Trump can’t let Reagan’s greatest mistake become his legacy



Charlie Kirk reported this week that President Trump faces growing pressure from GOP donors to cut a bipartisan deal offering amnesty to illegal aliens working in agriculture and hospitality. The donor class has long hated Trump and especially his supporters’ demand for real border security and immigration enforcement.

Big business pushing for cheap labor isn’t surprising. What’s alarming is Trump echoing their rhetoric.

What was effectively Ronald Reagan’s 1986 amnesty doomed California. It transformed a red stronghold into the Democrats’ electoral anchor. Trump can’t afford to make the same mistake.

Donald Trump says a lot of things. Anyone who gets emotionally exasperated at any single statement will start to look like a hysterical journalist. Salena Zito’s sage advice — “Take Trump seriously, not literally” — still applies. He might joke about annexing Canada, but those lines rarely lead to action.

At the same time, Trump takes public opinion seriously. He gauges crowd response and often walks back proposals that don't land. That makes it important to push back on bad ideas without losing perspective.

Trust the plan — but verify the plan regularly.

Kirk understands this. That’s why he’s mobilized opposition now to any amnesty deal, real or imagined. He wouldn’t act unless he sensed real movement inside the swamp. Corporate America has tolerated immigration enforcement as long as it targeted gang members and drug dealers. But when Immigration and Customs Enforcement started raiding farms and hotels, the donor class panicked.

Suddenly, Trump began repeating talking points from Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins about farmers and hotel owners losing their “best workers.” He promised to help them get the labor they need. His administration quietly issued guidance exempting farms and hotels from immigration raids.

The online backlash came fast — and fierce. The administration reversed course and rescinded the exemptions.

But Trump didn’t quite drop the issue. He kept talking about farmers’ need for labor. In the wake of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which delivered major funding for border security, Beltway insiders started floating a pivot: tack back to the center and strike a deal.

That whisper campaign likely prompted Kirk to sound the alarm.

Special carve-outs for illegal labor would betray MAGA’s core promise. Maybe 10 years ago, building a wall and deporting the worst offenders would have been enough. But after eight million illegal aliens surged across the border under Biden’s illegitimate regime, the situation changed. Democrats intentionally flooded the country to shift its demographics and tilt elections. If we don’t reverse that flood, they win.

RELATED: Where the left gets its rage against borders

Photo by Adam J. Dewey/Anadolu via Getty Images

After Kirk’s warning, Rollins re-emerged to promise that mass deportations would continue. The base cheered. But she added that future enforcement would be more “strategic” — a telling hedge. Trump followed up by insisting he opposed amnesty, then immediately floated a new “worker program” to help farmers. That language did not reassure.

The United States already has legal guest worker programs. Farms that ignore them and hire illegal aliens are breaking the law. They don’t deserve special treatment. They deserve prosecution.

The truth is, letting illegal aliens stay and rewarding them with American jobs is amnesty. Redefining the term won’t change that.

Conservatives have heard this pitch before. At this point, it’s almost comical. Every “immigration reform” ends the same way: Illegal aliens stay, and the floodgates reopen. It starts with the workers, then families follow. Chain migration becomes mass migration.

Trump was elected because he promised to break this cycle. He built his legacy on tough immigration policies — mass deportations, the wall, an America First agenda. To flirt with a Reagan-style amnesty now would be an incredible betrayal.

What was effectively Ronald Reagan’s 1986 amnesty doomed California. It transformed a red stronghold into the Democrats’ electoral anchor. Trump can’t afford to make the same mistake.

He must shut down this talk — shut down Rollins especially — and remember why voters chose him over the establishment in the first place. The donor class got Trump wrong in 2016. If he listens to its members now, they’ll take him — and the country — down with them.

Trump Has No Reason To Compromise With Democrats On Immigration

Inviting Democrats to sit at the immigration-policy table will accomplish nothing and will jeopardize this core issue of the president’s.

America last? Foreign workers fill jobs while Americans are left out



America is full. Beyond the ongoing waves of illegal immigration, the country has admitted 36 million legal immigrants since 1989 (68 million since 1965), bringing the foreign-born population to a record 51.6 million. Every year, the U.S. issues 1.1 million green cards, 1 million guest worker visas, and 1.1 million foreign student visas. This level of immigration has transformed the nation over the past generation in unprecedented ways.

The real debate should focus on how much immigration we can curtail. Unfortunately, influential forces connected to Trump donors and transition team leaders are pushing to expand the foreign-worker pool, even though America already has more than enough.

Eight years into the MAGA movement, conservatives should not have to play defense to prevent further increases in immigration after four years of Biden’s disastrous policies.

Calls for more foreign workers come from multiple sources, including Elon Musk, who advocates for increasing foreign-worker visas and green cards. The “tech bros” even persuaded Trump to echo Mitt Romney’s half-baked suggestion of “stapling green cards to the diplomas” of foreign students.

We don’t need more foreign workers

After the election, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) emphatically declared, “We need more work visas,” as though it were an unassailable truth. However, the idea of a foreign-worker shortage exists only among those who believe new jobs should be reserved for foreigners while sidelining Americans.

In reality, all net job growth in the U.S. since 2019 has gone to foreign-born workers. Heritage Foundation economist E.J. Antoni notes that, over the past year, native-born workers have lost 773,000 jobs on net, while foreign-born workers have gained more than one million jobs.

Since before the pandemic, the foreign-born workforce has grown by 3.7 million, while the native-born workforce has shrunk by 873,000. These numbers challenge the narrative that America needs more foreign labor.

What began as an argument that Americans won’t do manual labor has evolved into a claim that Americans won’t work in accounting, engineering, computers, or nursing. This belief creates self-fulfilling momentum, working against Americans in numerous industries. As more industries become saturated with workers from India or other countries accustomed to lower wages, salaries are depressed, and Americans are increasingly sidelined — especially as government policies often pay them not to work.

Indian contract companies like Infosys, HCL, Wipro, Cognizant, and Tata have exploited the H-1B, L-1, F-1, and Optional Practical Training visa pipelines to flood Silicon Valley and American tech companies with cheap labor. This approach not only boxes out American workers but also treats many Indian recruits as indentured servants. Over the past few decades, 71% of jobs in Silicon Valley have gone to foreign workers, while 74% of American STEM graduates have failed to secure jobs in STEM fields.

As industries like tech and computers become increasingly saturated with Indian workers, they develop cultures of parochialism and discrimination against Americans. In October, a federal jury found Cognizant, the largest recipient of H-1B visas for many years, guilty of discriminating against American IT workers. During the California-based discrimination lawsuit in Palmer v. Cognizant Technology Solutions Corp., evidence revealed that tech firms were actively terminating American employees to replace them with H-1B workers, primarily from India.

The population of Indian nationals in the United States has grown 13-fold since 1980. Every year, Indian nationals consistently rank as the second-largest recipients of green cards, with more than 100,000 issued annually. Additionally, there are 330,000 foreign students from India studying in the U.S. On what planet do GOP donors believe we don’t already have enough?

Toward a more balanced approach

The goal of economic policy — including tax, regulatory, welfare, and immigration measures — should focus on bringing sidelined American workers back into the labor force. Yet, one of the primary arguments for admitting so many immigrants is the supposed lack of available workers. This narrative ignores the significant rise in working-age Americans (16 to 64) not participating in the labor force. These individuals are not counted as unemployed because they are no longer actively seeking work.

The combination of welfare incentives and immigration-driven wage suppression has discouraged an entire generation of workers from rejoining the labor force. According to the Center for Immigration Studies, “If the same share of U.S.-born men (16 to 64) were in the labor force in 2023 as in 1960, there would be 9.5 million more U.S.-born men in the labor force. Even if the share returned to the 2000 level, it would still add 4.8 million men to the labor force.”

Instead of flooding the market with more cheap labor, further discouraging these sidelined workers, policymakers should consider a more balanced approach. Combining immigration reform with welfare reform could help incentivize Americans to re-enter the workforce and reverse these damaging trends.

We constantly hear about the supposed shortage of STEM workers, but labor scholar Steve Camarota of the Center for Immigration Studies raises an important question: “If employers are desperate for more STEM workers, why have they been lowering the compensation offered?” According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, compensation for STEM workers in 2023 was actually 7.1% lower than in 2019. If there is a tight labor market, it’s not for Americans but for the growing segment of third-world imports willing to work for less.

Congress banned contract labor immigration in 1891 for good reason. Sections 3 and 4 of the Immigration Act of 1891 prohibited companies and travel agencies from marketing or soliciting immigration with the promise of employment. The Founders envisioned a system that attracted productive immigrants who would assimilate into America’s political system and work freely, rather than one that functioned as a foreign labor mill designed to depress wages for Americans.

As Trump said during the 2016 campaign, “The time has come for a new immigration commission to develop a new set of reforms ... to keep immigration levels, measured by population share, within historical norms ... and to establish new immigration controls to boost wages and to ensure that open jobs are offered to American workers first.”

Trump made these promises before the record-setting immigration years under the Biden administration and before all the new job gains were captured by foreign nationals. Now is the time to fulfill those promises and return immigration to historic norms. Eight years into the MAGA movement, conservatives should not have to play defense to prevent further increases in immigration after four years of Biden’s disastrous policies.

Texas Showdown: Truckers Protest Border Chaos! Mayorkas Under Fire | Stu Does America Ep 843
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Texas Showdown: Truckers Protest Border Chaos! Mayorkas Under Fire | Stu Does America Ep 843

Senate Border Bill Would Allow Foreign Fiancés, Spouses Of Americans To Work In The Country Immediately

Persons on K-status [would] automatically be granted the right to work

Ditch Mitch? McConnell’s border deal stabs GOP voters in the back



Conservatives across the nation are groaning when they look at Mitch McConnell, James Lankford, and Chuck Schumer's new border deal, which is currently in the Senate.

Instead of making moves toward mitigating illegal immigration, these pretend Republicans have proposed the following:

How more amnesty, funding, and work permits for illegal aliens solves one of our nation’s biggest crises is beyond Dave Rubin.

“DeSantis is absolutely right – the Democrats blow, but the Republicans suck,” he quotes, hoping the rest of the nation will observe the leaps and bounds of progress Florida has made under Governor Ron DeSantis.

“Florida is now a deeply, deeply red state that is functional, and it's paying off its debt and has no income tax and is sane, and we don't have homeless problems and drug problems ... We protect the First Amendment and the Second Amendment,” he praises. “Maybe we can blueprint that throughout the country.”

For that to happen, however, the Schumer-Lankfort Border Deal, which is undoubtedly a complete betrayal of Republican voters, would need to be shut down.

To hear more about this new disastrous border deal, watch the clip below.


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Meet The Double-Crossing Texas GOP Congressman Lobbying For Dangerous Border Cartels

Gonzales is actively working to sink the entire Republican congressional strategy to ensure the border remains open.

When Corrupt Media Bother To Talk About The Border Crisis At All, They Go Full Pinocchio

The media have not only largely ignored the border crisis but have actively deceived Americans about how bad it is.

Horowitz: Martha’s Vineyard affair shows how easy states could fight the border invasion



We’ve been told for decades that America is different from every other country in human history in that it has no right to jurisdictional sovereignty. Anyone can trespass the country, unilaterally assert domicile in a given locality against the will of the people and its governing authority, and force the people to pay for their medical bills, K-12 education (Plyler v. Doe), make their children citizens, and be counted in the census – and there’s not a darn thing you can do about it. That was until Martha’s Vineyard.

Conservatives often observe the appalling hypocrisy of the left-wing virtue-signalers who publicly advocate for illegal immigration but then refuse to live with the consequences. But rather than just scoring a political talking point, conservatives would be wise to secure political outcomes based on the Martha’s Vineyard affair. If the residents of the opulent island were able to marshal the National Guard to remove 50 illegal aliens within a day, why shouldn’t the red states follow suit immediately?

What we’ve learned from the virtue-signaling at Martha’s Vineyard is that indeed, illegal aliens simply landing on their island doesn’t make them entitled to endless use of the community’s services. Residents, while claiming to have compassion and posting photo ops offering them food and shelter, made it clear that they lack the resources to house them — and therefore it is the compassionate thing, from anyone’s vantage point, to move them somewhere else. Why then should other poorer parts of the country be saddled with a burden on their schools and hospitals that is incalculable?

Consider the plight of Arizona, for a moment. As many as 11% of all school children have at least one parent who is in the country illegally. According to a 2012 study by the Federation for Immigration Reform, “The total education, medical, and incarceration costs in Arizona due to illegal immigration are $2.6 billion a year.” And that is for an entire state. You can imagine that the costs are even more acute in some local cities and towns, many of which are quite poor, such as Yuma. Some estimate that the lifetime cost of just the illegal aliens who have come under Biden so far is upwards of $100 billion. And those numbers are growing every day.

Martha’s Vineyard currently has 165 children in the local public school. Applying the same ratio as Arizona, they could easily afford these families because they likely don’t yet have 18 children among the group of 50 (11% of their native enrollment). If even that is too absurd for them, why should Texas, Arizona, and every other state cater to the invasion instead?

Thus, rather than merely observing the double standard of the left, isn’t it time for red states to begin promoting their own self-survival? Federal courts have forced these states to educate the world’s children, but Martha’s Vineyard wouldn’t be caught dead enrolling them in their schools. And they most certainly wouldn’t put up with the crime.

In 2018, John Lott conducted an analysis of Arizona’s incarcerated population and found that illegal immigrants in Arizona are at least 142% more likely to be convicted of crime than other Arizonans. He also found that they are 45.4% more likely to have been gang members, and “they are 133% more likely to receive sentencing enhancements for being classified as dangerous, and they tend to be released from prison at a younger age despite more serious crimes because they initially go to jail at a younger age.”

The point being that if Martha’s Vineyard could request removal of illegal aliens with no record of their island being overrun with gangs, drugs, and the rampant fiscal cost, then most certainly, those areas suffering its effects for two generations should have the right to use their respective national guards to remove illegal aliens. Ironically, Martha’s Vineyard residents were acting upon their own heritage. In 1700, Massachusetts passed a law denying admission to those deemed a public charge or who forced shipmasters to guarantee their economic security. They forced the ships to transport the inadmissible aliens at their own cost.



Red states have the ability to end this charade tomorrow. They can declare an invasion and invoke Art. I Sec. 10 to repel the invasion by coordinating their respective national guards to remove all large groups of illegal aliens the feds send into their states and return them to Mexico. If Martha’s Vineyard can’t afford them, most others can’t either. The federal government has violated its commitment to the states and the states have the right to step in and end this invasion. The amount of illegal immigration, pursuant to law, that states should tolerate is zero. The Secure Fence Act of 2006 requires the DHS to achieve full operational control over the border, defined as “the prevention of all unlawful entries into the United States, including entries by terrorists, other unlawful aliens, instruments of terrorism, narcotics, and other contraband.”

So why haven’t the states stepped up to the plate? Sadly, most Republicans still support the cheap labor-driven open borders agenda. Sure, now, more than ever, they will use the chaos at the border as a cudgel against Biden headed into an election, but do they really want to shut off the flow of illegal aliens? Idaho Republicans Mike Crapo and Mike Simpson are strongly pushing legislation to grant amnesty and a path to citizenship for illegal aliens working in agriculture so they can further drive down wages and bring some of the problems associated with big cities to America’s rural areas.

HR 1603 has 13 Republican House co-sponsors. The bill grants amnesty to every illegal alien in this country who claims to have worked at least part-time for agriculture and creates an unlimited agriculture guest worker program for the future to bring in millions of low-skilled workers. The cultural and fiscal costs are never factored in. It permanently tethers green cards for people coming in on these H-2 visas to the condition of working in agriculture for 10 years, creating an indentured servant model that will prevent farms from ever modernizing and mechanizing their processes because of the boundless flow of cheap labor.

“This is not amnesty,” said Idaho Rep. Mike Simpson, using the age-old trick to redefine amnesty. “This is earned citizenship, earned legality in the country, to be able to provide the jobs and do the jobs that are necessary.” The comments were made at the National Council of Farmer Cooperatives in Washington where the American Business Immigration Coalition promised to spend $8 million promoting the amnesty bill.

This, despite the flood of illegals at an unimaginable level.

\u201cWe are now 19 days into September and the federal government still has not reported migrant encounter numbers at the border for August. Those numbers will put us well over 2 million encounters for FY\u201922 with a month left to go, and they don\u2019t account for 500,000+ known gotaways.\u201d
— Bill Melugin (@Bill Melugin) 1663593106

Just know it doesn’t have to be this way. States can take charge of their own destinies. The problem is that Ron DeSantis is the only GOP governor espousing the view that immigration should be driven by a cost-benefit analysis to the whole of the people, not just to special interests. Most Republicans, as much as they don’t like the chaos at the border, continue to espouse a belief in the corporate cartel’s monopoly on our country in their desire to bring in boundless cheap labor.

“But corporatism is not the same as free enterprise. Too many Republicans have viewed limited government to basically mean whatever is best for corporate America is how we want to do the economy. And my view is, obviously free enterprise is the best economic system,” said DeSantis at a recent National Conservatism Conference.

Focusing on policy both for illegal and legal immigration, DeSantis framed his thought process as follows: “So the issue is, how does immigration serve the people of the United States and the national interest?” he said, adding, “We’re not globalists who believe that foreigners have a right to come into our country whenever they want to.”

At least as it relates to limousine liberals, when they are mugged by reality they will come to their senses. Not so for the globalist “business community” which Republicans slavishly serve. No amount of border chaos will ever move them from their dogmatic support for endless cheap labor.

Democrats Want To Push Backdoor Immigration Overhaul And Call It ‘The Budget’

While the plan is still in drafting, it would forge a pathway to citizenship for various illegal immigrants, such as farm workers already residing in the U.S. and “Dreamers.”