OPINION:
Among President-elect Donald Trump’s campaign promises, two face the stiffest challenges: ending the Ukraine war “in one day” and “mass deportation” of millions of illegal immigrants.
The practicality of a “one-day” ending of the war in Ukraine is hard to assess without greater detail on Mr. Trump’s plan. In contrast, assessing the costs and viability of “mass deportations” is easier because the U.S. government has considerable experience with deportation.
In 2017, when Mr. Trump first proposed mass deportations as president, the estimated number of unauthorized migrants was 10 million to 11 million. The Center for Migration Studies then calculated that deportations of that magnitude would require hiring thousands of new immigration agents, would cost “upwards of half a trillion dollars” and would take 20 years to complete.
Those figures would be considerably higher today given that, as the Center for Immigration Studies recently estimated, the number of unauthorized migrants likely exceeds 14 million. As explained below, those and more recent claims about the cost and time it would take to deport millions of migrants can now arguably be put aside because they fail to account for important new tools soon to be at Mr. Trump’s disposal.
Since 1986, employers have been required to complete a Form I-9 for each migrant worker they hire, recording the worker’s U.S. work authorization documentation. Although the form can be filed online, it may be stored at the worksite and reviewed by the Department of Homeland Security on the rare occasion when a DHS employee pays a visit.
To close this loophole, Mr. Trump’s DHS in 2020 drafted a proposed regulation (“G-Verify” for “Government-Verify”) mandating online filing of Form I-9. Although the proposed regulation was drafted too late in the year to be published, nothing stands in the way of its publication on the day Mr. Trump returns to office.
To be sure, G-Verify would not disclose the presence of migrant workers who had falsely claimed U.S. citizenship using a Social Security number that was phony or belonged to someone else. Congress, however, already has under consideration a bipartisan Mandatory E-Verify Act requiring employers to confirm with the Social Security Administration the validity of every new hire’s Social Security number.
Although neither G-Verify nor E-Verify would detect unauthorized migrants who worked “off the books,” the lawful employees, business competitors or customers of those employers who are aware of this criminal practice might be willing to report the employer to DHS in return for a small reward (say $2,000) and a promise of confidentiality.
Once an unlawful migrant employee had been identified by G-Verify, E-Verify or a rewarded informant, removal proceedings would more often than not be unnecessary since the migrant would find it difficult to get another job.
For the majority who are Mexican nationals, voluntary repatriation would be relatively easy and inexpensive. Voluntary repatriation of non-Mexicans could be given incentive by implementing the Voluntary Repatriation Program described in the G-Verify regulation, which would spare unauthorized workers who turn themselves in from prosecution and assist them in arranging a safe return home.
As acknowledged above, assessing the practicality of Mr. Trump’s plan to end Russia’s war in Ukraine will be challenging until the specifics have been disclosed. Barring the dangerous, unlikely path of sending in U.S. or NATO trips, the only feasible end-of-war outcome would almost certainly entail allowing Russia to retain control of at least some of the Ukrainian territory it now occupies, even though this would fly in the face of the prohibition in the U.N. charter against conquering another member state’s territory.
Ukraine is divided into 136 districts. A compromise might have the U.N. conduct a plebiscite in each Russian-occupied district to determine whether its residents favor incorporation into Russia. Any district in which a majority favored incorporation (or that was surrounded by such districts) would be so incorporated, provided that it bordered Russia or was connected to the border through other districts that were incorporated into Russia.
I cannot say how many Ukrainians might support such a compromise. Nevertheless, it seems a reasonable middle ground that acknowledges the reality of Russia’s sense that all or part of Ukraine belongs to it while respecting the U.N.-protected rights of Ukrainian communities that have no wish to be incorporated into Russia.
• William W. Chip was a senior counselor to the secretary of homeland security in the first Trump administration and a board member of the Center for Immigration Studies.
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