> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.sweatyspice.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # The Right Way Closed While You Were Still Talking About It - URL: https://www.sweatyspice.com/the-right-way-closed-while-you-were-still-talking-about-it/ - Published: 2026-09-14T15:00:11.000Z - Updated: 2026-09-14T15:00:10.000Z - Description: Fourteen months ago I argued the "right way" barely exists. Since then they fired a quarter of the immigration judges, deleted legal status for a million people who followed every rule, and still won't touch an employer. - Author: Geoff Anderson - Tags: Political Musing, The Long Arc, a journey of political weight > *Fourteen months ago I wrote that asylum seekers were following the rules and that employers, not migrants, drive undocumented labor. Since then the government fired a quarter of its immigration judges, deleted the legal status of a million people who had done everything correctly, and still will not touch a single employer.* On June 25th of this year, six justices decided that when the Secretary of Homeland Security cancels the legal status of several hundred thousand people, no federal court is permitted to ask why. That is the holding in *Mullin v. Doe*. Not that the terminations were lawful. Not that Haiti is safe, or that Syria is safe, which nobody outside the Federal Register believes. The holding is that the question is unreviewable. There is no forum. Thirty-two days later, on July 27th, the terminations took effect. I want you to hold that date next to a sentence you have heard nine hundred times: *I just want them to come here the right way.* [Fourteen months ago](https://www.sweatyspice.com/immigration-it-is-not-as-simple-as/) I wrote a piece arguing three things: - That the asylum seekers everyone was angry about were, in fact, using the legal process exactly as written. - That the "line" people wanted immigrants to wait in does not meaningfully exist for most of them. - And that the actual engine of undocumented labor in this country is not the migrant but the guy signing the checks, who has never faced a consequence worth the name. I still stand behind all three. What has changed is that every one of them has now been tested in public, and the results are *far* worse than I argued. --- ### The line, walked *A worked example, because the flowchart was never readable anyway.* In the original piece I linked a Reason Magazine [flowchart](https://reason.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/a87d1550853898a9b306ef458f116079.pdf?ref=sweatyspice.com) of the legal immigration system and told you to go look at it on a real monitor. That was a cop-out. Let me do it properly with one person. Take a 34-year-old bricklayer from Guatemala. No U.S. citizen relatives. High school education. Good at his trade, twenty years of it. He has heard that he should come the right way. Walk him through the doors. **Family-based.** Requires a qualifying relative who is a citizen or permanent resident to petition for him. He does not have one. Door closed, and it was never open. **Employment-based.** Requires an employer willing to sponsor, run a labor certification, and wait. For unskilled labor the relevant category caps out at ten thousand visas a year worldwide, against a per-country ceiling of seven percent. The math on that is not a wait. It is a lifetime. **Diversity lottery.** Excludes nationals of countries that have sent large numbers of immigrants in recent years. That exclusion list is precisely the countries people are angry about. Door closed by *design*. **Asylum.** Requires persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or membership in a particular social group. Being poor is not a protected ground. Neither is generalized violence, or a gang taxing your business, or the fact that your country's institutions have collapsed. **Temporary work visas.** H-2A and H-2B exist, they are capped, they are tied to a specific employer, and they lead exactly *nowhere*. You cannot ladder from them to residency. They are at best a *rental agreement*. That is it, the whole board. For our bricklayer there is **no** right way. Not a slow way, not a hard way, not an expensive way. There is no door with his name on it and there has not been one since 1965. So when a focus group participant says he wants people to come the right way, he is not lying, and he is not being cynical. He is describing a procedure he believes exists because nobody who talks to him for a living has ever told him it doesn't. > He is not lying. He is describing a procedure he believes exists because nobody who talks to him for a living has ever told him it doesn't. --- ### The one lever, and the thirty-five people willing to pull it *The demand side, tested twice, in public, on video.* My argument in 2025 was that if Congress genuinely wanted fewer undocumented workers, the fix was trivial. Stop chasing the supply. Prosecute the demand. Put a few restaurant owners, framing contractors, and poultry plant executives in federal custody and the hiring stops inside a quarter. Cheap labor is a hell of a drug, and you do not treat addiction by arresting the product. The counter I got was that this is a fantasy, that no administration would ever do it. Correctamundo. Here is the evidence. Look at the last time worksite enforcement was ramped up hard. In fiscal 2018, ICE hit ten-year highs for worksite audits and criminal charges. USA TODAY pulled the breakdown: six hundred sixty-six workers criminally charged against one hundred thirteen members of management, and federal indictments and convictions of managers hit a ten-year low for the agency. The raids were real. They just pointed downward. Now look at June of last year. After executives complained about losing staff, Trump posted that farms and hotels were being taken very good, long time workers, and [ICE guidance went out pausing worksite operations](https://www.epi.org/policywatch/trump-decides-to-pause-ice-raids-in-agriculture-meatpacking-and-hospitality-then-quickly-reverses-course/?ref=sweatyspice.com) in agriculture, meatpacking, restaurants, and hotels. Then Stephen Miller got hold of it and [the whole thing reversed inside a week](https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/trump-backtracks-ice-arrests-farmers-hotel-workers-rcna213469?ref=sweatyspice.com), reportedly because field offices could not hit the daily arrest quota without the exempted industries. This July, CNN reported the administration [planning another worksite escalation](https://abc17news.com/politics/national-politics/cnn-us-politics/2026/07/02/exclusive-trump-administration-plans-to-boost-worksite-immigration-enforcement-after-increase-in-criminal-probes/?ref=sweatyspice.com) off the back of increased criminal probes. Watch what that sequence actually shows. The employer lobby walked into the Oval Office, got what it wanted, and lost anyway, because the number that mattered was the arrest quota. And the arrests still come out of the break room, not the front office. Then there is the cleanest test of all. There is a bill in the House right now, the [Dignity Act](https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/4393?ref=sweatyspice.com), sponsored by a Republican, María Elvira Salazar of Florida. It pairs earned legal status for long-resident undocumented people with mandatory E-Verify. That second half is the exact lever I proposed. Nationwide, enforceable, on the *employers*. As of [this past January it had thirty-five members of Congress behind it](https://salazar.house.gov/media/press-releases/dignity-act-secures-35-cosponsors-bipartisan-support-accelerates?ref=sweatyspice.com). Thirty-five. In a House of four hundred thirty-five, under unified Republican control, during the most intense immigration crackdown in American history. You do not have to take my word about motives anymore. You can just count. > The bill that would actually force employers to follow the rules has thirty-five sponsors in a House of four hundred thirty-five. You do not have to take my word about motives. You can count. Sweaty's Corner doesn't have a marketing budget or an algorithm pushing it into anyone's feed. It has readers who share it. If this one landed, sending it to someone who'd get something out of it — or subscribing so the next one finds you directly — genuinely moves the needle. [ Subscribe ](#/portal/signup) Share this post --- ### If the loophole was the problem, you'd hire judges *The mechanism, which is *always* the paperwork.* Here is the part that should end the argument on its own. In 2025 I wrote that the asylum backlog exists because the United States runs a court system with a rounding error's worth of judges against millions of cases. People get a hearing date years out, they wait here legally in the meantime, and that waiting is the thing voters see and mistake for an open border. If you believed that was the loophole, the fix is boring and obvious. Hire judges. Fund clerks. Clear the docket. The backlog closes and the incentive to file a weak claim evaporates. They did the opposite, on purpose, at speed. NPR counted [nearly a hundred immigration judges fired in 2025](https://www.npr.org/2026/02/23/g-s1-110911/trump-immigration-judges-dismissals-numbers?ref=sweatyspice.com), with dozens more resigning or retiring. The permanent corps went from about seven hundred twenty-six at the start of the second term to roughly five hundred fifty a year later, even counting new hires. Twelve courts lost more than *half* their judges. Two courts had none at all. The Executive Office for Immigration Review shed more than four hundred legal assistants and attorney advisers. San Francisco's court [went from twenty-one judges to four](https://www.npr.org/2026/01/13/g-s1-105679/san-francisco-immigration-court-closure?ref=sweatyspice.com) before the court itself was moved out to Concord. The consequences are exactly what you would predict. AILA notes average pending time [hit 636 days](https://www.aila.org/library/policy-brief-america-needs-independent-fair-and-efficient-immigration-courts?ref=sweatyspice.com) and that a regulation issued this February has the Board of Immigration Appeals automatically dismissing appeals without conducting a review or explaining itself. Asylum approval rates [collapsed below ten percent this year](https://immpolicytracking.org/policies/reported-justice-department-fired-20-immigration-judges/?ref=sweatyspice.com), against a Biden-era average around forty-two. The staffing gap is being filled by [authorizing military lawyers to sit as temporary immigration judges](https://acaciajustice.org/the-hollowing-of-the-experienced-immigration-judge-corps-and-risks-to-due-process/?ref=sweatyspice.com), which is a sentence I would like you to read twice. The backlog was never a bug they wanted fixed. A backlog is an asset. It is the thing you point at when you need the system to look broken, and a functioning docket would have cost them the argument. --- ### The people who did it right went first *TPS, and what "following the rules" actually bought.* Now put Temporary Protected Status next to all of that. TPS is not a loophole and it is not a border phenomenon. It is a registry. You come from a designated country, you apply, you pay the fee, you pass the background check, you renew on schedule, you get a work permit. You are in the system by name and address. You are, by any definition a voter would recognize, doing it the right way. There were about 1.3 million people holding TPS in March of 2025, across seventeen designated countries. The administration has since [ended or moved to end thirteen of them](https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2026/08/12/second-trump-administration-has-ended-temporary-protected-status-for-most-immigrants-who-had-it/?ref=sweatyspice.com), affecting more than a *million* people. Venezuelans account for roughly fifty-nine percent of those who have lost protection. Haitians about a third. Some of them have been here for decades. The Penn Wharton Budget Model ran the labor numbers before the worst of it landed: [more than half a million legally working people](https://budgetmodel.wharton.upenn.edu/p/2025-11-19-550-000-workers-lose-status-by-end-of-2025/?ref=sweatyspice.com) losing work authorization, generating something like thirty-six billion dollars of annual GDP, concentrated in construction, building and grounds cleaning, and transportation, and concentrated geographically in Florida, Texas, and New York. Nearly half of all TPS holders live in Florida. Think about that state's economy for a second and then think about who voted for this. And here is the part that should stay with you. In March, a discharge petition to extend Haiti's designation [got its 218 signatures](https://forumtogether.org/article/temporary-protected-status-fact-sheet/?ref=sweatyspice.com) and forced a floor vote. The House passed it in April, 224 to 204, with ten Republicans and an independent joining every Democrat. A working majority of the elected House of Representatives voted to keep a group of legally present, employed, documented people legally present. It did not matter. The Senate did nothing, the litigation ran its course, and the Supreme Court settled it by removing the courthouse. So the sequence, cleanly: they registered, they paid, they renewed, they worked, they were counted. A majority of the House voted to let them stay. And they were still the first ones out the door, ahead of every person who crossed a river at night and disappeared into a drywall crew. There is no version of "follow the rules" that these people failed. Which tells you the sentence was never about rules. --- ### What the country actually thinks, which is two things at once *The focus group problem.* I have been a Bulwark subscriber for a long time and I will keep being one, and I am going to keep being irritated by this specific thing. Sarah Longwell's recurring finding is that the voters in her groups want secure borders and immigration done the right way, and that Democrats got destroyed on the issue. As reporting, that is accurate. She is telling you what people say, and she is better at collecting it than almost anyone. The problem is treating a reported preference as a policy signal when the preference has no referent. Nobody in any of those groups has ever specified what the right way is, because there is nothing to specify. It is a moral alibi, and it is a good one, because it lets a decent person hold two incompatible positions without discomfort. The polling shows the same split with the seams visible. Gallup last summer found [a record share of Americans calling immigration good for the country](https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/7/11/us-public-support-for-immigration-rises-amid-trumps-crackdown?ref=sweatyspice.com), support for deporting everyone down to thirty-eight percent from forty-seven, and nearly eight in ten backing earned legal status. By February, Marquette had [sixty percent disapproving of ICE](https://law.marquette.edu/poll/2026/02/04/new-marquette-law-school-national-survey-finds-60-disapprove-of-the-work-of-ice-with-democrats-and-independents-opposed-to-ice-and-republicans-in-favor?ref=sweatyspice.com). And in the same survey, fifty-six percent still favored deporting people here illegally. Ipsos makes the point that [this softening started well before the Minneapolis shootings](https://www.ipsos.com/en-us/where-americans-stand-immigration?ref=sweatyspice.com) rather than being caused by them. Read those together. The public wants deportation in the abstract and rejects the machinery in the specific, and it holds both because the two have never once been presented in the same frame. That is not hypocrisy. That is what happens when the only people with the standing to explain the mechanism decide their job is to reflect the mood back. I will also cop to something. My own 2025 framing does not survive contact with these numbers either. I ended that piece with *this is what we voted for*, and a lot of people have since moved. It was satisfying to write and it is not where this ends. --- ### The part that does not need you Because here is what the last fourteen months actually demonstrated. Public opinion moved substantially against the program. It changed nothing. The House voted to protect a specific population. It changed nothing. Federal district judges ruled repeatedly that terminations were arbitrary and capricious. The Supreme Court answered by holding that nobody gets to ask. Removals are running roughly seventy percent ahead of last year's pace at the same point, [per Austin Kocher's tracking](https://austinkocher.substack.com/p/ice-detention-and-deportation-by), and the Deportation Data Project found interior detention capacity [more than quadrupled](https://deportationdata.org/analysis/immigration-enforcement-first-year.pdf?ref=sweatyspice.com). The reconciliation bill appropriated tens of billions. The hiring is done. The beds are built. The appellate body dismisses on autopilot. JVL keeps making a version of this point on the podcast and I think he is right but slightly understating it. He argues that the nativist current predates Trump and outlasts him, that a successor with none of the charisma will inherit the coalition anyway. True. But a successor does not need to inherit a coalition. He inherits an appropriation, a staffing table, a detention footprint, and a holding that his discretion is unreviewable. Charisma built this. Line items run it. That is the difference between a movement, which needs you to keep showing up, and an agency, which does not. I do not have a fix at the end of this one. The demand-side lever still works and still has thirty-five sponsors. The courts have been asked and have declined. The one thing I would ask of the people with microphones is smaller and duller than a fix: when someone tells you they want immigrants to come the right way, stop nodding. Ask them which door. Then watch what happens when they go looking for it. ### Musical Interlude Keep the lights on Like what you've read, but not able to switch to paid? Why not buy me a coffee instead! All money goes to help defray the expense of running the site. [ ![Buy me a coffee](https://img.buymeacoffee.com/button-api/?text=Buy me a coffee&emoji=&slug=sweatyspice&button_colour=FFDD00&font_colour=000000&font_family=Cookie&outline_colour=000000&coffee_colour=ffffff) ](https://www.buymeacoffee.com/sweatyspice?ref=sweatyspice.com)