Not one I’m advocating, I’m just curious why, since cruelty is no consideration, trump doesn’t just make their lives so miserable that they would want to leave on their own. It would be more cost effective than roundups and camps. Simply (somehow) make it illegal to hire undocumented workers, and (somehow) make it illegal to rent to them.
It’s long been illegal to hire undocumented workers.
He separated immigrants from their children, and then lost the children in the system, and they still came. It’s already illegal to hire undocumented workers, they aren’t eligible for most government benefits, etc.
These are people whose home country is so awful that they leave everything and everyone they know, travel thousands of miles in order to maybe find a way into the US, where they are treated like crap and work their asses off.
That’s already built into the plan. Trump is going to round up at least some of them, and the inherent randomness of that, combined with the blatant disregard for the health and safety of those people, is a big part of what is expected will make a lot more of them voluntarily leave the country.
When they see that he’s not rounding up “criminals”, but instead actual working families who thought they were “one of the good ones”, they’ll begin to see that they aren’t safe, the goons could come for them at any time. And then they’ll weigh that risk against what they see happening to the ones already taken. Family separations will just be the baseline cruelty we’d expect to see.
And let’s not kid ourselves that this process will be so refined and well-tuned that it’s only going to remove literal “illegals”. Innocent legal immigrants of the wrong skin color and accent will be swept up and dumped like dolphins in a tuna net.
To the advocates of this, factual legal status isn’t the problem. It’s the mere fact they’re in the country at all.
My understanding is that when there’s a crackdown on businesses for employing undocumented workers, Republicans feel their (donors’) interests are threatened.
E-Verify should be required of employers. Employers want sub-wage slaves and the slaves are getting blamed, when the issue is the employers.
Googling, E-Verify is mandatory in Alabama, Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina and South Carolina and yet, undocumented adults and children are employed (really exploited) throughout the country.
And that points out what some of us have been saying all along, with regards to what Trump can and cannot do in office.
It doesn’t matter what laws you have on the books, if the people tasked with enforcing those laws decide not to do that, or just do a bad job of it.
A nation of laws still relies on people of good will to enforce those laws in a fair and impartial manner.
This kind of sums up the attitude many Americans have towards undocumented workers. Most of us agree we should have some controls at the border, we pass laws, and then we find it inconvenient to enforce those laws. It might be inconvenient because we need those workers for various jobs or it might be inconvenient because we feel guilty about getting rid of people who just want a better life for themselve and their families.
If Trump was serious about undocumented workers he’d go after employers. It’d be far more effective than trying to round undocumented workers up. If they can’t find employment most of them aren’t going to stick around.
It would be nice if we could pass some immigration laws that are humane, recognize the economic need for immigrants, and we were willing to enforce.
Why doesn’t he act charitable and offer a chance for citizenship if they rake the forests for, say, ten years?
Because Trump and many of his followers want to hurt people. The cruelty is the point.
True and yet fake documents are easy to procure and E-Verify is not required in more than a handful of states. So if you are not legal to work it is very easy to get around the law in most of the country.
Plus, there are still plenty of businesses that hire people without documents and pay them cash under the table.
Is having a fake SS number a federal offense, because it seems like it should be?
their lives were presumably pretty miserable already in their original country, which is why they left in the first place. It would take a LOT to make them voluntarily want to go back.
I have a friend who was born in Panama. She speaks fluent Spanish and is still a citizen there. We were sharing our misery over the recent election. I wondered, if the USA became the hell hole I predicted, would she go back to Panama? She said (not an exact quote) the government in Panama had all kinds of problems. The culture in Panama had all kinds of problems. At least in the USA, she had running water, electricity and shoes.
Of course, Trump might fuck things up badly enough that running water and electricity are no longer guaranteed.
I wouldn’t know. But in my understanding they are usually real SSN so more likely identity theft is an issue.
In Texas at least, they’re already there.
I think trump and his ilk would be happy if instead of going back they went somewhere else. Some red states would even be happy if they just went to a blue state, particularly if that causes problems there and can be used for propaganda purposes. In fact, they will even pay the bus fare.