President-elect Donald Trump will revive the Title 42 border barrier in his first days back on the job, according to a January 9 report in Axios.
On Wednesday night, according to Axios, “[GOP] Senators were given previews of some of what they were told would be 100 executive orders, two sources who were in the room told Axios.”
Trump was accompanied by his top advisers, including Stephen Miller, the migration czar.
The pending executive orders take time to implement and may face lawsuits once they are announced, but they will include “Building the border wall, constructing soft-sided facilities to hold migrants and implementing other asylum restrictions,” Axios reported.
For example, Trump needs money to finish the wall and to build detention centers for illegal migrants — and is planning to get those funds via a massive, fast-track reconciliation bill early in 2025.
The Title 42 legal barrier would make the existing but incomplete border wall far more effective by allowing the border patrol to send all caught migrants back into Mexico.
The rule must be triggered by health officials, such as the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). But it will take time for the Senate to approve a CDC leader who can restart the legal barrier — and that barrier may be blocked by lawsuits claiming there is no medical rationale.
The executive actions are very visible displays of Trump’s promise to block new southern migration and to deport the huge population of illegal migrants.
However, Trump’s business allies will try to keep many quick fixes off the list of executive orders.
Those quick fixes include a crackdown on airport migrants who use B-1/B-2 visitor visas to enter the United States for illegal work, and he could issue a mandate to the IRS to check tax records for corporate hiring of illegal migrants. Trump also could order his deputies to stop giving work permits to the spouses of H-1B migrants, and he could freeze the award of work permits and green cards to migrants who were improperly welcomed by President Joe Biden’s pro-migration officials.
For example, Elon Musk strongly opposes any revival of Trump’s bipartisan 2020 reforms to the H-1B white-collar migration inflow. In general, the huge but little-known white-collar migration programs are far more lucrative for investors and CEOs than the visible inflow of illegal migrants.
However, Trump can fend off the donor pressure by pointing to the rising public demands for fixes to Biden’s migration.
“Forty-seven percent of the public name migration as a priority for the government to work on … up from 35 percent who said the same in December 2023,” the Associated Press (AP) reported on January 7.
A January 5-8 survey by YouGov showed a 34 percent plurality believes legal migration makes the nation “worse off,” and a 41 percent plurality favor cuts or ending legal migration. Just 17 percent favor additional legal migration.
Sixty-one percent of Trump’s voters — and 38 percent of independents — favor cutting or ending legal immigration, said YouGov.
Forty percent of GOP voters favor a reduction or cut-off of H-IB migrants into white-collar jobs, said YouGov. However, YouGov skewed the question by describing the mid-skilled H-1Bs as having “specialized skills” as if American graduates do not have those skills.
But the political tide is moving against the H-1 sector, partly because American professionals are increasingly speaking out against the harm caused by the investor-imposed H-1B workforce:
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