The DSA's plan for immigration is the worst one yet
President Donald Trump recently renewed his criticism of the left’s immigration agenda, taking aim at mass amnesty. The Democratic Socialists of America are making the point for him, calling to “grant amnesty for all immigrants regardless of status.”
The White House Council of Economic Advisers released a new report last week estimating that the DSA’s immigration policies could cost Americans a whopping $440 billion to $613 billion over 10 years. And that’s not the worst of it.
'The rule of law cannot co-exist with mass amnesty.'
According to the CEA, allowing mass amnesty could create $36 billion to $47 billion in estimated annual costs for just SNAP, Medicaid, and HUD housing vouchers.
The report argues that these costs would come from “turning the existing population of illegal aliens into legal residents eligible for federal social safety net programs.”
While DSA candidates like Melat Kiros believe “millions of undocumented immigrants in the United States right now should have an immediate pathway to citizenship,” American taxpayers should be asking the more important question: If mass amnesty could leave taxpayers with billions in new costs every year, what exactly does it solve?
It certainly does not solve the underlying problem. It changes the legal status of the people already here while leaving the incentives that attract more illegal immigration intact. We have been down this road before. Not to ruin the ending, but we somehow keep finding ourselves right back to where we started.
In 1986, President Ronald Reagan signed the Immigration Reform and Control Act. The law created legalization programs for millions of illegal aliens while also establishing employer sanctions intended to discourage the hiring of unauthorized workers. About 2.7 million people ultimately received legal status under the law.
However, the bargain did not work. Due to IRCA’s eligibility cutoff, roughly 2 million were excluded from legalization, while an estimated 500,000 were eligible but never received legal status. According to the Migration Policy Institute, those who remained in unlawful status “became the nucleus of today’s large unauthorized population.”
The enforcement side also fell short. Weaknesses in employment verification and document fraud undermined employer sanctions. The problems IRCA was meant to address ultimately grew. The unauthorized population increased from an estimated 3.5 million in 1990 to 12.2 million by 2007.
Legalization changed the status of millions of people, but it did not prevent the country from having to deal with an even larger unauthorized population later. A growing population of illegal aliens brings larger costs for schools, health care, housing, and other public services.
RELATED: Republicans cannot serve two masters on immigration
The DSA platform does not just call for mass amnesty; members also want an end to ICE detention and deportations.
CEA estimates the “net cost to taxpayers of ending deportations and ICE detentions to be between $79 and $139 billion over 10 years.” The report argues that doing so would eliminate fiscal savings associated with current immigration enforcement.
Former Border Patrol agent and Texas Public Policy Foundation senior fellow Ammon Blair puts it plainly: “The rule of law cannot co-exist with mass amnesty.”
If amnesty paired with enforcement did not keep our country from ending up back here, why should taxpayers expect amnesty with less enforcement to work any better?
Mass amnesty is not an immigration solution. And it cannot prevent the next wave of illegal immigration.
American immigration policy sends a message around the world. If the United States repeatedly demonstrates that entering or remaining in the country illegally may eventually end in legal status, policymakers have to consider the incentive that amnesty creates for the next person deciding whether our immigration laws are worth obeying.
That is the problem with DSA’s socialist immigration promises. The slogans are simple, yet the consequences are anything but. Americans would be left paying billions in new costs while the DSA simultaneously calls for less immigration enforcement.
We cannot mistake an old idea for a new solution. History has shown us that mass amnesty is not the answer. Socialism has never been short on promises, but it is taxpayers who are always expected to foot the bill.
Republicans cannot serve two masters on immigration
Eleven years after Donald Trump’s rise, the Republican Party still has not broken with the business interests that depend on cheap, abundant migrant labor. A handful of conservatives want to shut off the employment spigot and reduce both illegal and legal immigration. But too much of the party remains willing to protect longtime illegal workers in agriculture, expand guest-worker programs, or legalize workers already here when employers insist they cannot operate without them.
That’s the real fault line. Almost every Republican says border chaos is bad. The harder test comes when immigration enforcement raises labor costs for industries dependent upon a large foreign workforce.
When a party’s voters and its governing class want fundamentally different things on a defining issue, eventually the contradiction must break somewhere.
For years, Republicans have talked about focusing deportations on criminal aliens while treating workers in agriculture, hospitality, and other favored industries differently. That approach leaves the cheap labor pipeline largely intact. If employers can continue hiring illegal labor with little consequence, the incentive to come and remain does not disappear.
Republicans simply won’t protect our nation’s sovereignty. Instead, they build up a false dichotomy that points to one solution: amnesty.
Senator Jim Justice (R-W.Va.) made the tension explicit last month. He told Politico that ICE can get “carried away” and questioned “dragging people away that have lived on your street corner for 15 years.” He later issued a statement saying he supports Trump’s immigration strategy “full stop,” while emphasizing the removal of dangerous criminals.
Justice serves one of the most anti-illegal alien states. He did not endorse blanket amnesty outright. He didn’t need to. His comments reveal how quickly the politics change once enforcement reaches local industries and communities that have become addicted to illegal labor.
The same pressure surfaced in southwest Kansas after ICE operations disrupted meatpacking towns. Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.) complained that local law enforcement had not received adequate notice and said the operations caused “mass disruptions to local communities and businesses.” Enforcement, he said, should be done “in a responsible and secure manner.” Sen. Jerry Moran (R-Kan.) likewise urged coordination with local police and said DHS told him the operation targeted people with criminal warrants.
Their complaint was about tactics and coordination, not ICE’s legal authority to remove illegal aliens. Still, the episode underscores the problem: Enforcement remains popular in the abstract until it collides with an employer’s workforce. Clearly, the problem is worse than we thought.
Rep. María Elvira Salazar (R) of Florida has gone further. In a campaign ad, she told Trump that some enforcement efforts had “gone too far” and said Hispanic voters who backed him in 2024 “feel betrayed.” Salazar explicitly said she was not proposing amnesty. But she has long favored a “legal-status framework” for many illegal immigrants already living and working here. In other words, amnesty.
RELATED: Kansas Republicans muddy the waters on ICE enforcement
The guest-worker side of the equation is even clearer.
House Agriculture Committee Chairman Glenn Thompson (R-Penn.) introduced the Securing Agriculture’s Workforce Act with 50 co-sponsors. The bill would allow H-2A labor certifications lasting up to three years, make it easier to transfer guest workers between employers, and let certain illegal farmworkers who were already here and had worked in agriculture apply for H-2A status. That is not citizenship, but it is a legalization mechanism tied directly to agricultural employment.
The administration has moved in the same direction on temporary labor. For fiscal year 2026, DHS and the Labor Department authorized up to 64,716 additional H-2B visas on top of the statutory cap for seasonal non-agricultural workers.
H-2A has no numerical cap. In October 2025, the Labor Department changed the methodology used to set the program’s minimum wage. The department itself estimated the rule would produce $2.46 billion in annualized wage transfers from H-2A workers to employers. A federal judge ruled the methodology unlawful in August but did not vacate the rule, leaving the wage rates in place while the litigation continues.
Whatever one thinks of the legal dispute, the economic direction is obvious: Washington is making foreign farm labor cheaper and easier to use.
In July, Rep. Dan Newhouse (R-Wash.) led a bipartisan letter — joined by six Republican senators and a number of House Republicans endorsed by Trump — asking the administration to reduce processing delays and structural barriers in the H-2A program. The letter did not ask Congress to raise a visa cap, because H-2A has none. It asked the executive branch to make the existing pipeline work more smoothly.
Sadly, this is not a fringe position inside the GOP. The cheap-labor lobby remains deeply embedded in the party’s agricultural and business wings.
Consider Nebraska. Gov. Jim Pillen (R) has embraced Trump’s immigration-enforcement agenda, yet a New York Times and Flatwater Free Press investigation found that Pillen Family Farms had employed undocumented workers at at least 20 hog farms. Court records showed at least a dozen workers charged with using fake or stolen IDs between 2015 and 2024. Pillen and the company say they never knowingly hired illegal workers and that the business now uses E-Verify. Still, it’s worth noting that Pillen’s farms have never been raided by ICE.
RELATED: The promise was mass deportation. The policy is carve-outs.
Republicans often treat illegal farm labor as the least objectionable form of illegal immigration. In reality, it may be among the most transformative.
Over the past few decades, large agricultural employers have reshaped rural communities across the Great Plains by relying heavily on immigrant labor. In Schuyler, Nebraska, roughly three-quarters of the population is Hispanic, while 27% of students in the Central Nebraska school district are foreign-born — figures more commonly associated with major metropolitan areas like New York and San Francisco.
The political divide is less about whether mass immigration transforms communities than about where that transformation occurs. Democratic interests tend to favor it in large cities; Republican-aligned agricultural interests have helped bring it to rural America.
When a party’s voters and its governing class want fundamentally different things on a defining issue, eventually the contradiction must break somewhere. The Republican Party itself was born in 1854 when the old party system fractured over the expansion of slavery into the territories.
If Republicans cannot choose between an immigration policy built around American workers and one built around employers’ demand for ever more labor, voters may eventually make the choice for them — and let this party go the way of the Whigs.
Democrats Revive Nullification With Refusals To Assist Federal Immigration Enforcement
What a state cannot be permitted to do is transform a policy disagreement into an exercise of state power to nullify federal authority.2 illegal aliens arrested after teenage girl is grabbed off the street and raped, police say
A 17-year-old girl told Mississippi police she was walking down the street in Cadet just before midnight on Thursday when she was kidnapped by one man and assaulted by him and another man.
The first man allegedly grabbed her and dragged her into a home, where he and another man raped the girl.
Detectives said they found a blonde hair when processing his boxers.
Deputies made a forced entry into the home at about 2 a.m. on Friday after the two men refused to follow orders in their native language.
Oscar Antonio Baltodano Lopez locked himself in a bathroom and only complied after being threatened with a firearm, police said.
Detectives noted that Lopez was wearing clothing that matched a description given by the victim. He also refused to hand over his boxers or allow a DNA swab. Detectives said they found a blonde hair when processing his boxers.
Another man in the home identified as Benjamin Santez Lopez told police he was home all night and denied having any sexual contact with the girl.
Police arrested the two men and booked them into the Washington County Jail without bail.
KSDK-TV reported that the two men are illegal aliens, and police said they could face deportation after the criminal prosecution process was completed.
Police believe a substance found at the home was methamphetamine.
Baltodano Lopez was charged with first-degree rape, first-degree sodomy, kidnapping, possession of a controlled substance, and resisting arrest, while Santez Lopez was charged with first-degree sexual abuse and first-degree sodomy.
A third illegal alien was taken into custody but was not charged.
There was no indication of where the illegal aliens are from originally.
Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!
Britain Is So Far Gone, It’s No Longer Safe For American Troops
The government is setting up illegal migrant camps for fighting-age men from some of the West’s greatest recent enemies and yet is surprised when its military bases come under internal attack from within.
thefederalist.com
www.theblaze.com
www.theblaze.com
www.theblaze.com