The White House has announced that there will be a “temporary pass” issued for migrants working at farms and in the hospitality industry. This is being pitched as relief to two major industries (and donor groups) that lobbied against mass deportations and workplace raids.

Our first thought: Just wait until President Trump hears about this!

Alas, on Sunday, President Trump left no doubt that these are his intentions. He argued that these are the good immigrants — after all, they’ve been hired. “I cherish our farmers. And when we go into a farm and we take away people that have been working there for 15 and 20 years, who were good, who possibly came in incorrectly,” he said. “And what we’re going to do is we’re going to do something for farmers where we can let the farmer sort of be in charge. The farmer knows he’s not going to hire a murderer.”

Funny, we don’t remember when it was that the American people elected the farm and hotel lobbies to be in charge of immigration enforcement.

The truth is that Donald Trump, going back to the 2016 campaign, has always shown some leniency toward hoteliers who hire seasonal staff, or hire under the table. He is in the hospitality business himself.

Now it’s the White House staff that is trying to clean up and make Trump more Trumpy on immigration. Border czar Tom Homan told reporters that they would still do worksite enforcement on farms and hotels, but on a prioritized basis. Trump told reporters he was interested in working out a deal for “reputable farmers.”

For decades, the movement to finally bring law to a lawless system of immigration in this country has had as its primary legislative goal enhanced worksite enforcement, primarily the adoption of a robust E-Verify system, so employers know right away whether their applicant is eligible to work before the job offer goes out. Trump’s argument that the fact of a farmer hiring a man makes it unlikely that he’s a murderer is in fact giving in to the premise of open-borders advocates who would simply have employers decide with whom we will share citizenship, regardless of the laws on the books.

America is more than a day-laborer hiring platform. The hospitality and agriculture industries should not get a pass. And they should adapt themselves to lawful hiring. There is already a generous visa system for such workers (it can always be simplified and made easier to use). Hiring within the law almost certainly will mean offering higher wages or better working conditions and exploring greater automation, expedients that other American industries take for granted.

The alternative is a status quo in which a slice of the economy is marked off as the preserve of illegal labor. This constitutes allowing employers to create a class of workers who don’t have the full protection of the law. This goes against America’s republican ideals and the Republican Party’s founding principle of free men and free labor competing under one set of laws for all.

Paul Harvey may have been right that God created a farmer, but that’s not a reason to make agriculture an oasis of lawlessness.