Op-ed: Trump’s New Amnesty Would Cover About Two Million Illegal Immigrants

President Trump wants to deport illegal immigrants, but, paradoxically, he doesn’t want certain industries to lose illegal immigrant labor. As a result, DHS recently decided it would not conduct worksite investigations or operations on the agriculture, restaurant, and hotel industries.

The new policy is a form of “administrative amnesty” for illegal workers in those industries. As with any amnesty, the recipients are allowed to remain in the U.S. for now. However, their new status comes not from Congress changing the law, but from the administration declaring it will not enforce the law against them.

How large is this amnesty? Having recently written a report on the illegal immigrant presence in each census-identified occupation, I reran the numbers based on the industries that Trump selected for protection. The results show that about 12.5 percent of illegal immigrants are covered. Since the Center for Immigration Studies estimated that there were 15.8 million illegal immigrants in the U.S. in January, that implies 2 million amnesty recipients.

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[Read the rest at National Review.]