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 The administration reversed course and rescinded the exemptions.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.

Build back better? Then stop outsourcing our agricultural soul



Drive through our country’s heartland — past golden fields, cattle-speckled hills, and humming dairies — and you’ll see the soul of America at work. But look closer, and a bitter truth emerges: The hands harvesting our crops and milking our cows are too often foreign-born laborers here illegally or on a costly visa program.

In my state, the Idaho Dairymen’s Association admits a staggering 70% or more of dairy workers are using phony documents — illegal labor propping up Idaho’s top commodity and our country’s No. 3 milk-producing state.

Today, we’re fed a line that Americans have gone lazy, addicted to cubicles or city lights. Nonsense.

We’re told Americans won’t do these jobs. Really? From the 1880s through the 1940s, Americans built these very industries. So what changed? It’s not the workers. It’s the bosses who stopped believing in them.

American grit built our farms

Idaho’s dairies, ranches, and construction sites can thrive with American grit — if employers stop making excuses and start making offers.

Go back to the late 19th century, when Idaho’s Snake River Valley was raw desert. Local settlers — farmers, laborers, families — dug canals, built dams, and turned dust into fields of potatoes and alfalfa, as historian Mark Fiege shows in his 1999 book “Irrigated Eden.” These weren’t hired foreigners; they were Americans, mostly Western settlers, whose sweat and cooperation built an agricultural empire through the Depression and wartime into the 1940s.

Those were hard years. Yet, these people showed up, sleeves rolled, ready to work. They weren’t too soft for the sun on their necks or the ache of a long day.

Employers abandoned American workers

Today, we’re fed a line that Americans have gone lazy, addicted to cubicles or city lights. Nonsense. Some yes, but fewer than imagined. The problem isn’t our people; it’s an industry that’s forgotten how to call them home.

Don’t tell me Americans won’t work. Plenty of us still hunger for the kind of labor that smells of earth and steel — jobs that build calluses and communities. Idaho’s fields offer purpose: the roar of a tractor, the precision of robotic milkers, the quiet triumph of a harvest under wide skies.

Vice President JD Vance nailed it when he sarcastically gave in to the notion that deporting tens of millions of illegal aliens will send us back to 1960 — when homes apparently couldn’t be built without illegal labor. Absurd! The same goes for agriculture.

RELATED: Glyphosate 101: What you need to know about America’s most popular pesticide

  Anton Skripachev via iStock/Getty Images

These aren’t dead-end gigs; they’re the backbone of our nation. But employers need to stop acting like foreign workers are the only option. If you are one of these employers who show up to the town parade waving Old Glory, singing Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the U.S.A.” — if you claim to be America First — then hire Americans first. Anything less is just talk.

Illegal workers cost more

Here’s where the elites squirm. As state Rep. Stephanie Mickelsen (R-Idaho) noted during a House debate, Idaho employers often admit that foreign labor isn’t even cheaper. Visas, travel, lodging, meals, and transportation add up — often rivaling what an American might earn in salary and benefits. Yet, they claim no amount of money will lure American workers.

Have they tried? Really tried? Take those bloated costs — every dime spent on foreign logistics — and pour them into wages, health plans, or housing for locals. Build training programs to teach kids how to run today’s high-tech rigs. If tech giants can sell college grads on coding in Silicon Valley, Idaho’s dairies can sell our youth on feeding America.

It’s not rocket science. It’s will.

The same elites twist unemployment numbers to prop up their narrative. They cite low jobless rates to argue that no one’s left to hire. But the Bureau of Labor Statistics excludes a key group: able-bodied men ages 25 to 54 who’ve dropped out of the workforce entirely. They’re not working, not looking, and not counted. That forgotten group alone includes an estimated seven million Americans.

Make American farming great again

Picture this: billboards across Idaho showing a young farmer steering a drone-guided planter, grinning like he owns the future. Community colleges partnering with ranchers to train veterans and high schoolers. County fairs where dairies hand out scholarships — not just milk samples. That’s not fantasy. That’s strategy. Businesses that want loyalty don’t wait for workers to show up — they go find them.

Right now, 70% of dairy workers rely on falsified papers. That’s not a workforce. It’s a failure of imagination. Legal, local labor builds trust, strengthens communities, and proves we take sovereignty seriously.

Idaho can lead the way. America’s watching.

Employers, quit hiding behind old excuses. Redirect your budgets, roll out campaigns, and watch Americans answer the call. Lawmakers, reduce or eliminate regulations that incentivize foreign labor.

Neighbors, cheer these jobs as the honorable work they are. Picture our fields alive with Americans, dairies humming with citizens who know this land as home.

That’s not just Idaho’s future, it’s America’s. We’ve done it before. We can do it again. All it takes is the guts to try.

One bad order could undermine Trump’s strongest issue



Thank God President Trump walked back his misguided order to grant de facto amnesty to illegal alien farm workers. Now he needs to kill the policy for good.

Trump won in 2016 — and again in 2024 — on two core promises: lower the cost of living and stop the third-world invasion of the United States. Since he shows no interest in cutting deficits in a way that might restore pre-COVID price levels, immigration remains the battlefield that will define his presidency. And unless he corrects course, he risks failure on that front too.

No more half measures or donor-driven compromises. No more weakness. Only total war on the policies, programs, and pipelines that keep America under siege.

To his credit, Trump moved quickly to shut off the surge at the southern border during his first week in office. But he did the same in 2017, and the long-term results didn’t last. A future Democrat administration will simply escalate. If Biden brought in 10 million, the next one will aim for 20 million.

Temporary border control and modest deportation numbers won’t solve the crisis. Fewer than a million removals over a four-year term won’t reverse the demographic or economic damage — especially while legal immigration, foreign student visas, and guest worker programs continue at record highs.

Unforced errors

Trump must go beyond symbolic border enforcement. That means neutralizing judicial interference through must-pass legislation — or ignoring illegitimate court rulings outright. He should authorize maritime deportations using ships, suspend most of the 1.5 million foreign student visas — especially from China and Islamic countries — and permanently empower states to enforce immigration law.

Instead, Trump recently unveiled a set of policies that undermine those very goals.

He announced continued access for Chinese nationals to U.S. universities — just as a spy ring was uncovered at the University of Michigan. He expanded his support for white-collar visas for Indian nationals and revived his “golden visa” scheme, which allows wealthy Chinese Communist Party elites to buy their way into U.S. citizenship.

Worst of all, Trump issued an order halting removals of illegal aliens working in farming and hospitality. He later reversed course — but the damage was done.

 

In pushing for more illegal labor, Trump handed leftists a talking point they had already lost. He lent moral weight to one of their core claims: that America needs illegal immigrants to do the “jobs Americans won’t do.” That argument, long peddled by George W. Bush, John McCain, and the donor-class GOP, was the very reason millions turned to Trump in the first place.

Ten years after calling for a moratorium on illegal immigration and a drastic cut to legal migration, Trump now echoes the talking points he once dismantled. If he keeps this up, he won’t just squander his mandate — he’ll cement the invasion he was elected to stop.

Five points Trump should heed

  1. You can’t re-onshore manufacturing and offshore the workforce. Trump champions tariffs to bring jobs home — but what good is that if those jobs go to foreign nationals here illegally? Patriotism means putting Americans to work on American soil — not just moving the factory.
  2. This isn’t about labor shortages. It’s about labor suppression. Trump wants more white-collar visas even as tech jobs disappear. He supports handing green cards to foreign students. This isn’t policy — it’s donor-class economics wrapped in populist branding.
  3. You can’t modernize with AI while subsidizing human labor. Trump wants to “win the AI arms race” with China. Great. Start by automating farm work instead of importing cartel-affiliated field hands. Cheap labor delays innovation — and the status quo keeps us dependent.
  4. The welfare state distorts the labor market. Trump refuses to shrink entitlements and yet complains that Americans won’t work. Maybe that’s true — but the welfare state is the push, and illegal labor is the pull. Cut both, and you raise wages and get people off the couch.
  5. Illegal labor invites cartel exploitation. Agricultural guest labor provides the perfect cover. In 2019, an exposé by the Louisville Courier Journal revealed how Mexican farm workers served as mules for the Jalisco New Generation cartel. One man, Ciro Macias Martinez, groomed horses by day at Calumet Farm — and ran a $30 million drug ring by night.

The cash-based, transient, and legally vulnerable workforce offers a logistical gold mine for transnational criminal organizations. Cartels use job scams to traffic humans, set up safe houses, and move product. Rural communities lack the law enforcement resources to push back. The result: strategic sanctuary zones for America's most dangerous enemies.

RELATED: Trump shrugs at immigration law — here’s what he should have said

  Photo by Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images

When Trump says these workers are “hardworking” and “not criminals,” he ignores the obvious fact that every illegal alien is a criminal. Amnesty for farm workers isn’t just a policy mistake — it’s an operational gift to America’s foreign adversaries.

No room for ambiguity

Trump knows immigration is his strongest issue. The polls prove it. But if he wavers, even slightly, on mass deportations or illegal labor, he opens the door for his political enemies to sow doubt — and for cartel operatives to sow chaos.

He reversed the farm worker carve-out. Now he must bury it. Then, he needs to go farther. No more half measures. No more donor-driven compromises. No more weakness. Only total war on the policies, programs, and pipelines that keep America under siege.

His base expects it. The country needs it. The future depends on it.

Illegal labor isn’t farming’s future. It’s Big Ag’s crutch.



I’m a strong supporter of President Trump. I respect his drive to secure our borders, restore national sovereignty, and bring real vitality back to the American economy.

But the Department of Homeland Security’s latest move — limiting workplace enforcement and putting a stop to Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids on agricultural employers — cuts against the very heart of the America First agenda. It protects the same corporate giants that are bleeding rural communities dry.

If DHS and USDA want to fix agriculture, they need to stop hiding behind the word ‘farmer’ when they’re really talking about corporate middlemen.

Let’s not kid ourselves: This policy isn’t about helping “farmers.” It’s a gift to foreign-owned industrial agriculture giants like JBS and other multinationals that built their business models on cheap labor, government handouts, and total control over every link in the supply chain.

These are the corporations responsible for wiping out independent family farms across the country.

The Biden administration let Big Ag off the hook. Is Trump really about to follow suit?

Hiring legally and thriving

You don’t need to hire illegal workers to run a successful farm or ranch. In fact, some of the best in the business don’t.

Look at White Oak Pastures in Bluffton, Georgia. Or Polyface Farm in Swoope, Virginia. Or Meriwether Farms out in Wyoming. These aren’t fantasy models. They’re real, thriving operations built on legal labor, strong local roots, and, when needed, carefully managed visa programs.

They don’t rely on mass illegal labor. They don’t need to.

What they do is create real jobs. They pay honest wages. They bring life back to rural towns.

Will Harris is the biggest employer in Bluffton — not because he cuts corners on labor, but because he heals the land, strengthens his community, and delivers food independence.

This is what Trump’s golden age of American farming should look like: self-reliance, real prosperity, and pride in a job well done.

A free pass for Big Ag

With this new policy, DHS basically gave corporate amnesty to the likes of Tyson, Smithfield, JBS, Cargill — you name it. These are companies that depend on cheap, illegal labor to keep their bloated, centralized model afloat.

We’ve been down this road before. Remember Ronald Reagan’s 1986 amnesty? Legalization now, enforcement later — except “later” never came.

And now, we’re repeating the same mistake.

This policy protects a broken system built on:

  • Top-down corporate control
  • Massive consolidation
  • Debt traps and labor abuse
  • De facto open borders
  • Slave-wage labor
  • Legal loopholes for billion-dollar companies

What we’re left with is what journalist Christopher Leonard called “chickenization” — a corporate takeover of the food system that treats farmers like serfs and workers like machines.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s loyalty to these monopolies has already hollowed out towns, forced families off their land, and turned our food supply into a global pipeline where cartel-linked produce replaces homegrown independence.

This doesn’t serve America. It serves the bottom lines of a few mega-firms that like open borders and look the other way on enforcement.

And whether it admits it or not, this is how the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals get implemented — quietly, through broken farms, outsourced jobs, and illegal hires.

RELATED: Trump orders ICE to ramp up deportations in Dem-controlled cities following MAGA backlash over selective pause on raids


  Photo by Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images

This isn’t just about agriculture. It’s about national security.

A nation that can’t feed itself without breaking its own laws isn’t sovereign. And one that lets multinationals run roughshod over the heartland while outsourcing production to places run by cartels is heading for trouble.

We can do better

If DHS and USDA want to fix agriculture, they need to stop hiding behind the word “farmer” when they’re really talking about corporate middlemen.

Trump has a chance to change course — one that truly puts Americans first. That means backing the producers who follow the law, hiring citizens or legal workers, and building food systems that support independence, not dependence.

Independent farmers and ranchers are ready to help. They’ve already shown what works: strong property rights, legal labor, fair water access, and a commitment to community.

This isn’t some policy wish list. It’s already happening.

And it’s winning.

Let’s not give our food, our land, or our future back to the monopolies that wrecked the past.

‘Who’ll pick apples?’ The Democrats’ degrading push for cheap labor



Who will pick our apples, build our homes, and mow our lawns if not immigrants? Liberal politicians frequently ask this question, and the mainstream media repeats it. The goal is to disarm anyone questioning the illegal immigration crisis at the southern border.

Never mind the elitist or racist undertones, to say nothing of any long-term concerns about demographic, cultural, political, or social changes all for the short-term benefit of cheap labor. The underlying message is that these jobs, filled by immigrants, are beneath American citizens.

Someone should fix America and what ails us — and not in some superficial, temporary worker kind of way.

Former President Bill Clinton and U.S. Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) have both recently said the quiet part out loud, but this ideology trickles down to Democratic voters. It’s reflected in people like my once-favorite journalism teacher, who shared a meme saying, “The immigrants ruining your life are Rupert Murdoch, Elon Musk, and Peter Thiel, not the apple picker ...”

It’s even in my own family. My mother, who moved to Houston from Cleveland, now has a man named Leo mow her grass for $25.

“I could never mow your lawn for that here,” I tell her, speaking from Ohio, where I own a landscaping company with employees on a real payroll with real payroll taxes.

But Mom thinks it is great. Cheap labor keeps her costs down. Our family wants my mother to move back to Ohio. I know she is thinking about it. She sends me links from Zillow of houses she looked at that might be more up my alley.

“I could never afford the house I have here in Ohio,” she says. “It has granite counter tops.”

Then she says something that makes me sad and makes me pause. “I couldn’t afford the house on Concord.”

That’s the house where I grew up and the one my parents, now divorced, sold for under $150,000 in the early 2000s. Houses on the same street now regularly sell for $300,000.

In the long term, my mother has less buying power than she did before, but Leo mows her lawn for practically nothing.

Hiring was bad prior to COVID — telling people to stay home and collect checks sent it into overdrive. In early spring of last year, when I pull up a list of past employees in our database we might rehire, I was stunned by the number who have since died from the heroin and opiate epidemic in the more than 15 years we’ve been in business.

And it just seems like someone should fix America and what ails us — and not in some superficial, temporary worker kind of way.

The birth dearth

Maybe it is the drug epidemic, the destruction of the nuclear family, the nearly 1 million abortions America now performs annually, the cost of living, or the constant messaging that babies are a burden and a nuisance that is hammered into school-age children — especially girls — but Americans are not having babies like they used to.

Democrats will even tell us that Americans are not having enough babies to replace our current population, and we need mass immigration to replace them and replenish the tax base.

While campaigning for Kamala Harris, Bill Clinton suggested Georgia college student Laken Riley might still be alive if her killer had been properly vetted — something that the Biden-Harris administration neglected to do.

Well If they’d all been properly vetted that probably wouldn’t have happened,” Clinton said regarding Riley’s murder before suggesting we still need immigration. “But if they are properly vetted and that doesn’t happen. ... And America is not having enough babies to keep our population up, so we need immigrants that have been vetted to do work.”

Clinton’s recent campaigning sounds a lot like “replacement theory” — the native population needs to be replenished and replaced by foreigners — although Wikipedia assures me that this is a “far-right conspiracy theory.” That’s a relief!

Jobs done with your bare hands offer even greater dignity than those in fields like insurance, pharmaceuticals, law, mortgage brokering, or the permanent bureaucracy.

Republican vice-presidential candidate JD Vance sat down recently with New York Times reporter Lulu Garcia-Navarro to discuss the immigration crisis.. Garcia-Navarro seemed to bristle at the idea that American citizens could fill the jobs needed in the housing sector.

“You could absolutely re-engage American workers,” Vance said while alluding to re-engaging those who have willingly checked out of the workplace or those struggling with mental health or addiction.

“To work in construction?” Garcia-Navarro replied.

“Of course you could. ... This is one of the really deranged things that I think illegal immigration does to our society is that it gets us into the mindset of saying that we can only build houses with illegal immigrants — when we have 7 million, just men, who have completely dropped out of the labor force,” Vance said.

“People say, well, Americans won’t do those jobs. Americans won’t do those jobs for below-the-table wages. They won’t do those jobs for non-living wages,” Vance continued. “We cannot have an entire business community that is giving up on American workers and then importing millions of illegal laborers. That is what we have thanks to Kamala Harris’ border policy.”

Dignity in work

I have heard different versions of the question of who will perform the work elitist leftists deem unclean or undesirable repeated often to defend mass immigration and the hiring of illegal immigrant workers. It is often coupled with the implication that Americans will not do the jobs they are unable to perform from the comfort of their home office and Zoom — farming, construction, or landscaping.

“Every MAGA I’ve ever seen complain about immigrants taking American jobs would never do this,” a viral tweet reads as the workers in the video harvest what appears to be broccoli.

It is somewhat laughable when I hear it, largely because I would put preparing and planting a new lawn from start to finish or building a paver patio — something we have done in the last few weeks with American employees — right up there with roofing, concrete, and indeed farming broccoli as extremely difficult and physically taxing jobs.

Work has inherent dignity — all work does. One could argue that jobs done with your bare hands offer even greater dignity than those in fields like insurance, pharmaceuticals, law, mortgage brokering, or the permanent bureaucracy.

And yet you will hear various demeaning, overtly racist or elitist iterations from liberals to the question of who will pick our produce, build our homes or mow our lawns if we do not allow for illegal immigration? And who will do that cheaply?

What Americans will and won’t do

Jerry Nadler in January provided one the most transparent examples, saying American produce would rot in the fields if it were not for illegal immigrants.

We need immigrants in this country — forget the fact that our vegetables would rot in the ground if they weren’t being picked by many immigrants, many illegal immigrants,” the New York congressman said. “The fact is that the birth rate in this country is way below replacement level, which means our population is going to start shrinking. And the ratio of people on Social Security and Medicare is going to increase relative to the number of people supporting them.”

I have wondered what it would look like if I ran my business like that.

Many of my peers or friends in the industry have done just that — as hiring foreign workers is essentially the business model throughout the “green industry” and commonplace at nurseries or with landscaping contractors.

On a cold and rainy March morning in Ohio this spring, I called a friend who also owns a landscaping company to see how he was handling the start of busy season.

“I am dropping off a load of plants,” he said.

I was shocked because at the time, I was wondering if the rain coming down might turn into snow.

“Our guys would quit,” I said, half joking, half not.

His guys were the eight Hondurans he was dropping off plants to.

They are all here legally through the H-2B program for temporary workers.

He houses them on his property — he is required to provide them with housing — and charges them rent. There was a season when he rented them a camper. This year he bought them a house.

If you zoom out — or took a drone image — of the modern business with a staff comprised of foreign workers toiling in the fields, doing the jobs deemed unworthy while living in a camper or a house out back, it must in some ways resemble a reimagining of the Southern plantation.

Maybe we should not live like that, and that business model should not be the goal. Maybe we should fix what ails us here.