They’re a largely unskilled societal menace, and they put an incalculable burden on the American taxpayer. So why not pay them to leave?

No, I’m not talking about our bloated federal workforce, but the same logic applies: If we can incentivize one problematic horde into early retirement, perhaps we can incentivize another one to return to the countries from whence they came. Or so the thinking goes.

Yesterday, amid an ongoing and unprecedented effort by leftist judges to thwart the will of the American people, the Trump administration said it would begin paying illegal immigrants to leave the country. As the Department of Homeland Security announced, the illegals who use the Biden era’s ingeniously repurposed CBP phone app to self-deport will now be eligible for a $1,000 payment once they’ve been confirmed to have returned home.

The hope is that they’ll take the four-figure carrot and run rather than hunker down and wait out Trump’s term in the fleeting hope that Sandy Cortez Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez will ride some magical wave of pro-immigrant sympathy into the White House on a campaign promise of amnesty for all.

“If you are here illegally,” said Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, “self-deportation is the best, safest and most cost-effective way to leave the United States to avoid arrest. DHS is now offering illegal aliens financial travel assistance and a stipend to return to their home country through the CBP Home App.”

It’s a generous offer to those who’ve broken our immigration laws, but $1,000 doesn’t begin to cover the money they paid the coyotes to traffic them across our border or the hardship they endured in getting here. But if they can be convinced that the alternative is getting nabbed and deported like “Maryland Man” and the Guatemalan mom who just had a kid, and if they can be made to realize that the gusher of free stuff they were promised isn’t all it was cracked up to be, then perhaps a measure of them will take the money and skedaddle. It’s not a golden parachute. It’s not even a month’s rent. But it’s not nothing.

How sad, though — how infuriating — that it’s come to this. The Biden administration engineered a four-year-long invasion of our country, and Donald Trump was elected with a sweeping mandate to undo the damage — to, as he put it, “get them the hell out of here.” But the Despotic Branch — the same one that stood idly by while Deporter-in-Chief Barack Obama expelled millions without a whiff of so-called due process — is now usurping Trump’s Article II authority to remove them, all while the Trump-deranged rump party known as the Democrats is reflexively jetting off to foreign lands to sip margaritas with wife-beating MS-13 gang members.

Credit goes to Team Trump for doing something. He made a promise, and he’s doing everything in his power to keep it. Our immigration and deportation process, though, is screwed up like a soup sandwich, and the American people know it. Think about how easy the Democrats made it to enter our country during the past four years. Now, think about how hard our laws have made it to deport someone legally. As Manhattan Institute scholars Daniel Di Martino and Charles Fain Lehman point out:

Individuals targeted for deportation are entitled to hearings before an immigration court. … That includes an appellate process, several forms of “relief from removal,” and the ability in some circumstances to appeal into the federal court system proper. The process can be stretched out by an immigration defense bar often ideologically opposed to all deportations and eager to exploit the immigration court system’s lack of staff and funding. As a result, the average case pending before immigration court is nearly two years old.

What’s the solution? Di Martino and Lehman suggest — wait for it! — hiring more federal employees. “Today,” they write, “we have about 700 immigration court judges. Ideally, that number should double, thereby clearing the backlog and swiftly processing new cases. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), which processes new arrivals, also needs to hire more employees to do ‘credible-fear’ interviews at the border and process the growing affirmative asylum backlog.”

These are solutions to a problem with reasonable parameters. But the problem we face has unreasonable parameters — more than 10 million illegals. At current levels, the Trump administration is on pace to deport somewhere around 500,000 per year, or two million for his term in office. And that number will likely shrink as our pro-illegal leftist judiciary finds new and creative injunctions with which to gum up the works.

Senator Grassley: Good luck getting your quixotic bill passed!