The most sure-fire way to assess the effectiveness — and unintended consequences — of a broad policy such as immigration enforcement is to watch it play out in real time.
That may be happening locally, as the national pursuit of a Trump administration crackdown on undocumented migrants in the United States is in the national spotlight. And now, President Trump himself is making an adjustment, a welcome one.
On his social-media platform, Truth Social, the president had previewed the anticipated change. “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,” he wrote on Thursday.
And on Monday, that position was formalized: Reuters reported that the president ordered U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to scale back raids on farms, hotels, restaurants and meatpacking plants.
Immigration authorities would be taking an important step in the right direction by following that directive. The aggressive enforcement action at the center of national debate has been too punishing on employers and workers alike.
Hawaii is caught up in these wide-ranging sweeps. At the end of May, the Honolulu Star-Advertiser reported that so far this year, more than 100 people have been arrested for alleged violations of immigration law.
Few details have been released about these cases, but sectors such as agriculture and the service industries, including hotel and restaurant workers, are of concern. UNITE HERE Local 5, the hotel workers union, held a rally Thursday to join a national protest of raids, clearly an issue for Hawaii as well.
Some enforcement raids have been reported at Kona coffee fields, for example — a more intense pursuit than what happened during the first Trump term. In 2017 was the high-profile case of Andres Magana Ortiz, a Kona coffee farmer for nearly 30 years, who complied with a deportation order that sent him away from family here and back to Mexico.
Recently, the president undoubtedly heard complaints from influential constituencies worried about the impact in the farm fields, crucial to the economy but with workforce demands that are difficult to fill.
The federal administration maintains that its emphasis is to rid the nation of the “worst of the worst” — those who entered the country illegally and who are actively engaged here in criminal activity.
Nobody should contest that mission, or with the argument that employment of undocumented workers often is paired with exploitative work conditions. But the administration has set arbitrary quotas for arrests that are simply too high and have done real damage to businesses; media reports indicate the target is 3,000 arrests per day.
The driving force behind immigration enforcement should be to prioritize the worst offenders for deportation, while exploring ways to fix the system overall. This should be done without decimating businesses that fill an important niche but cannot pay wages at the level that Americans seek.
Enabling work permits in such sectors would be a policy preferable to scouring worksites to meet an arrest quota. And this isn’t the job only of the executive branch.
Congress has failed utterly to grapple with what is a crucial imperative: creating an immigration system that is rational and fair, enabling reasonable access to work authorization and, ultimately, legal citizenship.
That remains the long-term goal, but for now, finding a middle path that is sustainable for business and humane to working people is the right objective.
Source: The Garden Island