Rio Grande.
“I’m not sure he’s particularly worried about it,” Krikorian said. “This is something that he thinks is a good idea, and [for him] if it happens, fine, and if it doesn’t happen, that’s okay too.”
