This is a tautology, or a circular argument. You can’t or won’t acknowledge that objections to millions of illegals pouring across the border year after year, decade after decade, are not merely based on “hatred of brown people” or whatever the phrase du jour might be.
Correct – it’s not just racism/bigotry. It’s also ignorance. Statistically, immigrants whether legal or not are a very significant benefit to the US economy.
Y’know, I just realized something. None of your posts here are actually claiming that it’s not racism. You’re just saying that we shouldn’t say it’s racism.
No, they are not “wannabe Gestapo stormtroopers” , and if the Dems control Congress next yeah, all they have to do is cut the budget back to Biden era levels, and the budget will not support the new hires. Most will have to be laid off.
Right. Getting rid of the new hires is simple, given a Dem Congress. Not to mention, no more budget tor mass raids. The other ideas will have to wait until there is a Democratic president.
See that term " illegal migration" that is the problem. Why even have it? I mean sure block terrorists and criminals, but give people who want to work a work permit. See- no more " illegal migration"- problem solved.
[quote=“Common_Tater, post:304, topic:1032355”]
You can’t or won’t acknowledge that objections to millions of illegals pouring across the border year after year, decade after decade,
[/quote]. and
The number is more like 500000 per year of undocumented aliens. Certainly not “millions”- and most are people overstaying their visas- so not “pouring over the border”. The arrive by plane, etc.
And the total number is offset by people leaving the US for whatever reason.
Tell me, what is wrong with admitting a few hundred thousand new workers per years, with work visas?
True.
It is more or less racism- or Xenophobia. I note than no one seems perturbed by the thousands of Canadians who come here and overstay their visa. Because they are white people who speak our language. Just the brown spanish speaking people “pouring across our borders”. 
Roughly a million unauthorized a year came in during some of that time, much less at other times. This was partly due to U.S. policy changes but maybe more due to labor demand in the U.S. It also had to do with how bad conditions were in sending countries. Life in Mexico is getting better.
After Trump, it may be that people will no longer want to immigrate to the U.S., legally or otherwise, even with a Democratic president, due to a high possibility that MAGA will eventually return to power.
The ideal is that we let in more legal immigrants, and that fear of a MAGA return keeps out most of the rest. Then we have no practical need for a large Border Patrol or ICE. But I think there is a political need for something like ICE but less cruel.
Border patrol keeps out drugs and other stuff, mostly. Yeah, a less cruel ICE, like under Biden.
I’m going to push back on these statements just a bit. Not over the argument that the Trump administration has been far worse on immigration than the Biden administration. That’s self-evident.
But there does seem to be an unstated implication that the Biden administration was fair and even-handed in their treatment of immigrants. Best as I can tell from contemporary reporting, they were not. They were just less nakedly toxic than Trump. Otherwise they were punitive and expansive as they allowed themselves to be swayed by right-wing populism into continuing with a number of the policies Trump enacted is his first term. There was a fair bit of reporting on this around 2023-2024.
If you dislike illegal immigration like friend Common_Tater above you should have been applauding Biden’s tough stance. If you think Trump’s first term was punitive and cruel, Biden was only better by comparison and not a lot better (than Trump’s first term, the second is in its own category of awful).
My phrasing has emphasized that they did the job moderately well … adequately, not perfectly. But before we can grant your point that part of its shortcomings was, while less than Trump by far, still “punitive and expansive”, we need to articulate what, without Congress passing immigration reform, or funding asylum claim m processing adequately, execution of immigration policy should or even can look like? Whether the agency doing it is ICE or rolled elsewhere or something named something “new” …
And, the portions that were arguably far less but still punitive or expansive, were also by executive order, not structurally integral to ICE, easily unwound if desired to do so.
Issue of course being what is done instead, given realities, political and practical.
Yes, we certainly can’t blame any of that on consumers who want the cheapest goods, capitalists and their never ending need for a better profit margin, or the conservative ideology that continually reminds us to “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain! It’s the immigrants that are the cause of all of your problems!”
The Biden and Obama administrations followed the law on Immigration. Now, yes, some may disagree with those laws, and say it is not fair to deport some law abiding immigrant who just wants to work. But that is the law.
Exactly. We need immigration reform, and until then, yes, undocumented aliens will be deported. but the huge and abusive raids, etc was not part of the Dem administrations.
South of the Border Immigrants do not steal jobs Americans want to do- or can do. Some Growers tried young white guys to do the kind of farm work that migrant farm workers do- and they were unable or simply would not do that.
Problems arose immediately for the A-TEAM nationwide. In California’s Salinas Valley, 200 teenagers from New Mexico, Kansas and Wyoming quit after just two weeks on the job. “We worked three days and all of us are broke,” the Associated Press quoted one teen as saying. Students elsewhere staged strikes. At the end, the A-TEAM was considered a giant failure and was never tried again.
- The U.S. agricultural sector relies primarily on immigrant workers, both documented and undocumented.
- Labor shortages in this sector are likely to persist and may worsen… The United States’ agricultural sector depends almost entirely on foreign-born workers. To illustrate the problem: In 2011, an attempt to employ 6,500 farm workers was made in North Carolina — only a small number of Americans applied, fewer showed up for work and, of those, only seven worked through the full harvest season…
Acute Labor Shortage
A diminished work force and the resulting acute lack of labor has affected U.S. farms engaged in food production for some time. This labor shortage has led to farmersnot finding enough workers to harvest their crops and leaving fruits and vegetables to rot in fields all over the country. The decreased supply of produce has also led to price increases for the final consumer.
https://farmstand.org/no-americans-wont-fill-big-ag-jobs-corporations-prefer-it-that-way/
In creatively cruel ways, President Trump is making good on his promise to carry out the largest mass deportation in history. Across the country, heavily armed federal agents in camouflage storm worksites, target worker activists, chain up workers like criminals, and tear them from their families, all under the banner of “restoring” jobs to American citizens.
Nowhere has this campaign landed with more force than in agriculture, a sector that depends overwhelmingly on immigrant labor — both documented and undocumented. In June, industry leaders reported that up to 70 percent of workers stopped showing up after ICE raids, leaving “crops rotting” and meatpacking plants understaffed. Trump himself has acknowledged this contradiction, calling for a pause on agricultural worksite raids to “protect our farmers” only to be overruled by his own Border Czar, who pledged to increase worksite enforcement by “four to five times.”
The history of ICE raids since its founding in 2003 exposes the hollowness of the “Americans want these jobs” myth. If it were true, these raids would lead to economic revival, local hiring booms, and wage increases. They don’t.
After a 2006 ICE raid took 250 workers from a Swift meatpacking plant in Grand Island, Nebraska, the company struggled for months to fill the jobs, eventually turning to Somali refugees. In 2019, after 680 poultry workers were detained in Mississippi, a wave of Americans briefly applied — many quit within days. Some jobs were ultimately refilled by the same detained workers after their release.
Raids haven’t revitalized local economies. They’ve devastated them. In Postville, Iowa, when 389 workers were arrested in a 2008 raid, nearly 20% of the town’s population disappeared overnight. The local economy cratered, and the community, including those not directly affected by the raid, was traumatized. This pattern repeats wherever ICE strikes.
So, you are wrong- Maybe there are not enough highly paid cushy jobs for Americans, but there are a LOT of Agriculture jobs, and Americans can not and will not do them.
That’s part of it.
But also: Immigration creates higher paid jobs for American citizens who supply and supervise the immigrants.
New York Times: Trump’s Deportations Are Costing Americans Jobs, Study Finds
Almost all of the economic profession agrees that immigration raises wages. The only exception is extreme, unusual, flooding of the labor market with high levels of immigration over a short time, the one documented example being the Mariel boatlift in 1980 that lowered Miami wages for a couple months. Aside from that, immigration creates jobs that are higher paying.
This may be outdated info, but it used to be that economists who worked for labor unions would satisfy their employers by coming out with heterodox studies claiming that immigration lowers wages. These labor economists were then earning a high salary with bonuses because of immigration! While this obviously is only the tiniest example of immigration supporting jobs and good salaries, I mention it because there are so many little ways, that add up, in which the presence of immigrants increase middle class and higher jobs and salaries.
I mean, it’s not “solely due to racial prejudice.” Xenophobia figures pretty prominently, too, as does just bog-standard ignorance. But awhile ago I started a thread asking for the actual systematic harm done to Americans by illegal immigration, and got fuck-all as an answer.
Are you aware of actual harms, borne out by research and well-cited statistics, caused by people entering the country without documentation? If so, please offer them to me–it’s been years since I first started asking the question, and I’ve yet to get a clear answer.
Note that I’m not asking for information about harm caused by criminalizing immigration. If we’re talking about the harms caused by alcohol, I’m not asking for cites about Al Capone. I’m asking for details about the harm caused by the immigration itself.
I agree that it is mistaken and politically poisonous.
The main reason for opposition to immigration is that it is obvious if you have more people competing for the same jobs, it is going to bid down wages.
Now, if you’ll read my last post, you’ll see that I’m convinced the obvious thought from the last sentence is mistaken. With more new workers, a lot of the old workers are needed to supervise the new ones, and supervisors make more. So do the HR managers that now get hired. And the accountants who are needed because our company is now bigger and making more. However, the failure to factor this all in is not due to racism.
I recommend reading:
The Truth About Immigration: Why Successful Societies Welcome Newcomers by Zeke Hernandez
You may not agree with the argument, but Hernandez is not in business to accuse you of bigotry.
Attributing support for decreased illegal immigration and strong enforcement on racism and xenophobia has to conveniently ignore the strong support those positions have had among Latinos. Not a black and white … or even a brown … issue.
An example near end of Biden’s term:
While most support providing a path to U.S. citizenship for people in the U.S. illegally, a majority also thinks improving border security should be a priority for the U.S. government. A bare majority also agrees that they worry that if the government begins mass deportations of illegal immigrants, they may target all Latinos, including native and legal residents
Of course the fears were well justified but strong action, even “punitive and expansive”, on border security was supported, for some items by the majority:
64% support giving the president authority to shut U.S. borders if there are too many migrants trying to enter the country.
• A minority supports building a wall or fence along the entire U.S.-Mexico border (42%) or sending all undocumented immigrants in the U.S. back to their country of origin (38%). Compared to December 2021, more Latinos support building a wall (30% in December 2021) and sending all undocumented immigrants back to their country of origin (28%).
In fact while “Abolish ICE” polls more support than oppose among Hispanics, it isn’t the overwhelming numbers one might think it would be for those bearing the brunt of the oppression:
39% opposed among Hispanics.
Give it time. Wait until ICE snags a few of their family members off the street and bounces their head off the asphalt. The “strong support” will go bye-bye.
Because Hispanic is a grouping that contains no internal divisions.
But why would it be “the same jobs”? Immigration means more jobs. Whatever it is you do for a living, immigration means more people consuming that.
Statistically and mathematically, immigrants only detract from the economy and overall benefit if they take more than they provide. This can be analyzed and measured on a large scale, and has been done over and over, and it’s crystal clear that US immigrants, legal or otherwise, contribute way, way more in taxes, jobs created, businesses started, etc., then they consume.
Opposing immigration is based on bigotry or ignorance. There’s no other explanation.
Then why not favor open borders?