His racist language on this topic was so jarring in 2016, but – somehow – we’ve gotten used to it and Latino men nationally voted overwhelmingly for Trump in 2024. In states like Florida and Texas (58% and 55%, respectively), Trump won the Latino vote convincingly even though, historically, Latinas have been a core part of the Democratic constituency. So, the Democrats have gotten it wrong on the issue of immigration and Latinos know it.
After decades of doing nothing, it’s clear there’s motivation for a change, but the idea of deporting 10 million people or more sounds incredibly disruptive and there are whole industries – agriculture, restaurants, retirement communities and home health care – that could be decimated. So, what do we do?
When I was a young buck of 18, I spent a summer working for my dad’s racquetball partner, Dan Lungren, who, as a Republican, upset the Democratic Congressional incumbent in Long Beach, California. Dan was 32 when he was elected and I swept in with him as a Congressional Summer Intern and the one project he asked me to focus on the summer of 1979 was a reinstitution of a Bracero program, which had been incredibly controversial.
The Bracero Program is a historical U.S. initiative that has not been active since its conclusion in 1964. It was a bilateral agreement between the U.S. and Mexico that began in 1942 during World War II. The U.S. faced a labor shortage as Americans left for military service and industrial jobs. The program allowed temporary laborers to work in U.S. agriculture and other sectors. Bracero farm workers picked fruit in California, cotton in Arizona, sugar beets in Colorado, and vegetables in Texas’s Rio Grande Valley. Dan believed it served both the Mexican workers and employers well, but I tried to help him see that the uneven power dynamic led to the workers being exploited. Since 1964 when the Bracero program ended, we’ve seen a constant rise of undocumented immigration to fill labor demands.
The guest workers may have labored under a form of indentured servitude, but now – with the rise of anti-immigrant sentiment – they labor under the fear of detention camps and deportation. Part of the reason the Bracero program wound down in 1964 was because of the rise of labor unions and the fact that harvesting many crops had become mechanized.
But, we have yet to mechanize home health care and the U.S. faces a sobering future in the care economy. 40% of home health aides and Certified Nursing Assistants are foreign-born and we’re likely to see one million more of these positions needed in the next decade due to our aging population. Deporting millions of immigrants isn’t the solution as, given the historically low unemployment rate in the U.S. and the fact that many of the kinds of jobs that immigrants take aren’t work that American citizens are willing to do, we need to explore new options.
I was a little embarrassed nearly a half-century ago when I was exploring a reinstitution of a Bracero program on Capitol Hill as my liberal friends thought it was an awful idea because of some of the program’s historical abuses. But, between 1979 and 2025, we’ve seen an American revolution in terms of anti-immigrant sentiment while seeing no meaningful immigration reform, a historically low unemployment rate, and an aging population that needs care.
And, a topic that’s particularly salient with conservatives, the total fertility rate (TFR), representing the average number of children a woman is expected to have over her lifetime, is worrisome. A TFR of 2.1 is generally considered the replacement level, meaning each generation can replace itself without population decline. As of 2023, the United States’ TFR has declined to 1.62, marking the lowest rate ever recorded in the country. This figure is significantly below the replacement level, indicating potential long-term implications for population growth and demographic composition. On average, immigrants have a much higher birth rate; for Mexican-American women, the rate is 20% higher than the general population.
Something’s got to give. Don’t be surprised by Trump adjusting his expensive, disruptive deportation plans to transform unauthorized immigrants into legally authorized workers through some kind of aggressively-enforced means that also requires that these workers deport themselves for periods of time so they don’t get too comfortable in the U.S.. By doing this, Trump can declare an immigration victory while also not pissing off employers.
-Chip