TACO, Loco

Donald Trump is a remarkably weak man. Consider his administration’s constant immigration flip-flopping.

Immigration—illegal immigration most specifically and urgently, but immigration in general, too—is the reason Donald J. Trump, game-show host and cameo performer in porn films, is president of these United States. In a world in which the immigration issue had been treated seriously by Republicans (or—ho, ho!—by Democrats), Trump never would have been the 2016 nominee and never would have been president. Trade has long been Trump’s No. 1 issue, but immigration has been a close No. 2 for about a decade. Ironic, then, that his trade and immigration policies change every 15 minutes.

Sometimes, we get TACO Trump—TACO being Wall Street’s reassuring acronym: Trump Always Chickens Out. He has done that a lot with tariffs, but he also did it (for a few hours, at least) with the recent immigration crackdown, presumably after someone explained to him that his policies were creating problems for farmers, restaurateurs, and hoteliers, all of whom rely heavily on immigrant workforces and some of whom employ a non-trivial number of illegal immigrants. “Our great Farmers and people in the Hotel and Leisure business have been stating that our very aggressive policy on immigration is taking very good, long time workers away from them, with those jobs being almost impossible to replace,” Trump wrote last week. So—TACO?

Not so fast. Trump un-TACO’d his own TACO—or at least he tried to.

No, this isn’t TACO Trump at all—this is Lord Derby of Jamaica Estates. The original Lord Derby was a famously weak-willed and vacillating British politician of whom it was said: “Like the feather pillow, bears the marks of the last person who has sat on him.” (That observation came from the rather steelier Earl Haig, commander of the British forces at the Battle of the Somme.) After telling ICE late last week to lay off on the meatpacking plants and hotels, the Trump administration belayed that order after the weekend and insisted that raids and deportations would continue. And then the administration did what everybody who has been paying attention expected, i.e., it re-TACO’d the un-TACO’d TACO while pretending that the whole immigration enchilada was still on the menu.

How’s that? Homeland Security spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin announced: “There will be no safe spaces for industries who harbor violent criminals or purposely try to undermine ICE’s efforts.” Let me translate that into English for you: Tracking down illegals is really, really hard work, and this is an administration that hates hard work, so, instead, the administration will wait for state and local authorities to do the work of arresting and prosecuting violent criminals and then prioritize deporting those violent criminals—which was the policy of the Biden administration and the policy of the Obama administration. 

More mush from the wimp, as someone once put it.

You’ll know that some future president is serious about dealing with illegal immigration when he sets aside talk of “comprehensive” reform and just signs mandatory E-Verify into law and puts some resources into beefing up its database to more efficiently deal with stolen Social Security numbers and the like. E-Verify is a system used to screen employment candidates at the time of hiring to ensure that they are legally entitled to work in the United States. It is required for federal contractors and public employers in some states, but in most states, there is no rule requiring private employers to verify worker eligibility. Generally, E-Verify is not mandatory, and the reason it is not mandatory is the same reason Congress has effectively gutted debt-control measures such as the old Gramm-Rudman-Hollings Balanced Budget Act, which imposes automatic spending cuts to enforce deficit reduction: because it works.

Mandatory E-Verify would not only screen illegal immigrants from regular work—thereby reducing the attractive nuisance that drives much of illegal immigration—but it would also make it easier to prosecute employers who cynically exploit illegal immigration to keep their workforces cheap and docile. And that is what really needs doing.

One of the truly enraging aspects of our national policy conversation is hearing from the same supposedly hard-nosed capitalistic bootstrapping “self-reliance” Republicans—the ones who insist on work requirements for single mothers receiving welfare benefits—that meatpacking bosses and agribusiness CEOs and hotel owners cannot be expected to comply with federal law when it comes to hiring.

Oh, the despair! “We can’t get workers!” the poor gentlemen of the C-suite lament. But that isn’t true: They just cannot get the workers they want at the below-market wages they offer without illegal workers in the mix bringing down overall labor prices. If you cannot turn a profit without breaking the law, you don’t have a business—you have a criminal enterprise. Forget all that talk about a $50 side of guacamole, because this isn’t about the price of avocados—it’s about the price of a boat slip on Fisher Island. 

Trump’s problem is that he doesn’t have the guts to stand up to the corporate executives (many of whom hold him, not without reason, in utter contempt) or the huevos to stand up to the immigration hawks in his administration (most of whom believe, not without reason, that they can bully him into compliance). Lacking both principle and courage, he lurches from one thing to the other. And so we get, by turns, Commander TACO and Lord Feather-Cushion.

So, here’s an immigration agenda most of us could get behind: Enforce the law. Pay market wages. And quit electing these gutless, gormless clowns.