Trump: ‘No Amnesty’ — But …

His lips say no no no, but his fiscal plans say … well, YMMV. 

After yesterday’s Charlie Kirk clip went viral, the White House must have gotten an earful from MAGA World about the potential for a mass amnesty rather than the continued deportation of criminal illegal aliens. Trump had a response to it during today’s open Cabinet meeting, and that answer was … not entirely clear:

.@POTUS: “There’s NO AMNESTY.” pic.twitter.com/QsHiHlcWml

— Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) July 8, 2025

REPORTER: On immigration—the Secretary of Agriculture said this morning that undocumented workers would not be covered by any amnesty for working on farms. You had said that the ICE folks won’t go after those folks on farms. So there’s no amnesty?

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: What we’re doing is we’re getting rid of criminals. But we are doing a work program. Do you want to explain that?

AGRICULTURE SECRETARY BROOKE ROLLINS: Yeah. This morning we talked about—of course, this is the top of my question—this morning we talked about protecting the farmers and the farmland. But obviously, this president’s vision of no amnesty and mass deportation continues—But in a strategic way, and ensuring that our farmers have the labor that they need. 

Secretary Chavez-DeRemer has been a leader on this. Obviously, this comes out of the Labor Department, but it’s about moving toward automation, ensuring that our farmers have that workforce, and moving toward an American workforce. So, all of the above—

DONALD TRUMP: We’re going to give the farmers the people they need. But we’re not talking amnesty.

This is precisely what I predicted yesterday — no amnesty per se, but a work program that legalizes cheaper labor in the short run. However, that has its own issues, and sequencing matters a great deal as to whether this works as a new and well-regulated bracero program or just becomes a de facto amnesty. 

To put it simply: You can’t start a new bracero program while a large number of illegal aliens still reside in the US. Practically speaking, it would be difficult nigh unto impossible to manage guest workers on any significant scale while dealing with a large population of illegal workers at the same time. The cost of enforcement would become astronomical, and so many crossover mistakes would take place that the political will for enforcement could quickly dissipate. 

To make a bracero program work, we would first need to expel nearly all of those working illegally now — not just the “criminals,” as Trump says, but everyone, or close enough to it, as well as complete border security in the long term. The only way that a bracero program can succeed is if it has the monopoly on cheap labor, so that the cost and wage impacts can be carefully calibrated. Layering a bracero program onto a large population of illegal-alien labor only creates more downward pressure on wages, and the same businesses undercutting legal workers with illegal labor now will still use even cheaper black-market labor over the legal bracero workers.  

The only alternative to mass deportations and temporary labor shortages in the transition would be to force all illegals here to enter the legal bracero program and offer them benefits to self-identify. The benefits would have to be worth the risk involved, so that would probably include some sort of broader normalization of status in the US to encourage them to eliminate black-market labor. And that looks suspiciously like amnesty to me, and I suspect I would not be alone in that regard.

Promoting automation in the ag sector is a far better long-term solution, and many of those tasks are already automated. However, it sounds as though Trump and Rollins want a shorter-term bracero program to fill the gap, and that again creates the short-term issues described above. 

We have not yet seen any firm proposals, of course, so we can wait before leaping to firm conclusions. However, given that we are still very early in the deportation process, the fact that this is coming up at all now is worth some curiosity, at least, if not concern.