President Donald Trump told an audience of Hispanic supporters and business executives on September 30 that migration politics is the hardest part of his job, as he faces competing pressure from pro-American voters and business interests that want more cheap migrant labor.
“Frankly, it’s the hardest job that I’ve had — the hardest job,” Trump said. “Because they’ll say ‘You’re too tough’ or ‘You’re too soft.’ ‘Get tougher!’ ‘Get softer!’ No matter what you do, it’s always tough.”
Trump told the same Hispanic business audience that politicians ultimately answer to voters. “We have to have the votes,” he said, warning that the alternative is a return to open borders. “Otherwise, we have these lunatics with the open borders. We’ll have the open border lunatics. They’ll open the borders… They’ll let the lunatics in every prison… But we’ve gotten thousands of murderers out of our country… You saw 25 million people walked across the border into our country [under President Joe Biden], and many of those people were not people that you would want in this country.”
He pointed to his administration’s record on border crossings: “We’ve been very strong and for the last 17 months… we had zero people [illegally crossing the border]… We have people coming in, but we have them coming in through a legal process. Legally, we have them coming in legally.”
A Look Behind the Curtain
Mark Krikorian, director of the Center for Immigration Studies, said Trump’s remarks reveal an honest acknowledgment of the competing pressures he faces, rather than a cave to donor interests.
If the president just said, “Look, I want to give you business lobbyists here who paid $1,000 a plate to hear me talk … whatever you want,” that would be bad. He’s not saying that. He’s saying this [issue] is tough. You guys want one thing, other people want something else, and I’m constantly pulled in both directions. That’s a look behind the curtain, and is encouraging in the sense that he at least is acknowledging that he’s pushed [by business] in the wrong direction.
Krikorian argued that incremental progress is still the smarter strategy for immigration hawks than demanding everything at once.
I’m not willing to concede that he’s doing the best he possibly can given current pressures. But he’s doing a lot more than any other president, and so you know, I’m happy to take half a loaf … But the point is, if you’re willing to settle for something as long as you’re moving in the right direction, you know you’re operating in reality. This administration is clearly moving in the right direction, even though there are areas where they’re not doing as much as they should be doing.
Pressure From Both Sides
Since taking office, Trump has been navigating between his pro-American voter base and donors who favor continued migration. That tension has grown as his border and deportation policies push companies toward hiring Americans instead of migrant labor.
Todd Schulte, president of the pro-migration lobby group FWD.us, recently criticized the scale of Trump’s deportation effort, calling it harmful to immigrants and minority communities alike.
[It is] bad for immigrants, bad for immigrants who are citizens, bad for Latinos and blacks and all sorts of people who are getting caught up in an expanding profiling and criminal justice system.
Schulte’s organization is working with Hispanic business executives and ethnic advocacy groups to push Trump toward legalizing a larger inflow of migrant labor.
At the same time, Trump faces pressure from his own base to go further. Mike Howell, president of the Oversight Project and a member of the Mass Deportation Coalition, said voters will back a tougher stance.
People should make their voices heard. This is still a constitutional republic where voters allegedly matter, and so I would advise the President to remember that each billionaire has one vote, and the voters have a lot more.
Howell said politicians need to “dance with the girl you brought to the prom.”
Enforcement Numbers
The Department of Homeland Security is currently arresting roughly 50,000 illegal migrants per month for deportation, a pace that remains popular with GOP-leaning voters and is widely seen as Trump’s strongest issue with his base.
Krikorian suggested the administration could do more without inviting significant new political backlash, by quietly auditing companies that hire illegal workers rather than staging high-profile raids.
He should be doing more [company] audits — not showy raids — but just audits by officials who don’t have guns or badges. Just guys in briefcases bringing the IRS and the Labor Department with them and doing a paperwork colonoscopy on your payroll, especially if there’s some reason to believe this is an employer with real problems. That’s something they could do a lot more of, I think, and you know, wouldn’t necessarily create significantly greater political pressure than he has to face now.
Krikorian said sustained pressure from voters is what will keep the administration moving in the right direction against the pull of business and ethnic lobbies. “He needs constant encouragement,” Krikorian said.
