Hankins’s proposal would be disastrous for the Right.
Professor James Hankins has proposed a grand bargain on immigration. He has the right idea: with an issue as thorny as immigration, on which the views of the American electorate are split, one might even say schizophrenic, the solution must be some kind of compromise. In order to strike a lasting bargain, each side must be satisfied with what it receives in return for giving up some of its demands.
Alas, in the Hankins bargain, what the Right gets, it doesn’t want, and what the Left gets, it doesn’t need.
The Left’s preferred policy solution for illegal immigration is amnesty. Their plan has always been to get as many people as possible over the border and then, when the congressional winds are favorable, grant them citizenship. They think they will be able to get enough conservative crossovers to pass an amnesty. There have always been Republican defectors who are either naïve would-be humanitarians and think amnesty is the compassionate solution or cynical friends of big business who want to maximize immigration as a source of cheap labor.
Plus, it would take some very compelling sweeteners to get the Left to agree to accept the half-loaf of guest worker permits, since they fully expect to get the full loaf of amnesty soon enough. None of the concessions Hankins offers are anywhere close to sweet enough.
As part of his “solution,” Hankins proposes to regularize illegal immigrants’ work arrangements. “Legalizing the status of undocumented immigrants would greatly weaken the underground economy,” he writes. Are we sure it would? Hankins may be surprised to learn that the majority of workers in Mexico are employed in the informal economy; in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras, it is more than two-thirds. Half of Mexican adults do not have a bank account. Even middle-class Mexicans often deal in cash to avoid the scrutiny of the taxman. The same is true throughout much of Latin America.
The fact that immigrants work “in the shadows” may not be solely because of their legal status: they are simply recreating the arrangements that exist in their own countries. The lure of working on the books is therefore not as great as Hankins thinks it is.
Next Hankins offers to grant illegal immigrants access to government services such as education. Where did he get the idea that they lack such access now? Schools are not allowed to turn away illegal immigrants per the Supreme Court’s decision in Plyler v. Doe. They are not even allowed to do anything that might have the unintended effect of discouraging illegal immigrants from enrolling. When Alabama tried to determine how many illegal immigrants and children of illegal immigrants were in its schools, a judge ruled it could not collect this information, because even asking the question could “significantly deter…undocumented children from enrolling in and attending school.”
One in ten public school students are classified as English Language Learners; in Texas and California, the rate is twice that. When the town of Springfield, Ohio, received its notorious influx of Haitian immigrants, its school district was forced to hire translators fluent in Haitian Creole. If it had failed to hire them, the district would have been subject to a lawsuit for not meeting its students’ needs. Contrary to what Professor Hankins thinks, the American public school system goes to great lengths—and expense—to serve illegal immigrants and their children.
Finally, Hankins offers illegal immigrants the chance to apply for citizenship, and “after ten years of lawful residence, persons holding worker permits would be able to apply for citizenship for their children.”
American citizenship is the greatest prize of all, so I can see why Hankins thinks this would be a good carrot to dangle. But he misses the glaring flaw in his plan. Due to the misguided policy of birthright citizenship, the vast majority of children in households headed by illegal immigrants—80% according to Pew—are citizens already.
So the enticements Hankins offers in exchange for giving up on amnesty are not very enticing. Perhaps if workplace enforcement were ramped up, or if birthright citizenship were abolished, then his offer would look more attractive. For now, I doubt the Left would be interested in it except as a delaying tactic while they keep pushing for full amnesty.
No Can Do
What about the conservative side of the bargain? Here, too, Hankins misjudges both the priorities of his audience and the facts on the ground.
The central Republican objection to illegal immigration, according to Hankins, is that it is done outside the proper channels and is unfair to legal immigrants who come here the right way. “Lawbreakers should not be allowed to ‘jump the line,’” he insists. “Republicans have the moral high ground when they insist that illegal immigrants should not be rewarded for breaking our laws.” Hankins therefore addresses Republican concerns by talking up the rule of law and ideas about fairness.
But those are not the main objections of most restrictionists. I can see how Hankins thought that since many conservatives are more comfortable expressing their worries about illegal immigration in terms of the rule of law, it made sense to sidestep other worries that are difficult to talk about within the constraints imposed by left-wing taboos. But Hankins’s proposed solution simply arrives at the same end result as open borders: tens of millions more Latin American migrants living in the United States, only by a more orderly method this time around—which makes it no solution at all.
Hankins speaks of the “legitimate moral concerns” that Republicans have with illegal immigration, implicitly contrasting these with illegitimate concerns, such as those motivated by racism or prejudice. It is true that concerns about fairness and queue-jumping are part of the conservative case. But they are by no means exhaustive. And these unspoken reasons may be politically incorrect—but they are not illegitimate.
Immigration causes receiving countries to resemble sending countries in proportion to the size of the migration wave. The wave that turned the U.S. from 6% Hispanic the year I was born to 20% Hispanic today—and a projected 30% Hispanic in 2050—has substantially accelerated the Latin-Americanization of our country. One can esteem Latin America and still recognize its dysfunctions, many of which are beginning to appear here; the political seesaw between caudillismo and lawfare is just one example.
California has often been a preview of America’s future. In the case of demographics, it paints a worrisome picture of permanent Democratic dominance. Many Republicans, including Elon Musk, believe that illegal immigration is a plot to turn America into a “permanent one-party state.” The central fact of Latin American politics is its lopsided class structure, with a large underclass and a powerful elite with not much of a middle class in between. This is what California has now, thanks to immigration and the outmigration of the middle class it used to have to other states.
The two extremes of the class spectrum both vote for the Democratic Party, so elections in California have lost their competitive function. Services deteriorate without pushback, because the lower class expects no better, and the upper class insulates itself with private replacements. It is a miserable equilibrium, but one with a lot of inertia. If it spreads to the rest of the country, it will be very difficult to escape.
Not to worry, says Hankins. If Republicans offer illegal immigrants the grand bargain he lays out, they will be so grateful that Republicans will sail to victory on their votes. Hispanics and Asians are natural conservatives, so it should be easy for the GOP to lock down their allegiance.
There are just a couple problems with that argument: First, the Republican Party’s inroads with Hispanics have occurred under Donald Trump, who has been more aggressive on the immigration issue than any candidate in living memory, both in tone and in substance. This suggests that moderation on immigration is not the key to winning over these demographics, however much academics and political consultants might want to persuade us that it is.
Second, these inroads are vastly overrated. “Harris won the Latino vote by only ten points,” Hankins crows. “Only”? The fact that a historically weak candidate who ran an incompetent campaign still won Hispanics by double digits is not comforting. Among voters 18 to 29, Harris beat Trump by nearly 20 points, which does not bode well for the future.
The supposed rightward shift among Asians is even more fictitious. Trump won only 35% of the Asian vote in 2024, compared to Harris’s 61%. Among Asian voters 18 to 29, he won only 23%. Asian Americans are one of the most left-leaning blocs in the country—and have been for years. Hankins may be right that they will shift into the Republican column over the coming decades, but I would not bet the future of the republic on it.
The reason Republicans should be open to a grand bargain on immigration, Hankins argues, is that the public is bound to turn against President Trump’s agenda: “if Democratic-aligned media can collect enough video of immigrants suffering in detention camps, tearful family separations, children denied schooling, and so forth.” You can’t expect to get everything you want, he says, so you might as well compromise now.
But I see no evidence that the American people are souring on Trump’s immigration policy. Quite the opposite, in fact. Immigration is the subject on which the president enjoys his highest favorability ratings, better than both his handling of the economy and international trade negotiations. The people in his administration know the power of sob stories to shape public attitudes. That is why Tom Homan and his public relations team have flooded social media with information highlighting the criminal records of the aliens they are sending home. Instead of feeling sorry for deportees, Americans rightly feel sympathy for murder victims such as Laken Riley and Jocelyn Nungaray.
Hankins doesn’t think the American people have the stomach for “the largest deportation operation in American history.” I think they do. By the end of Trump’s second term, housing will become more affordable for young families as illegal immigrants leave the market and stop driving up demand. Schools will have more resources to devote to the children of legal citizens as class sizes get smaller and demand for expensive ESL instruction is reduced. Transportation infrastructure will be less strained. The lives of ordinary people will be better in tangible ways thanks to Trump’s immigration enforcement. That—and not giving up ground on the most pressing issue facing our country—is the path to electoral victory for Republicans.
