ESSAY: 1/ They Don't Jail CEOs: Illegal Immigration Starts and Ends with Criminal Employers Illegal immigrants come for jobs. The root of the problem is the demand from criminal employers. But, every year this is neglected. As one commenter said “they don’t put CEOs in jail.”

3/ The best data on this is done by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University sourced from the US Department of Justice (DOJ). According to its 30 May 2019 report, “since criminal penalties for employers were first enacted by Congress in 1986, few employers have ever been prosecuted under these provisions (8 USC 1324a). Prosecutions have rarely climbed above 15 annually.” For 2019, Pew estimated 10.2 million illegal immigrants inside the US. There’s no way a population in the millions is supported by an amount of employers in the dozens. There are many more employers in the shadows that are able to slide the through the cracks. Of those few that are prosecuted, fewer are convicted to more than token punishment. Even under hyper-restrictionist Trump’s first term, TRAC found “prosecutions of employers since President Trump assumed office roughly parallel the number that occurred during all but the first year of the Obama Administration.” ryanresearch.substack.com/p/th...…

4/ Since TRAC’s data stops in 2019, another measurement that extended more recently was the Corporate Prosecution Registry (a joint project of University of Virginia School of Law and Duke University School of Law) which includes prosecutions of corporations for immigration crimes. Since 1998, only 220 corporations have been prosecuted for immigration crimes. An average of about 8 per year. While these numbers are small, it is still notable that they’ve trended further down in both Trump and Biden administrations. Most recently, in 2025, just one corporation was prosecuted. Full article: ryanresearch.substack.com/p/th...…

5/ WORST OF BOTH WORLDS The reality is that, despite flashy raids, expensive fines, or periodic upticks in deportations, there has never been a serious policy agenda to specifically reckon with criminal employers in a sufficient way to shut off the demand for illegal immigration. Critics, as far back as 2005, were warning that this paradigm is not an “effective deterrent.” The illegal immigrant population was never substantially reduced. Today, the illegal immigrant population sits above 14 million. It is self-evident that whatever “crackdowns” that occurred across multiple administrations were totally irrelevant. Employers are not deterred from hiring. Illegal immigrants still keep coming despite the risks. The only tangible effects are that criminal employers benefit from increased leverage over their illegal workers and political pressure mounts for amnesty. Full article: ryanresearch.substack.com/p/th...…

9/ TRUMP DOES BUSH'S AMNESTY TWO-STEP Returning to today, Trump has displayed much more aggression on immigration enforcement. The beefing up and unleashing of ICE has certainly left an impression on the public. However, Trump’s first term followed the previous presidential pattern of protecting criminal employers, as shown by the data, and there’s reason to believe his second term won’t be much different. In the summer of 2025, Trump said, employers of illegal immigrants “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…This is not good. We must protect [them]…Changes are coming!” The next day a senior ICE official paused raids on criminal employers of illegal immigrants. Despite the viral controversy generated by Trump’s chosen tactics, he again seems to let criminal employers off the hook and thus not attack the cause of the illegal immigration problem at its source. It's not a stretch to see the parallels between Bush’s “turn up the pain” ICE raids and Trump’s current iterations. The comparison in form could also pertain to its substance. Full article: ryanresearch.substack.com/p/th...…

10/ TRUMP LITERALLY SAYS HE WANTS AMNESTY A few weeks ago, the New York Times reported, “when asked if he would support a plan that includes a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, Mr. Trump said ‘possibly, possibly.’ He said so-called Dreamers, who were brought to the United States as children, should feel ‘safe’ in the country and that he would ‘love to be able to do something for them…I’d love to have a comprehensive immigration policy. Something that really worked. It’s about time for the country.” On 23 May 2025, Trump made similar comments: “We’re actually going to be doing something in the near future that’s going to make it possible for people to come into this country and come in and, you know, have a road toward citizenship, and I think it will be very exciting, but it’s too soon to speak of.” Similar statements were reported by Axios on 15 April 2025, where Trump alluded to a “path to legal status” for illegal immigrants. This isn’t exactly that new. In Trump’s first term, he promoted a proposal to provide a “pathway to citizenship” for 1.8 million illegal immigrants which some conservatives called “amnesty” such as Breitbart News. In response to the push back, Trump said, “We’re going to morph into it…It’s going to happen, at some point in the future, over a period of 10 to 12 years.” Mitch McConnell and a spokesman for Paul Ryan both endorsed Trump’s proposal. ⁠Coincidentally, Trump’s timeline lined up with his current second term. Trump just told the New York Times his plans for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA, would be updated in about a year. Full article: ryanresearch.substack.com/p/th...…

14/ Whether it be Kobach’s technocratic solution or a more stern “jail the CEOs” agenda, it’s clear that current policy on illegal immigration enforcement is both unnecessary and ineffective. It’s also clear that Trump will announce his next amnesty proposal before his second term is finished (likely with the help of Gang of Eight Rubio) and invalidate the premise of why he was elected as a tough on the border candidate in the first place. If only Nixon could go to China, perhaps, only Trump can pass amnesty. Full article: ryanresearch.substack.com/p/th...…

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