This is part one of a two-part series examining the impacts of decades of mass Hispanic immigration on the U.S. and the policies necessary to reverse those trends. Part one can be found here.
There are numerous policy options available to remove unwanted foreign dependents from the United States: canceling work visas, revoking citizenship from criminals, simple immigration enforcement for overstayers, and a broad administrative review of all citizenship applications since 1965, with a focus on welfare recipients. Many of these applications are already known to be fraudulent. We need only look back on the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, also known as “the Reagan amnesty,” which even current GOP policymakers will admit was riddled with fraudulent cases, 90 percent of which were approved.
Hispanics who obtained their citizenship through fraud or deceit, such as that mentioned above, would then have that citizenship revoked. Usefully, this precedent is already well established in American law, and a nationalist administration would not be taking any wildly unprecedented steps or violating any norms by utilizing this fantastic precedent. The grounds for expansion of denaturalization are also being explored in Senator Erik Schmitt’s SCAM Act and Representative Andy Ogles’s (R-TN) upcoming ASSIMILATION Act. These pieces of legislation are a great start, but more will be required. Namely, Congress is going to need to expand denaturalization to cover the Latin American (and other) immigrants who have relied heavily upon the American taxpayer. If immigrants have come to this country and have relied upon Medicaid, food stamps, WIC, housing assistance, or any combination thereof for any reason aside from serious sickness or disability, they should be denaturalized and returned to their home countries. It is not the duty of the American people to host a permanent foreign-born welfare class. Were the American state to denaturalize and/or deport all legal Hispanic immigrants who rely upon the welfare state (with an adjustment made for the genuinely sick, elderly, and injured), it would result in about 11–12 million denaturalizations and deportations.
Next, the United States government should relinquish all claims of sovereignty and responsibility over Puerto Rico, recognizing it as a sovereign state. This is a policy that we have written about extensively and wish to see brought into being. We estimate that some four million first- and second-generation Puerto Ricans in the United States would return to their homeland.
There are also other demographics of recent Hispanic immigrants that have no right or claim to live in the United States, such as the children of illegal aliens. While it is self-evident that a pro-American government would deport the many tens of millions of illegal immigrants residing in the country (a figure that the American Federation for Immigration Reform estimated to be 18.6 million at the start of 2025), there remains the question of their children. The children of illegal immigrants born in the United States are American citizens by birthright, at least as the Constitution is currently interpreted. This demographic of people, according to the most recent data we could find, numbers roughly five million people under the age of 18. These children would have to leave the nation with their parents. After all, children belong with their parents, and family separation is immoral.
The children of illegal immigrants are, in the overwhelming majority of cases, entitled to or already possess the citizenship of their parents’ country of origin, their homeland. The United States could reasonably denaturalize this demographic as they left with their parents, and it would not turn them into stateless individuals. The policy aligns with the 1961 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness and therefore would not violate international law or norms.
With estimates showing that 72–76 percent of illegal aliens are Hispanics, or about 12.3 million people, and assuming that the same figure holds true for their children, another 4.25 million people, we can assume that deportation and denaturalization policies aimed specifically at illegals and their children would result in upwards of 16.5 million deportations.
Through the enactment of all the above policy recommendations, a remigration-oriented American government could reasonably remigrate as many as 23.4 million Hispanic immigrants/illegal aliens to their countries of origin and ancestral homelands without violating domestic or international legal and human rights norms. We took care to remove the 15 percent of Hispanics who are born to a US-born non-Hispanic spouse from this equation, as we do not want to break up the families of Americans. Still, this figure represents 34.4 percent of the current Hispanic population of the United States and would not require unduly stripping anyone of their citizenship who acquired it fairly and with the best of intentions, nor stripping citizenship from persons who were born to legal residents or American citizens or those who are already above the age of 18.
We want to address three other key factors. The logistics of deporting illegal aliens, the denaturalization of immigrants who have aided and abetted illegal immigration, and a voluntary remigration program for those immigrants and their descendants who do not identify as Americans and live in parallel societies.
Thus far, we have not included the population of illegal immigrants in any of our numbers, aside from those already naturalized (generally through amnesty or illicit methods), who would, of course, lose that citizenship for having broken American law by illegally entering the country or lying to obtain documentation. Regardless, the current illegal alien population is nearly impossible to accurately calculate, but it has significant demographic and policy implications. So, in an attempt to provide context, we have the following information:
A Yale study, which purposefully used the most conservative parameters possible, found that in 2018, there were likely more than 22 million illegal aliens in the United States. The more liberal projections in the study predicted as many as 30 million illegals were present in the U.S.—a staggering number. But this is far from the full picture. This Yale figure is reinforced by the FAIR estimate that nearly 18.6 million illegal aliens live in the United States as of 2025.
How could the United States ever deport such huge populations? The initial response to these large numbers may be that the state could never deport such huge populations of people. That, however, could not be less accurate—which the Trump administration is already proving.
We know large-scale deportation is possible and has already been carried out by American authorities on previous occasions. Readers may recall that during the height of Operation Wetback in 1954, the United States government was able to deport a million Hispanics over the course of a single year. For more modern data, we need only look back to the year 2000, when the United States government deported some 1.86 million individuals in a single fiscal year. These deportations did not strain federal resources or break the budget at the time and were carried out peaceably. The American state is the most well-resourced institution in human history, and the American economy is one of the most resourceful in the world.
A coordinated program, carried out over the course of 12 or so years, could remove these populations with relative ease. To deport roughly two and a half million people a year would increase the demand on U.S. air traffic by less than 0.4 percent and would increase the legal traffic at the southern land border by only 0.7 percent a year.
Many others, knowing they are no longer welcome in a more self-confident United States run by its founding European stock, would opt to voluntarily deport themselves. We need only look at the Trump administration for evidence. At the outset of Trump’s first term, the Justice Department recorded a 17 percent jump in voluntary deportations, though sadly, this trend did not persist, as immigrants realized the administration was not serious about enforcing immigration policy. The second Trump administration has already begun experimenting with using mobile applications to assist illegals in self-deporting, with FOX News reporting that 5,000 immigrants have already voluntarily departed the U.S. in just a few weeks following the app’s launch.
Aside from deportation, whether compelled by the state or voluntarily undertaken, there are other policy changes that a government that truly puts America first could implement to increase returns of illegal and irregular immigrant departures without the direct intervention of immigration officials.
The policy changes required are rather straightforward. The first would be to make the E-Verify system mandatory for every employer, public or private, in the United States. This could be done in two ways: first, by a direct legislative imperative that all institutions and employers must use the E-Verify system. But a second, more immediate route would be to require all federal contractors and any business that interacts with the federal government or that receives federal tax dollars to implement the E-Verify system. Currently, federal contractors need only use E-Verify on employees who “work under federal contracts” rather than all employees. This must change.
The next necessary policy change focuses again on the Reagan Amnesty, the 1986 IRCA. This act contains a provision that makes it nearly impossible for prosecutors and federal officials to take businesses that employ illegal immigrants to court. This section (Section B) should and must be replaced, but this issue could be tackled more immediately by a nationalist government. The Attorney General could have the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel issue a new opinion, which more strictly reinterprets the provision to allow the prosecution of business owners who employ illegal immigrants.
The president should then begin the process of firing all 93 federal U.S. attorneys, which he is empowered to do at his discretion. He should then turn to filling these vacancies with new U.S. Attorneys who will uphold the interpretative changes of the Attorney General. Some of this has gone on already under the new Trump administration, though we do not overlook the fact that the Senate is dragging its feet on more than 70 appointments to these positions and thereby blocking the president’s deportation agenda.
Finally, there are the groups of immigrants and their descendants who have facilitated illegal immigration. Facilitation of breaking American law by an immigrant should lead to that immigrant being expelled from the United States. A Pew study estimates 1.3 million U.S.-born adults live with their illegal alien parents, and a further three million lawful immigrants reside in a household with illegal immigrants. The children of illegal immigrants are hardly “Americans”; moreover, immigrants who knowingly harbor illegal aliens are violating American law. We have already proposed the denaturalization of the children of illegal aliens, but we should also denaturalize and/or deport the three million lawful immigrants who reside with an illegal alien. Assuming a similar share of 75 percent of Hispanics, this would be a group of about 2.25 million people. If we assume overlap with the previous denaturalized group of welfare-dependent migrants, we can also assume about 1.13 million more unique denaturalizations and/or deportations of legal immigrants. This would increase the total number of potential Latin American deportees to roughly 24.5 million people, or about 36 percent of the current Hispanic population.
Next, we present the necessary policy of voluntary remigration, which we have championed for some years now. We have already established how few Hispanics in the United States identify as Americans or with America. They feel like an alien population, and the polling reflects this further. A 2024 poll by Monmouth University found that 45 percent of people of color wanted to leave the United States, as opposed to 27 percent of white Americans. Another poll conducted by Harris in 2025 showed that 61 percent of Hispanics in the United States had considered moving abroad, and 26 percent of them specifically cited a desire to relocate to Latin America. The generations most interested in moving were Gen Z at 63 percent and millennials at 52 percent. Estimates show that 46 to 49 percent of Hispanics in the United States are zoomers and millennials. The most cited reasons for considering a move were a lower cost of living (49 percent), a dissatisfaction with American politics (48 percent), and a desire for a higher quality of life (43 percent). When asked about the most important factors in considering a move, 86 percent of those wanting to relocate cited the need to find somewhere with a more affordable cost of living. This data suggests in no uncertain terms that many Hispanic immigrants and their descendants would leave the United States and relocate to their own countries—or elsewhere in Latin America—if they were given the financial resources to do so.
We propose giving them those resources.
White Papers has proposed and continues to propose that a $75,000 Remigration Grant be paid to those post-1965 immigrants and their descendants with American citizenship to leave the country if they so desire. If we assume that 61 percent of Hispanics from the Harris poll were serious about relocating to some degree, and we consider the fact that most Hispanic Americans make only $20,000 to $28,000 per person per year, we can assume that a $75,000 relocation grant would be very enticing. We estimate that roughly 15.2 million more post-1965 Hispanic immigrants and their descendants would take a remigration payment and relocate abroad. This would cost the government roughly $800 billion, including the logistics, but this is far cheaper than continuing to host such a large, foreign, discontented population that costs the U.S. taxpayer upwards of $680 billion each year.
In total, we estimate that 58.4 percent of the current Hispanic population of the United States can be deported as illegals, denaturalized, or enticed to voluntarily remigrate. Of the 28.3 million remaining Hispanics in the country post-remigration, some 18–20 million would have pre-1965 roots and thus be those of the original, true Hispanic American communities that existed in the country before the Hart-Celler-induced era of mass immigration. The other 8–10 million would be those post-1965 Hispanic immigrants and their descendants who have truly integrated, contributed, and identify first and foremost as Americans and not Mexicans, Cubans, Latinos, or some other foreign identity.
We cannot solve the housing crisis in California without remigration. We cannot reduce the burden on the state and federal budgets without remigration. We cannot coordinate full employment policies without remigration. We cannot expect to solve the issues of criminality and sexual violence without the large-scale remigration of the worst elements of recent immigrant populations. Most importantly, we cannot secure a future where Americans, patriotic and loyal, remain the overwhelming majority of the population of the United States without a policy of remigration.
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