Federal deportation policy is undergoing a “course correction” amid pushback from swing-voting Latinos, according to House Speaker Mike Johnson.
The GOP is building “a durable governing common sense majority for their foreseeable future,” Johnson told an NBC News interviewer, adding:
We got a little hiccup with some of the Hispanic and Latino voters, for certain, because some of the immigration enforcement was viewed to be overzealous … But here’s the good news, we’re in a course correction mode right now.
We’re going to have a new secretary on Homeland Security. Markwayne Mullen is going to do a great job in that role. I’m sure that he’ll be confirmed by the Senate. He’s a thoughtful guy. He’ll bring a thoughtful approach. [We] have somebody like Tom Homan who has 40 years of experience [in this] field and was decorated by Democrat presidents for his acumen and expertise. He went into Minneapolis and brought calm to the chaos there. That’s what you’re going to see.
Mullin, the incoming homeland security chief, opposes any migration amnesty, but has been ambivalent on his preferred deportation policy.
The “course correction” plan was also sketched by James Blair, the White House’s deputy chief of staff for legislation and political affairs:
The claimed “course correction” term is ambivalent about whether the federal government should only deport criminal migrants instead of all illegal migrants who are being used by companies to drive down wages for American families.
Many polls show that a clear majority of Americans favor deporting all illegal migrants — but also that a critical swath of swing-voters dislike the drama of street arrests. Many non-political voters are also moved by the myriad pro-migrant sob stories pumped out by sympathetic media sites.
“We want them all gone, James,” said a social media response to Blair’s tweet from X account @scalpsandall:
I want the drywallers who loiter around the gas station at 5 am and clog everything up because the cashier can’t understand them gone. I want the farmhand who works for $12/hr and no benefits because the taxpayer shells out for his kids’ education, health care, and housing. I want them all gone, violent or not. I want my country back.
The ambivalent “course correction” policy will rebuild support from Latinos who prioritize pocketbook issues, Speaker Johnson predicted:
I think that Hispanic and Latino voters who came to us came for a number of reasons. They were very animated about the open border and all the negative secondary effects that came from that, but they also concerned about the cost of living and the lack of jobs and all these other things that everyone’s concerned about.
… We’re anticipating extraordinary economic growth going into this year. In the midterm all boats will raise. Salaries and wages will go up. You have bigger tax refunds and bigger paychecks, and the average family $10,000 more money in the pocket because of Republican policies. I think these people will see we did what we said we’re going to do. We calm down the immigration enforcement concern. We uphold the rule of law, but we do it in a way that honors the dignity of everyone, and they’ll understand that our party is with them, cares about them. This is the permanent home where they should be okay.
But Trump’s all-illegal-migrant deportations are already improving the economy for ordinary Americans — especially for the millions of working-class Latinos who are seeing wage gains in a wide variety of jobs.
Federal and market data show that wages are up and housing costs are down. Inflation is declining, transport costs are shrinking, crime is dropping, and corporations are spending heavily to help Americans become more productive. The resulting prosperity will likely help to raise birth rates as husbands gain higher wages and wives gain greater confidence in the future.
One-in-five Texas companies have reduced their reliance on “workers from a different country,” according to a February 10-18 survey by the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. That 20 percent is up from just 2 percent in February 2024. Similarly, just 13 percent of Texas companies have increased their reliance on migrant workers in the last year, down from 41 percent in February 2024.
The reduced use of migrants is forcing up wages for construction workers, including Latino-Americans. “The construction industry is experiencing its most dramatic compensation transformation in decades,” said a December 2025 report by The Birmingham Group:
The current labor shortage is driving unprecedented wage increases across commercial projects. Construction firms report difficulty filling critical positions, with some markets experiencing job opening-to-candidate ratios exceeding 3:1. This imbalance has created a seller’s market for skilled workers, enabling significant salary negotiations and competitive pay packages.
Trump and his deputies are zig-zagging toward a new national strategy of economic growth via productivity and automation, instead of former President Joe Biden’s crude and lethal policy of Extraction Migration.
For Trump, the nation’s chief rival is no-migration China, which relies on smart and diligent citizens to expand its high-tech factories and laboratories. “We’re going to need robots … to make our economy run because we do not have enough people,” Trump told Breitbart News, adding:
We have to get efficient … we’ll probably add to [the existing workforce] through robotically — it’s going to be robotically … It’s going to be big. Then, somebody is going to have to make the robots. The whole thing, it feeds on itself … we’re going to streamline things. We need efficiency.
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