There is an argument that the single most important issue resulting in Donald Trump’s victory over Kamala Harris is the illegal immigration that the Biden-Harris administration not only tolerated but encouraged. The problem had grown untenable by Trump’s first victory in 2016 and was a key issue then as well.
Yet from the beginning, the Biden-Harris team not just canceled and reversed the tools Trump used to get immigration under control, but invited illegal immigrants to enter, guided them towards requesting asylum, and neglected to deport those judged unqualified for asylum.
The economy and inflation were the other big issues, and the immigration crisis directly connects to these as well. The electorate saw illegal immigration being encouraged and tax dollars being spent to accommodate this and provide benefits to immigrants while voters’ own financial status was suffering. Exit polls suggest that a majority of working-class voters and those without a college degree were for Trump. And a substantial number of these voters concluded that illegal immigrants would soon become their economic competition and drive down wages.
Whether it was 10 million, 15 million or 20 million, a tiny percentage of these immigrants, especially those classified as “got aways” and likely totaling 100,000 or more, are violent criminals, terrorists and/or agents of foreign powers that seek to harm and even destroy America.
An audit report issued by the Department of Homeland Security in August 2024 indicated that 32,000 children had not appeared in court on the appointed date and were at higher risk of being trafficked. There were also almost 300,000 children who had not yet been issued a notice to appear in court and Immigrant and Customs Enforcement did not have the tools to identify where they were.
It is little wonder then that polls before the election showed a significant majority approved of the idea of mass deportation. While many who favor mass deportation may not fully understand how it might roll out and may be in favor of exemptions in many cases, these views of the current illegal immigration problem clearly drove voters.
Trump will obviously re-establish his border and immigration policies and likely strengthen them with executive orders. I believe he will invoke 8 U.S.C. §1182(f), which provides:
“Whenever the President finds that the entry of any aliens or of any class of aliens into the United States would be detrimental to the interests of the United States, he may by proclamation, and for such period as he shall deem necessary, suspend the entry of all aliens or any class of aliens as immigrants or nonimmigrants, or impose on the entry of aliens any restrictions he may deem to be appropriate.”
Of course, nothing is simple in government and any such invocation will be challenged in the courts. In the end, legislation will be required (and is appropriate) to address ongoing immigration, as well as Trump’s intent to mass deport.
I believe Republicans can and should take the opportunity in 2025 to actually “reform” the immigration process. Unfortunately, they are not likely to include my proposal for a blanket moratorium on new immigrants over the next 10 years. But it seems certain they will provide tools and funding for the deportation of illegal immigrants.
It is also clear that the Trump administration will prioritize known criminals and terror risks. Their second priority will be those whose asylum status was rejected yet were allowed by Biden-Harris to remain in the country. They have also stated the intent to prioritize finding and safeguarding the hundreds of thousands of unaccompanied minors. But mass deportation using draconian methods will be difficult at best, and the optics may even turn the majority against the concept. What we need is a kinder and gentler mass deportation. After all, we should acknowledge that the overwhelming majority of these folks came here simply to make a better life for themselves and their families. And many of them have a sense that they were essentially invited in.
What does a kinder and gentler deportation look like? I believe it includes an overwhelming amount of self-deportation and reform legislation could encourage this by including the following provisions.
Any new law should provide that those illegally entering the country are permanently disqualified from becoming citizens and forever banned from working in the United States. They would also be permanently ineligible for any government-sponsored benefit program. This may seem cruel to some, but the purpose is to dissuade forever those whose goal is to improve their lives from entering illegally. The only path to accomplish this should be the legal path. This should apply to new illegal immigrants from the date the legislation is approved.
For those who are already here illegally, there should be a method to encourage and even assist them in the self-deportation process and thereby get a pass on the permanent disqualification suggested above. To begin with, they should be given one year to register with DHS including providing their name, address and identifying details in the form of a driver’s license-type photo and a DNA sample. (Note that the DNA results should be available to law enforcement to assist in solving crimes but should otherwise be private and used exclusively for immigration control purposes.) Significant funding would be necessary. Registration must be easy to do and could be set up at locations such as post offices or motor vehicle department sites. Staffing would be temporary because, after one year, the program would end. Any existing immigrants in the country illegally who wanted to protect their future citizenship or working privileges would have two choices. They must either register or self-deport within the year.
Those who registered and do not have asylum cases pending should have a total of two years (including the one-year registration period), to self-deport. Transportation assistance should be provided. For asylum cases, there must be a dramatic if temporary increase in funding to deal with backlogged claims, including government-funded legal advocates (similar to defense attorneys provided to accused criminals who cannot afford legal representation). The goal should be to clear all outstanding asylum cases within three years. And yes, I understand how difficult that could be.
Asylum rules would benefit from reform as well. Among other things, asylum seekers should be encouraged, and perhaps required, to apply while still outside the United States, including at the border as was done with Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” rules.
There are many details between these lines, but a kinder and gentler deportation should be a Trump administration priority, especially in the form of new laws that encourage self-deportation and create disincentives to future illegal immigration.
Butler is a husband, father, grandfather, business executive, entrepreneur and political observer.
Children watch a July Fourth Parade along the Walkway of Heroes and Independence Avenue on July 04, 2026 in Tappan, New York.
The Great American Grumpfest
Our nation’s 250th birthday party didn’t feel especially patriotic and wasn’t as much fun as the 200th anniversary was.
President Trump, who did his best to co-opt our holiday for his personal aggrandizement, was a major reason. The party he threw in Washington, D.C., was crankier than uplifting, and less about celebrating our shared past and a promising future than about reminding us how far we have strayed from our founders’ plan to create a republic that future Americans would keep in good working order.
Credit Trump this much. He has a singular gift for picking at scabs that other politicians would rather ignore and pushing us into reckonings we don’t need.
The thing is, Americans have seen all this before. Sometimes the makeover we were encouraged to undertake was more conservative, sometimes more liberal. Whatever direction we were pushing, however, the reckoning we had in mind this time had to be more forthright and the conclusion more definitive than it was the last time.
Our current discontents, the ones behind the reckoning President Trump has been trying to inspire, are not trivial. Included among them are immigration, birthright citizenship, exploding healthcare costs, election rigging, a gag-inducing national debt, how we educate our children, too many genders, racial differences we can’t move past, a lopsided economy that favors more well-off Americans, and historic levels of political corruption and graft. Add to these the several foreign adventures he has pushed us into or is anxious to undertake, and you have the makings of a national headache the likes of which we haven’t had in half a century.
All the elbow-throwing and overheated rhetoric we’re using today have begun to look almost normal in all the ways that bickering neighbors and feuding family members appear normal. But they have also made us look mean-spirited and have portrayed our differences as irreconcilable. To ourselves, of course, but also to many people outside the United States who might be forgiven for turning their heads and not looking at the national car wreck we Americans show no interest in avoiding.
The good news, as I suggested above, is that Americans have had a great deal of practice dealing with challenges and national car wrecks like these.
This essay begins to lay out the reasons why.
By way of illustration, we have our seemingly insatiable demand for more bad news about race in America.
Sixty years after being released from the legal constrictions that bedeviled both white and black Americans, many white people have come to believe the color that used to make them unassailable is now a sign of a moral inferiority born of a racial animus they can never wash off. Many black people, on the other hand, are insisting that America is as hopelessly stacked against them as the formerly unassailable white people’s ancestors used to tell their black ones.
The result is that many people today are buying into racist nightmares and mumbo jumbo that their black and white ancestors worked hard and effectively to put in each other’s heads.
This might be dismissed as crazy behavior if it weren’t so important to rituals Americans have long used to express their deepest fears about each other while figuring out what move they can make that won’t end with their world crashing down on everybody’s head.
Unfortunately, the kind of cultural sleight of hand we have used to ramp up our racial differences has been appropriated by people who have many other cultural fears and unresolved differences with each other. Their clumsy but culturally prescribed missteps are making all these other issues look as irremediable as our racial problems.
A good place to start an answer to how we back away from ledges is Alexis de Tocqueville’s writing on early-19th-century American democracy. He had an optimistic take on Americans’ unscripted displays of public bravado, recrimination, and payback.
For him, these were occasions when people tried to mitigate the effects of the unfair hand they were dealing someone else or had themselves been dealt by behaving in ways quite at odds with how they would otherwise be expected to act. These inversions of what Tocqueville called “the natural order of conscience” presented themselves as a loud but culturally muted challenge to the hypocrisies that people had built into the world they’d made together.
One of his favorite illustrations of early-American hypocrisy involved slave masters sleeping with their less-than-worthy slaves. To the best of my knowledge, he didn’t pick up on all the ways that slaves messed with their owners. Their well-chronicled and quiet resistance showed that even severely ill-treated people can exercise more control over their lives than outsiders appreciate.
Be that as it may, such inversions of a people’s “natural order of conscience” make a good public show of them wrestling with demons they can’t or may not want to shake off, but in any case, are nowhere close to figuring out how to cast out.
Implicit in these disruptions was the discomforting idea that people might flip the entire script and turn the world on its head in more permanent ways. That kind of flipping worked out better for us in our revolution against England than in our Civil War. These events taught us the value of stepping back from historically unprecedented ledges.
Americans of late have been giving loud expression to a long list of things they don’t like about each other and the last makeover they started but didn’t finish a half-century ago. The outcome of our fights today will be as revealing as they are embarrassing to everyone who imagined they could recast our country in a way that privileged their favorite kind of Americans.
Their disappointment with the accommodations they strike will be palpable, but the middling results they achieve with all their pushing and shoving won’t be anything they can’t live with.
Anthropologists who have written about such moments in other cultures less “advanced” than our own show that people find ways to work around their seemingly irreconcilable differences without ever fully resolving them. Indeed, the patches and repairs people make have the unheralded effect of reinforcing rather than undermining the legitimacy of the practices and values they thought were fundamentally flawed.
For example…
White guilt and black pessimism do more good than putting cash into the pockets of professional shamers and handwringers. They give the rest of us who don’t feel guilty or powerless more time to make the world less racially unequal. Good news.
Regarding illegal immigration, the entrance requirements for future immigrants will remain stringent. Americans will applaud the continued detention and deportation of the few illegal immigrants who commit serious crimes. Good news.
All the people who came to the United States without being legally vetted and were locked up for a time will be released in numbers small enough to avoid serious media attention. Along with the several million other good people who snuck in but avoided capture, the former detainees will go to school, find gainful employment, pay their taxes, and stay out of trouble. Many will eventually become citizens. Good news.
Investigations into election tampering and Donald Trump’s 2020 presidential loss will come to an unceremonious conclusion the day after his second term ends. Many Americans will grumble about this, but there will also be some quiet partying, too. Good and bad news.
Congressional hearings into all the grifting accomplished by people tied to the Trump administration will end without anyone having to pay a dime back to the American taxpayers. Bad news, we’ll learn to live with.
New laws and regulations will be created in the hope that the kind of corruption practiced by President Trump will not be repeated for another 250 years. Good news, I hope we’ll live long enough to enjoy.
Show trials for people who allegedly vandalized the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, if they happen, will get big television viewer ratings. Good news.
Trials for pardoned Capitol insurrectionists who committed serious crimes after their release should get more attention, but won’t. Bad news.
We will continue to hear nothing from most of the people who were pardoned for crimes they committed in the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. They will keep their mouths shut and their heads down for the rest of their life. Good news.
The gold-gilded ornaments that Donald Trump had plastered all over the White House will be shipped to Mar-a-Lago, where the former president will sell them on eBay. Fun news.
American taxpayers end up paying for most of the new East Wing, the removal of the miniature gladiatorial arena that was built behind the White House, and the restoration of the White House rose garden. Bad news.
The Triumphal Arch was never built. Good news.
Trad wives and gay couples raise perfectly lovely children. Good but unsurprising news.
Trans men and women learn that most Americans can’t figure out who they used to be. No one gives a second thought to their use of “family bathrooms” or “unisex bathrooms” in public settings, businesses, and schools. Communities will sponsor athletic teams that have trans boys and girls just to show they can. Good news.
Budget deficits will be kicked down the road for someone else’s children to pay down. Bad news.
Federal agencies that had their budgets and employee ranks slashed during President Trump’s second term are getting some of the money and lost positions back. Good news.
Elite universities will buy their way out of DEI purgatory by competing for conservative scholars whose inflated salaries dwarf those of their liberal colleagues, who will think about suing their institutions for reverse discrimination but won’t be able to figure out who would pay for it or care. More fun news.
Okay. I’ve probably missed some ways that Americans will step back from the ledges they have been making noises about leaping off. But to the extent that my predictions pan out, the best and most important moral of the stories about us stepping away is this: everything we lost and took back, or had returned to us, will have happened without our government collapsing, civic traditions crumbling, or our people beating each other up.
The reason why is that the differences Americans have with each other really weren’t as irreconcilable as we made them out to be. The empty-sounding bromide that Americans have more that unites us than divides us turns out to be true, not just metaphorically but in fact.
Now that is really something to celebrate.
Daniel J. Monti (danieljmonti.com) is Professor of Sociology at Saint Louis University and the author of American Democracy and Disconsent: Liberalism and Illiberalism in Ferguson, Charlottesville, Black Lives Matter, and the Capitol Insurrection.