The War On [Insert Thing]...
The recent passage of another shitty omnibus bill is par for the course.
What MAGA is most thrilled about is probably upping the ICE budget by over $165 billion over the next several years. The problem with this is the same problem with any government program or agency: you can give them all the money in the fucking world, and they wouldn’t be able to solve any of the problems they’re directed to solve.
The “War on Poverty” began in 1964 and we are poorer than ever in real purchasing-power terms. MAGA appears to be more like your standard liberals, in this regard. They believe they can spend their way out of this. More than that, it is like when a liberal says, “Sure, I’ll pay more taxes if it means someone else gets to have health insurance” or whatever. In this instance, MAGA is saying, “Sure, I’ll pay more taxes if that means businesses which employ illegals don’t get penalized.”
Because that’s the other (real) option: to pressure Congress to up the fines on businesses which employ illegals. We already have these laws on the books. One of the laws allows us to disbar any company who continually violates said laws from ever getting government contracts1. Rather than making businesses suffer, we end up with this bullshit2:
$46.5 billion to complete construction of the border wall.
$14.4 billion for removal transportation.
$12 billion in state reimbursements for states that fought against the Biden administration’s open border.
$4.1 billion to hire additional CBP personnel, including 3,000 more customs officers and 3,000 new Border Patrol agents.
$3.2 billion for new technology and $2.7 billion for new cutting-edge border surveillance.
$855 million to expand Customs and Border Protection’s vehicle fleet.
The law will also provide ICE with the funding to hire 10,000 new agents, which would allow the rate of deportations to reach as high as 1 million per year. ICE currently has 20,000 law enforcement and support personnel across 400 offices.
The BBB provides ICE with enough detention capacity to maintain an average daily population of 100,000 illegal aliens and secures 80,000 new ICE beds.
The Big Beautiful Bill will also fully fund ICE’s 287(g) program, which empowers state and local law enforcement to assist federal immigration officers.
Under the law, ICE and Border Patrol agents will also receive a $10,000 bonus for the next four years.
Even if they hit their target of 1,000,000 deportations per year—so what? The incentive is predominantly employment of cheap labor. The oligarchs aren’t going to let this happen overnight. Trump will be rotting in the ground before they hit their targets. So long as the need for cheap labor persists, and we do not criminally prosecute any company who violates immigration laws, it will continue.
The Supreme Court said as much in Plyler v. Doe:
“Sheer incapability or lax enforcement of the laws barring entry into this country, coupled with the failure to establish an effective bar to the employment of undocumented aliens, has resulted in the creation of a substantial ‘shadow population’ of illegal migrants—numbering in the millions—within our borders. This situation raises the specter of a permanent caste of undocumented resident aliens, encouraged by some to remain here as a source of cheap labor.
...
The dominant incentive for illegal entry ... is the availability of employment. ... [W]e think it clear that ‘[charging] tuition to undocumented children constitutes a ludicrously ineffectual attempt to stem the tide of illegal immigration,’ at least when compared with the alternative of prohibiting the employment of illegal aliens.” 3
NONE of this should news to anyone.
Nor should the bait and switch of ICE and DHS being used as yet another jobs program instead of the Democrat’s version of hiring more IRS agents.
The reason I’m interested in this particular area is because I’ve often wondered if Trump (or any president) could push to fine entire sectors which employ illegal immigrants, but also, if it can translate into fining them for their workweeks being too long? I spoke with @revmaxxing about this (follow him if you haven’t already) and it seems plausible (until you actually look into it).
One obstacle is the FLSA. When it was first enacted, the Supreme Court insisted it was:
“…to protect certain groups of the population from sub-standard wages and excessive hours which endangered the health and well-being and the free flow of goods in interstate commerce.”4
Remember: this was intended as a “compromise” between actual shorter hours and ensuring any time worked above a certain threshold (40 hours) would be compensated. This was a comically bad deal for the working-class. Rather than get paid for the actual labor-time that was socially-necessary, they would be compensated for work that never needed to be done in the first place. This created the conditions for hyperinflation and the eventual wholesale destruction of wages under Nixon.
One of the economic reasons for the FLSA was to “spread employment by placing financial pressure on the employer.”5
Again, this was a strictly fascist reform. The real pressure on the employer—on capital, profits—is reducing hours of labor. It’s why FDR chose the FLSA and not Hugo Black’s 30-hour bill.
The fascist State has made it nearly impossible to reduce hours of labor under any circumstances. Even the “Big Beautiful Bill” is nothing more than another bulwark to getting to the root of the immigration issue. It’s the FLSA but for immigration: businesses never actually have to pick up the costs and competition amongst the working-class continues to intensify, spurring the calls for even more funding.
Thus, an enormous part of the existing workday finances and subsidizes corporations breaking the law on a daily basis (like when everyone has to pick up the tab for Wal-Mart employees on SNAP and WIC) and ensuring this part of the existing workday (which is entirely superfluous) continues to grow.
It seems to me that the entire goddamn welfare-State is a firewall between existing society and communism. Any “war on [insert thing]” is always a war on the working-class and their subsistence. Mind you, it’s not a matter of who pays for what. Communism is not going to come down to accounting. But the transition from fascism to communism is very much about who bears that burden. Right now, Washington and the globalists are winning. And it’s not even close…
https://www.uscis.gov/i-9-central/legal-requirements-and-enforcement/penalties.
https://www.dhs.gov/news/2025/07/04/secretary-noem-commends-president-trump-and-one-big-beautiful-bill-signing-law.
https://cis.org/Report/Hiring-Illegals-Crime.
https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/the-flsa-after-80-years-part-ii-eight-74855/.
Ibid.