In Donald Trump’s Republican Party, immigration is one of the few issues on which there remains a party line. On trade, Republicans are divided between protectionists and free traders. On foreign policy, Russia hawks joust with China hawks, though both seem open to bombing Mexico. On economics, rhetorical commitments to protecting entitlements sit side by side with traditional GOP libertarianism. While Trump’s personalist reign over the party has for now suppressed these conflicts, the divisions are nonetheless obvious.

Not so with immigration. For the last decade, there has been no Republican dissent from nativism and repression. Since Trump first declared his candidacy in 2015, it has been his signature issue, and even before his rise the party had decisively rejected the pro-immigration conservatism of Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush. On this issue, more than on any other, the party is united.

Yet as Trump now enacts this agenda with frightening brutality, it has ironically revealed some of the cracks in his coalition. If opposition to immigration is the glue that holds the Republican Party together, it is also an issue on which the party is far out of touch with its benefactors in the capitalist class. There is, quite simply, no sector of capital with any enthusiasm for Trump’s unleashing of the body snatchers in black balaclavas. In fact, it directly threatens some of his strongest supporters.

Though much has been made of Trump’s success among both blue-collar workers and billionaires, small-business owners form an often overlooked core of his base. Academic research has repeatedly identified the importance of this group of Trump supporters, finding that business owners and the locally rich — those with a higher income relative to their community, if not the nation as a whole — are some of his most fervent backers. Often they own businesses in sectors where location matters, like hospitality, commercial agriculture, construction, and food service, leading historian Patrick Wyman to dub this social layer the American gentry.

A look at campaign contributions from these sectors makes their allegiance to the GOP clear. The dairy industry, for example, gave about 70 percent of its donations to Republicans in 2024. Restaurants and bars were only slightly less partisan, giving a bit under two-thirds to the GOP. These kinds of place-bound industries — in which firms are often small in the grand scheme of the US economy, even as they loom large in their communities — are some of the Republican Party’s strongest supporters.

It makes sense that the owners of these firms would be some of the most reactionary forces in American politics. Lacking the profit margins of big business, they hate unions. Similarly, environmental regulation, workplace safety, and tax increases all threaten them far more than they do their larger counterparts.

But these same vulnerabilities are also what make them major employers of undocumented labor. While big manufacturers can relocate their plants in search of cheap labor, and tech firms can choose between Austin and New York City as locations for new offices, the owners of small restaurant chains and dairy farms are stuck. Squeezed by tight profit margins and unable to move, they have to hire the cheapest labor they can find. It’s no surprise they turn to undocumented workers.

During his first administration, Trump largely avoided immigration policies that directly threatened his supporters’ labor force. His main immigration initiatives were the Muslim travel ban, building a border wall, and the family separation policy. Though he talked about mass deportations, his actual deportation numbers were lower than Barack Obama’s.

His second term has been different. Almost immediately following his inauguration, the number of daily arrests made by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) tripled. Neighborhood and workplace raids have increased significantly. The resulting terror has spread far beyond the sites of the raids, as many immigrants avoid work or public life in their wake.

In California, which has been the locus of many of the raids, the labor force declined by about 3 percent from May to June 2025, even as the number of people working rose in much of the rest of the country. Sectors like agriculture and food service have reported massive disruptions.

Affected industries quickly moved to put pressure on the White House to exempt their workers. In mid-June, Trump seemed to acknowledge their complaints, posting on social media, “Our great Farmers and people in the Hotel and Leisure business have been stating that our very aggressive policy on immigration is taking very good, long time workers away from them, with those jobs being almost impossible to replace.” Just days later, however, ICE put out a press release declaring it would not ease up on workplace raids.

Fundamentally the administration is in a bind. It has promised deportations on a scale unseen in recent decades. In selling this policy, Trump has focused overwhelmingly on the need to deport violent criminals. But there simply aren’t enough immigrants who have committed a violent crime to justify the scale of deportations that Trump has promised. If he wants to meet the deportation targets he has embraced (and that have been urged by apparatchiks like Stephen Miller), Trump has to commit to arrests on a scale that cannot help but destroy the labor force of a crucial portion of his base.

So far, all evidence suggests that this is the path the administration will take. The obscene budget increase for ICE — which will make the agency larger, in terms of funding, than the marine corps — will not go to waste. And on other issues where business has dissented from Trump’s agenda, such as tariffs, the administration has stubbornly plowed ahead undeterred.

Even big business can’t get what it wants from Trump on immigration. While Trump’s small-business supporters want undocumented workers to bypass minimum wage and occupational safety laws, big business wants a large expansion of guest worker programs. These programs bring in immigrants under restrictive terms for temporary periods, often binding them to a single employer and canceling their visas if they quit or are fired. The H-1B visa for highly skilled workers (especially salient in the tech sector) and the H-2A visa for seasonal agricultural work are the most important categories of guest worker permits.

In some ways, immigrant workers under these visas have even fewer options than undocumented workers. An undocumented landscaper faces no greater penalty for leaving an abusive employer than a citizen does. But for a guest worker, quitting entails either deportation or at least a loss of legal status. This is why, historically, big capital has tended to prefer hiring guest workers over undocumented ones. Since the late 1990s, groups like the Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable have pushed for expanding guest worker programs but have been met with intransigence from the GOP. Though Trump occasionally makes noises about supporting more guest workers, the hardcore nativists in his administration always convince him to back down.

The response to all of this from business — big and small — has been cowardly at best. Rather than stand together against the policies that are hurting them, business has instead begged for individual exemptions. Various trade groups lobby the administration to exclude their workers from raids, but without opposing the broader dragnet. Long freed from the necessity to organize against a powerful working class, American capital remains disorganized and poorly equipped to push back against Trump’s policies.

As such, there is no use hoping that American capital will find the nerve to oppose Trump’s nativist brutality. Though sections of the gentry may be ruined by the administration’s terror campaign against much of its workforce, forthrightly opposing the administration would require a level of business unity that simply does not exist.

But this is not to suggest that the contradiction between Trump’s immigration policy and what his business supporters want is politically irrelevant. It’s just to say that, in a future crisis of the administration, business won’t be the first domino to fall. When the crisis comes, however, as it surely will, the divides over immigration could quickly become volatile. Rather than business slowly backing away from a failed administration, as it did during the second George W. Bush term, we may see something more akin to an explosive decompression.