I don’t really mind if we kick them all out, so I don’t know why you think I’m trying to make sneaky distinctions so I can only kick out half of them. You even acknowledged “obviously there are going to be differences between someone who arrived at 1 vs 15”. That was what I was explaining.
As for “problematic cases”, here is one: DACA recipient arrested near Yuma on human-smuggling charges
Can we agree that that particular DACA recipient ought to be deported?
Only after lengthy interrogation.
*The Border Patrol has not identified the Mexican immigrant, but said he’s from Salinas, California. Kallinger said this is the first case in recent memory of a DACA recipient arrested in the Yuma Sector for human smuggling.
…
To be eligible for DACA, recipients must pass criminal-background checks, making any applicant with a criminal history ineligible. Kallinger said the 26-year-old had been charged, but not convicted. He remains in federal custody. The other four people were also charged with immigration violations, Kallinger said.*This seems like a self-correcting problem which has not been endemic or even remotely common among DACA recipiemts.
Stranger
But, but, if one person in a minority group ever does something bad, the entire group must be eliminated!
So, sorry for quoting this earlier post of yours, but this topic very much brings up morality plays and the argument gets simplified into a black and white position of the heartless ultranationalist vs the compassionate liberals. It is of course a debate with legitimate shades of gray.
One viewpoint that is wholly missing is that of legal immigrants.
Let me explain. My family is one such case. In order to immigrate here, my family had to be separated for about 3 years. My dad had a green card but my mom’s expired and she had to wait until my dad became a citizen to be called in through legal means. Going through the legal means meant quite a sacrifice from a familial unity standpoint, and it would have been an easy option for my mom to enter with a tourist visa and overstay it. Yet they chose to not violate the law. So part of the conversation should include the viewpoints of the legal immigrant community and recognize the sacrifices they made and all the legal hoops they jumped through in order to get here.
Is it fair to breakup illegal immigrant families? No. But the legal immigration route also results in the breakup of families, one that they endured willingly. With the proposal to legalize those who jumped the line, what message does the legal immigrant community receive from this?
Again my family’s particular story is just an anecdote, but I’m sure that the vast majority of the ~500,000 to ~1,000,000 legal immigrants to the US each year have even worse stories that aren’t reflected in the statistics. I bring this up as a flaming liberal, yet I can see why my parents voted for Trump.
That our immigration system is very flawed, and should be fixed in order to prevent such things.
The message that you should not take away is that because your family went through a flawed system, everyone else should have to as well.
I think you make some important points, but I must respond with a few things.
First, there is nobody - nobody - who says the current system is good. So saying that the legal immigration system has problems is part of the entire point
Second, nobody is talking about a general amnesty for all who entered the country illegally. We are really just talking about what to do with people who really didn’t have a choice to come to this country illegally, and to a significant extent, spent a substantial majority of their formative years in this country. If your family has a grudge against these kids because of the burdensome hoops they went through as adults, well, I don’t think that’s a fair comparison at all.
Finally, let’s keep in mind what Trump wants to do with the immigration system overall. Uniting families to him is bad. He wants to eliminate it to the greatest extent possible. There’s a decent chance that under a Trump-designed immigration system, your father would be welcomed to the country if he spoke good English, was wealthy already, worked in certain fields but not others, was of the proper age when he applied, etc. To the extent he made it through those wickets and then wanted his family to join him here, in Trumpland he’s now one of those crappy immigrants who wants to soak this country for chain migration.
It’s easy to say, “the US is screwed up in all these different ways (immigration, education, social mobility, health insurance, etc) and so I support Trump because he hates those things too!” The part that’s missing is that Trump’s answers to all those problems make them worse for people who aren’t rich: break up more families; make public schools fail; cut taxes for the rich; gets millions to give up health insurance, etc).
If you family hates the system, I understand. But to support someone on the basis of “he hates the system too!” and not “here is how I will fix it” is a profoundly short-sighted opinion.
Indeed legal immigrants want the system fixed, however it is felt that the reason it’s broken is in no small part by illegal immigration, as it prevents a political compromise from taking place. Notice that the proposals coming out of the White House (promoted by Steven Miller) include a sharp reduction in legal immigration, actually excarcebating the problems of long wait lines and fickle rules. Both parties claim to want a solution, but one wants effectively amnesty (which doesn’t feel fair) and the other one wants to kick all illegal immigrants out (which is also not fair). One party wants a physical barrier and the other thinks it’s a monumental waste of money. Neither party wants to competently implement E-verify (a type of virtual wall) as it would create an underclass of unemployed urbanites making local policing problems much worse and depressing local economies, and the other party opposes it too because entrenched agricultural interests don’t want their business model affected or disrupted in the least. The above summary is a small portion of the back and forth politicking that doesn’t have any easy answers, yet as I said before, I’m not surprised when polls show that 30%ish of Hispanics vote for Republicans, as these are probably doing so because they went through the legal avenues and begrudge illegal immigration enough to make them single-issue voters (perhaps also combined with a pro life viewpoint). Now, begrudging DACA recipients is silly, yet the unanswered question of how should their parents be dealt with (since they’re most likely still living in the US). Is there a fair solution for all? I’m not so sure.
Soooooo… yeah. Threadkiller.
Kinda weird when it gets real. The good news is lots of money is being made and spent running this horribly flawed system. The bad news is the system (including immigration law) isn’t getting fixed. It’s working great for the people willing and able to use and profit from it.
It’s nowhere near broken enough for anybody who matters to really care.
The most logical way to address the ongoing problem of so many illegal immigrants, so many people willing to hire illegal immigrants, the aging demographic situation in the US, illegal immigrants settling in the US for decades, having kids and marriages with Americans, is to increase legal immigration. Clearly there’s demand that isn’t being met, and a host of downsides to creating an underclass.
But talk about it that way and everyone looks at you like you just unleashed a horrible fart.
That doesn’t solve the problem of the demand for illegal immigrants. What’s the point of allowing more legal immigrants? Businesses want workers they can underpay, work double digit hour days 6-7 days a week and generally ignore labor laws.
Businesses want workers - we don’t really have to worry about their desire for workers they can underpay, since minimum wage laws exist for a purpose independent of immigration: making sure people have a minimum modicum of survival they get from selling their labor - hopefully enough to pay the rent and groceries and so on.
Making it possible for workers who find themselves faced with such an employer to report the misbehavior, without risking finding themselves deported*, might help curb said misbehavior.
That’s what happens when the workers are forced to be undocumented. Since they cannot work legally, they have to work under the table, and they have to accept substandard wages and conditions.
But, to be fair, you don’t have to be an undocumented worker to be paid under the table. I know pretty much everyone in my industry does quite a bit of illegal labor practices with underpaying under the table, and that is with people that have every eligibility to work in the US.
I suspect most people who have had to make a living working in a service industry have worked ‘under the table’ at some point, just working as staff for an unlicenced caterer or in an underground club. Payment in cash without dyvving out to state and fed taxes and FICA is kind of a common bonding topic among servicepeople, and is something Donald Trump in particular should be familiar, both from employing undocs and avoiding paying taxes himself.
But let’s be pragmatic; while many areas of manufacturing and even some intellectual labor are disappearing due to automation and offshoring, there is one area where neither of these avenues are workable, those being child and elder care. We’ve long used undocumented workers for both because of their cheapness, and they’re often tasked with performing medical support and care despite being unlicensed and untrained. This problem is going get worse by an order of magnitude in the next few decades, and the smart thing to do would be to recognize, protect, and promote these workers to assure fair treatment and oversight to prevent abuse. We absolutely need immigrants because four-year-degreed workers won’t perform it and people working three or four minimum wage jobs don’t have time. Immigration is and always has been a net benefit to the economic and social health of the United States and short-sightedly pandering to a small minority of half-wit xenophobes is ignoring the impending elephant.
Stranger
I will agree, and having been part of the service industry my entire life, I’ve done a few jobs under the table. I didn’t really want to, but I did so as they were the only jobs available at the time, and I kinda needed money.
And dog grooming. 
I absolutely agree, though to the point where you would probably disagree with me as to how much immigration I think is healthy and necessary to reclaim the U.S. throne of “Greatest Country in the World”. I would like to see a population of up over a billion 'round these parts. We need that if we are going to compete with China and India emerging and coming into their own. Bonus points if we manage to skim off their best and brightest in the process.
I can think of no country throughout history has improved its conditions by isolating itself. We do have many examples of empires that fell due to embracing xenophobic ideas, though.
I don’t know that any nation needs a billion people, and certainly not to be competitive in a post-labor-based-textile-and-manufacturing economy, but we certainly need the influx of both people willing to do low paying care and service jobs which are not amenable to automation, and we also need the diversity that immigration brings, not for some kind of vague social justice morality play but because it gives us insight into other cultures that we have to interact with on the global stage and reminds us of the actual greatness of the United States, which is not in its military might or coal mines, but in creating opportunity for education and social advancement, an ideal we fail at far tooo ften for how much we take it for granted. Immigrants who start businesses and contribute to their community make us appreciate the struggles that ancestors (which, unless you are a certified tribal, are pretty much all immigrants themselves) went through to make our lives so comfortable and stable.
We used to “skim off their best and brightest” by opening our universities to them and then encouraging the best to stay and innovate. But now Americans are afraid of the competition from highly motivated foreigners and are trying to find ways to reduced H-1B visas even as it becomes more difficult to find the highly skilled intelectual labor domestically. China, India, Korea, and others, on the other hand, have lured students back and are setting up their own schools with US- and European-educated scientists and engineers with funding and support. And honestly, that is a good thing, or it would be if we were encouraging competiton rather than cutting funding for basic science outside of medicine and otherwise asserting how the free market will fix everything. I mean, it will, but likely not the way we like.
Indeed we do. The Arabs enjoyed centuries of high literacy and science before retrating into tribalism and fundamentalist thinking, and China literally turned its back on nearly two millenia of technical advances to become an isolationist empire quickly upset by British opium in a stunning social conquest. Isolationism has never served any nation over the long term in all of history.
Stranger