The current 5-10 year waiting period is a significant disincentive for illegal aliens to self-deport under the program created by the Trump Administration.
It's very hard for a legal immigrant (like me) to buy into something like this. My parents had to wait 8 years to come here legally and they did everything properly. I was born during the time they were waiting and we left for America when I was 4. Many foreigners have already been waiting years to come here. The fact that someone broke into my house and stayed here for 10 years without committing any ADDITIONAL crimes doesn't sway me.
"The logic that ultimately drove our immigration policy to become effectively one of open borders under Joe Biden was built on the idea that Americans would not work in construction, manufacturing, food processing, or even the hospitality sector because... well, no one ever told us why Americans wouldn't do those jobs.
Omaha provided a laboratory to evaluate that claim. If Green Valley Foods required illegals to operate, then it was doomed. But something extraordinary happened: "Every seat in the waiting area of Glenn Valley Foods was occupied with people filling out job applications early Thursday afternoon, two days after the meatpacking plant became the center of the largest worksite immigration raid in the state of Nebraska so far this year.
Dozens of prospective employees, many of them Spanish speakers, had been coming in and out of the plant all day. Some were hoping to land a new job; others were coming in for training."
I think that too many 'thought experiments', especially in the political areas, are fatally biased towards the people that have a... either a known or unknown, bias.
I look suspiciously upon arguments that we have to somehow compromise our standards... our laws... and do it without a dispassionate exploration of why we do what we do in the way we do it.
It reminds me of Chesterton's Fence, we probably shouldn't remove or destroy it until you fully understand why the fence was built there in the first place. Offering alternatives to the fence and it's location begs the question raised by the existence, and location, of the fence.
I would accept prioritization of deportations (the worst first) but if any otherwise non-violent illegal aliens get swept up, so be it. But eventually, they must all go. As for return, if they self-deported and otherwise met all the requirements, they must go to the end of the line. No cutting in line -- not for a job they already had - nor any other reason. Wait your turn.
I don't think we should have publicly-funded assistance programs at all, which is what they're likely living on. But so long as we do, maybe we could modify those to have a maximum lifetime duration that any one person may be on them. That pattern already exists in most (all?) states for unemployment.
Mr. Shipley makes a serious point that I agree with so I would not want to stray too far. It's a fact that the USA will not deliberately let anyone starve. I feel that public assistance for healthy, mentally able people should be at the minimum subsistence level. Even then, groups of deadbeats can form commune-like arrangements to pool their assistance resources. I saw that during the ten years I did tax returns for low income and elderly taxpayers. Sometimes groups of three or four would come in together and leave together. All had minimal wages and EIC.
Just some background as to the reasoning for this section of law relating to (B) Aliens unlawfully present:
This section was added to Title 8 with the passage of The Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 (IIRAIRA). The purpose of this section of law was to prevent aliens from coming to the US illegally or overstaying their visa and then attempting to adjust status to permanent resident (the most common way was through marriage to a US Citizen) – which is a form of “line jumping” as you called it – but was rampant in the 1980s and in the early mid 1990s. Some INS examiners would say that they believed 90% of the immigrant petitions based on marriage involved fraud. This provision greatly cut down on the submission of fraudulent I-485s (Adjustment of Status to Permanent Resident). The 180 day and 1 year triggers to inadmissibility are known in immigration circles as “bad time”. Ie: “He can’t adjust because he has bad time”…
Congress could broaden the conditions of eligibility to the waiver that already exists for this section as well. The Attorney General can already waive inadmissibility for any reason for aliens falling under the previously removed or ordered removed bars.
I don’t think they should be in front of anyone being considered who applied through the legal channels. What of people here who don’t work, or can’t work and offer no skills?
There are many people who want to come here and can fill the jobs legally for those expelled.
Tough issue for sure, all because Congress has ignored this for many years.
How about they all get deported and all immigration (with a very small number of exceptions like real marriages) gets stopped for 20 years. That's my plan.
I like this idea. I would only add that anyone who re immigrates in this manner should have a much longer path to be eligible for naturalization. I'd say a generation (20 years). This seems just to those who didn't break the law and current citizens and would help to take away the incentive of politicians to encourage illegal immigration.
Other provisions to consider, any status change should be temporary legal status, with provisions of after 40 quarters (ss, and medicare) eligibility a change to permanent legal status. If ever before, during and after status change you received government assistance, restitution to repay the assistance.
NEVER, can or will the provisions to 'path way to citizenship'! Never! Exceptions (maybe) for armed service (one hitch minimum) 10 years LEO, firefighters, first responders.
Any illegal immigrant entering US workforce will be required to have an employer sponsor ensuring proper taxes are collected, however, immigrants may swap or transfer sponsors due to opportunity of bad faith sponsor. Sponsors will be required to return worker to country of origin if applicants is unable to perform to standards or contracts end. This return provision will be borne by sponsor/applicants not by US taxpayers.
alot of what you have proposed are already requirements of non-immigrant employment visas. And the employers complain constantly about how hard it is to go through this process. The employers cannot force an alien to return to their country. You do bring up a good point about mobility of these "work permits". Many aliens use the current work visa program as just a way to get into the US legally and then they abscond from their job fairly quickly and go live and work where they like -- so they are the ones who enter on "bad faith" way more than the employers engage in it. But there are the employers that use these program to "smuggle" aliens into the US. One the largest users ever in the US of H-2A farmworkers-- the North Carolina Growers Association - who even DOL consulted with for years as an expert on the H-2A process -- almost their entire upper management was convicted of using the program to smuggle aliens in for financial gain. Also, you cannot have a path to "permanent residency" without that also being a path to citizenship -- and besides, most of them couldn't care less about becoming a US citizen.
Understood -- but the problem is complex and there are no simple solutions.
"Mass deportations" are impossible under existing INA law, and here is no real prospect for changing the law -- nor appropriating money for the thousands (tens of thousands) of new Govt employees that would be needed to process millions of involuntary deportations.
I would definitely agree that the problem is complex, and there are no simple solutions. But I would go further and say "there are no solutions". This is not a new problem. We have been trying to solve it for 50 years and almost every proposed "solution" is one that has been tried in some form already and failed. We can have small successful solutions here and there, but there is never enough stick -- and not likely to ever be -- to make people comply - and then they get the carrot anyway. I hate to be so cynical, but I have been on the implementation side of all of them and there is never the will, let alone resources, to be strict enough to not let fraud take over. The longer we go, the more "ties to the community" the 20 million and growing get and the will to deport increasingly vanishes.
Also I agree that "mass deportations" are impossible under current law and the law is unlikely to change and if it did the courts love nothing more than overturning the kind of laws that would make it faster. I think we are stuck with 99% of them.
I agree -- but the problem has never existed to the extent it exists now, and rather than illegal immigration being dominated by Mexican nationals who crossed the border, we now have millions of illegals from all over the world because the Biden Admin basically waved them all in. THAT is meaningfully different from the situation we have faced historically.
I agree that before illegal immigration was mostly Mexican and Central America, and during the Biden years it was dominated from Africa and Asia along with Haiti (via Chile), which makes deporting them even harder than ever before. Like an INS guy who was in charge of the Atlanta Deportation section once told me: I can move an army of Mexicans for what it takes to move one African or Middle Eastern guy.....However, I'm not sure how that makes this plan work better. The longer they have to travel back home and then reenter, the less likely they are to do it. Mexicans used to go home every year for all of December and January. And also the workforce that Trump singled out -- farms, restaurants, and hotels are still dominated by Mexicans and Central and some South Americans. But one thing for sure -- there will have to be some novel solutions - never tried before to have any effect -- the devil is always in the details I guess what I will say is that you could do this as part of a solution and count it as a win for all the people that used it, but have a plan for all of the people who don't also.
on that topic of "waving them in", I firmly believe that Mayorkas is guilty of 8 USC 1324 -- about a million counts of it. CBP One was alien smuggling. They used that to bring in inadmissible aliens into the US - they even admit that is why they used parole. Everything they did from coordinating the flow in Central America to advertising CBP One, to telling people who were between the ports of entry that they could go to the POE, and then paying NGOs to house and move aliens into the interior of the US...All of that is a smuggling scheme and most of it is exactly what alien smuggling organizations used to do and get prosecuted for by HSI and DOJ before Mayorkas became the biggest alien smuggler in history. I'm confident that I could write an affidavit to support the charge :) -- except that I guess that govt officials acting in official capacity are somehow immune from prosecution on this.
Here we come back to the original problem. The dems are trying to destroy the nation, and nobody is ever held accountable. Changing/improving the law means nothing when the law the rule of law simply does not exist.
It's very hard for a legal immigrant (like me) to buy into something like this. My parents had to wait 8 years to come here legally and they did everything properly. I was born during the time they were waiting and we left for America when I was 4. Many foreigners have already been waiting years to come here. The fact that someone broke into my house and stayed here for 10 years without committing any ADDITIONAL crimes doesn't sway me.
Here's a piece that argues similar points but also takes on the "No American will do the work that an immigrant is doing", https://redstate.com/streiff/2025/06/16/major-ice-raid-at-an-omaha-meat-packing-plant-reveals-an-unfortunate-truth-n2190563 . He wrote, in part,
"The logic that ultimately drove our immigration policy to become effectively one of open borders under Joe Biden was built on the idea that Americans would not work in construction, manufacturing, food processing, or even the hospitality sector because... well, no one ever told us why Americans wouldn't do those jobs.
Omaha provided a laboratory to evaluate that claim. If Green Valley Foods required illegals to operate, then it was doomed. But something extraordinary happened: "Every seat in the waiting area of Glenn Valley Foods was occupied with people filling out job applications early Thursday afternoon, two days after the meatpacking plant became the center of the largest worksite immigration raid in the state of Nebraska so far this year.
Dozens of prospective employees, many of them Spanish speakers, had been coming in and out of the plant all day. Some were hoping to land a new job; others were coming in for training."
I think that too many 'thought experiments', especially in the political areas, are fatally biased towards the people that have a... either a known or unknown, bias.
I look suspiciously upon arguments that we have to somehow compromise our standards... our laws... and do it without a dispassionate exploration of why we do what we do in the way we do it.
It reminds me of Chesterton's Fence, we probably shouldn't remove or destroy it until you fully understand why the fence was built there in the first place. Offering alternatives to the fence and it's location begs the question raised by the existence, and location, of the fence.
Why was it put there in the first place?
How would you get them out, and do you want any of them to be able to return ever?
I would accept prioritization of deportations (the worst first) but if any otherwise non-violent illegal aliens get swept up, so be it. But eventually, they must all go. As for return, if they self-deported and otherwise met all the requirements, they must go to the end of the line. No cutting in line -- not for a job they already had - nor any other reason. Wait your turn.
What you say make sense if we had good vetting.
" we have 500,000 unfilled manufacturing jobs right now, and we have 8.5 million adult men who are not employed and not looking for a job"
Maybe this is the group who should be incentivized. We can't deport them.
I don't think we should have publicly-funded assistance programs at all, which is what they're likely living on. But so long as we do, maybe we could modify those to have a maximum lifetime duration that any one person may be on them. That pattern already exists in most (all?) states for unemployment.
Mr. Shipley makes a serious point that I agree with so I would not want to stray too far. It's a fact that the USA will not deliberately let anyone starve. I feel that public assistance for healthy, mentally able people should be at the minimum subsistence level. Even then, groups of deadbeats can form commune-like arrangements to pool their assistance resources. I saw that during the ten years I did tax returns for low income and elderly taxpayers. Sometimes groups of three or four would come in together and leave together. All had minimal wages and EIC.
Just some background as to the reasoning for this section of law relating to (B) Aliens unlawfully present:
This section was added to Title 8 with the passage of The Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 (IIRAIRA). The purpose of this section of law was to prevent aliens from coming to the US illegally or overstaying their visa and then attempting to adjust status to permanent resident (the most common way was through marriage to a US Citizen) – which is a form of “line jumping” as you called it – but was rampant in the 1980s and in the early mid 1990s. Some INS examiners would say that they believed 90% of the immigrant petitions based on marriage involved fraud. This provision greatly cut down on the submission of fraudulent I-485s (Adjustment of Status to Permanent Resident). The 180 day and 1 year triggers to inadmissibility are known in immigration circles as “bad time”. Ie: “He can’t adjust because he has bad time”…
Congress could broaden the conditions of eligibility to the waiver that already exists for this section as well. The Attorney General can already waive inadmissibility for any reason for aliens falling under the previously removed or ordered removed bars.
Brilliant analysis - unfortunately it makes to much sense for our politicians to understand or enack.
Voting in any election, whether national or local, results in immediate expulsion….
I don’t think they should be in front of anyone being considered who applied through the legal channels. What of people here who don’t work, or can’t work and offer no skills?
There are many people who want to come here and can fill the jobs legally for those expelled.
Tough issue for sure, all because Congress has ignored this for many years.
How about they all get deported and all immigration (with a very small number of exceptions like real marriages) gets stopped for 20 years. That's my plan.
I like this idea. I would only add that anyone who re immigrates in this manner should have a much longer path to be eligible for naturalization. I'd say a generation (20 years). This seems just to those who didn't break the law and current citizens and would help to take away the incentive of politicians to encourage illegal immigration.
Other provisions to consider, any status change should be temporary legal status, with provisions of after 40 quarters (ss, and medicare) eligibility a change to permanent legal status. If ever before, during and after status change you received government assistance, restitution to repay the assistance.
NEVER, can or will the provisions to 'path way to citizenship'! Never! Exceptions (maybe) for armed service (one hitch minimum) 10 years LEO, firefighters, first responders.
Any illegal immigrant entering US workforce will be required to have an employer sponsor ensuring proper taxes are collected, however, immigrants may swap or transfer sponsors due to opportunity of bad faith sponsor. Sponsors will be required to return worker to country of origin if applicants is unable to perform to standards or contracts end. This return provision will be borne by sponsor/applicants not by US taxpayers.
alot of what you have proposed are already requirements of non-immigrant employment visas. And the employers complain constantly about how hard it is to go through this process. The employers cannot force an alien to return to their country. You do bring up a good point about mobility of these "work permits". Many aliens use the current work visa program as just a way to get into the US legally and then they abscond from their job fairly quickly and go live and work where they like -- so they are the ones who enter on "bad faith" way more than the employers engage in it. But there are the employers that use these program to "smuggle" aliens into the US. One the largest users ever in the US of H-2A farmworkers-- the North Carolina Growers Association - who even DOL consulted with for years as an expert on the H-2A process -- almost their entire upper management was convicted of using the program to smuggle aliens in for financial gain. Also, you cannot have a path to "permanent residency" without that also being a path to citizenship -- and besides, most of them couldn't care less about becoming a US citizen.
Sounds reasonable in theory, but very cumbersome and complex.
Understood -- but the problem is complex and there are no simple solutions.
"Mass deportations" are impossible under existing INA law, and here is no real prospect for changing the law -- nor appropriating money for the thousands (tens of thousands) of new Govt employees that would be needed to process millions of involuntary deportations.
I would definitely agree that the problem is complex, and there are no simple solutions. But I would go further and say "there are no solutions". This is not a new problem. We have been trying to solve it for 50 years and almost every proposed "solution" is one that has been tried in some form already and failed. We can have small successful solutions here and there, but there is never enough stick -- and not likely to ever be -- to make people comply - and then they get the carrot anyway. I hate to be so cynical, but I have been on the implementation side of all of them and there is never the will, let alone resources, to be strict enough to not let fraud take over. The longer we go, the more "ties to the community" the 20 million and growing get and the will to deport increasingly vanishes.
Also I agree that "mass deportations" are impossible under current law and the law is unlikely to change and if it did the courts love nothing more than overturning the kind of laws that would make it faster. I think we are stuck with 99% of them.
I agree -- but the problem has never existed to the extent it exists now, and rather than illegal immigration being dominated by Mexican nationals who crossed the border, we now have millions of illegals from all over the world because the Biden Admin basically waved them all in. THAT is meaningfully different from the situation we have faced historically.
I agree that before illegal immigration was mostly Mexican and Central America, and during the Biden years it was dominated from Africa and Asia along with Haiti (via Chile), which makes deporting them even harder than ever before. Like an INS guy who was in charge of the Atlanta Deportation section once told me: I can move an army of Mexicans for what it takes to move one African or Middle Eastern guy.....However, I'm not sure how that makes this plan work better. The longer they have to travel back home and then reenter, the less likely they are to do it. Mexicans used to go home every year for all of December and January. And also the workforce that Trump singled out -- farms, restaurants, and hotels are still dominated by Mexicans and Central and some South Americans. But one thing for sure -- there will have to be some novel solutions - never tried before to have any effect -- the devil is always in the details I guess what I will say is that you could do this as part of a solution and count it as a win for all the people that used it, but have a plan for all of the people who don't also.
on that topic of "waving them in", I firmly believe that Mayorkas is guilty of 8 USC 1324 -- about a million counts of it. CBP One was alien smuggling. They used that to bring in inadmissible aliens into the US - they even admit that is why they used parole. Everything they did from coordinating the flow in Central America to advertising CBP One, to telling people who were between the ports of entry that they could go to the POE, and then paying NGOs to house and move aliens into the interior of the US...All of that is a smuggling scheme and most of it is exactly what alien smuggling organizations used to do and get prosecuted for by HSI and DOJ before Mayorkas became the biggest alien smuggler in history. I'm confident that I could write an affidavit to support the charge :) -- except that I guess that govt officials acting in official capacity are somehow immune from prosecution on this.
Here we come back to the original problem. The dems are trying to destroy the nation, and nobody is ever held accountable. Changing/improving the law means nothing when the law the rule of law simply does not exist.