I'm a liberal opposed to illegal immigration

Great Debates
1

Why are so many liberals so protective of immigrants who have broken U.S. laws in order to come to or stay in this country?

I am a liberal on most issues, especially social issues. I tend to vote Democratic. But I do have trouble understanding why the prevailing liberal view seems to be to defend immigrants that here without having gone through the legally required process to do so. The only thing in Trump’s entire speech this week that I agreed with was that we are a country of laws.

I just think people need to obey the law. I am not clear on why so many liberals paint this position as xenophobic or anti-immigrant; I am neither. I live in a very cosmopolitan area, and love the fact that my children have grown up with kids from dozens of other countries. Being anti-illegal immigration isn’t at all the same thing as being anti-immigration.

The idea of breaking up a family because some of them are here legally and some of them are not is tragic, but the immigrants themselves have to take at least some of the blame for such a situation. Many liberals take these situations to make conservatives out to be heartless. People who did not go through the legal immigration process knew they were taking a risk. I am very sympathetic to children who were brought here at a young age, but we do need a solution that somehow acknowledges the law. (A distantly related issue is foreigners who come here on a legal tourist visa just to give birth to an American citizen, but that is another discussion.)

Many illegal immigrants (call them undocumented workers if you prefer, but in fact they are immigrants who are here illegally) have made positive contributions to our culture and economy, and have established productive lives here. But that is an “end justifies the means” argument, and is tacit encouragement for more people to follow the same path.

Many immigrants are willing to take jobs that Americans will not. But if so, then we should make it possible for such people to come here legally, rather than say that the end justifies the means.

The situation is grossly unfair to those following the law who are still awaiting their opportunity to come here using the legally mandated process.

I do not know if the arguments against illegal immigration are valid, such as it takes away jobs from Americans, depresses wages, puts an undue burden on public services. The argument that says that illegal immigrants bring violent crime into the country is specious; it’s just an appeal to emotion and foments fear (I think this argument is downright despicable). Let’s assume for the sake of argument all of these points are just a smokescreen. There is still the issue of immigration law.

There are pragmatic and humanitarian arguments to favoring those who are here without having gone through legally required channels, but you could make similar arguments for those who break other laws. Why is immigration law treated so differently than laws broken by our own citizens?

2

Because “the law” that they’re breaking is a broken quota system that itself is xenophobic and anti-immigrant.

Most immigrants want to follow the rules, but the rules don’t allow them to come here legally unless they literally win the lottery. The conditions where they’re coming from are usually so bad that it’s worth all of the risks and the “law breaking” to cross the border illegally.

I don’t know what the liberal consensus on immigration quotas is, but until they’re eliminated or increased to even remotely reflect reality, we’re setting people up for disaster.

3

I am also opposed to illegal immigration, but you also need to consider how broken the legal immigration system is when you decide how to enforce immigration laws. I have known multiple families, some of them totally fluent in English trying to immigrate from a western European country and it is still a disorganized nightmare. They are expected to travel to hard-to-find, obscure offices in downtown Chicago, at specific times and then told when they get there they didn’t bring the right kind of information and they have to do it all over again. (they bring what they are told, but the rules seem to change with every new person they deal with) I can’t even imagine a non-English speaker successfully navigating the legal immigration system.

On top of that, you have people that fell out of this convoluted system, or avoided it all together, 20-30 years ago. They have been living here, paying taxes, working and contributing all this time, and many of their family members were born here. They may have been children when they were brought here by their parents. So you gotta have some compassion for these people, instead of treating them exactly like someone who just sneaked over the border trying to pull a fast one.

4

Wow. Those assertion are both numerous and not obviously true. You have cites for all of them?

I’m sort of with the OP on this. There seems to be an effort to equate being anti-illegal immigration with being anti-immigration. Not the same thing at all.

5

As someone that has been on both ends by immigrated illegally, (civil war in El Salvador the reason, risked health testing components for missiles, became a citizen) and now having a wife waiting for years to come legally, I can tell you that the main difference is that currently a lot of immigrants have families with a lot of members with different statuses. The issue now is that a lot of the new rules and enforcement are being directed to families that will be separated, many times younger Americans will see their parents to be deported and now the little ones become more of a burden to the USA.

And bad idea on thinking that drug laws are not affecting families and society too, I can also make the point that marijuana laws are also unfair. More than once I pointed that IMHO people arrested just for marijuana possession or sale with no violence involved are out political prisoners. And the result of the drug war is also to have mostly minorities undermined and in very difficult positions and also having many barriers to progress.

It is no wonder that bigoted guys like AG Sessions loves both the drug war and to punish immigrant families.

6

Well he is a bit hyperbolic, but I had already spent 3 Christmases without my wife.

More than once I made the point that it all depends on the ones making the laws and the ones enforcing them. It does not help your point at all when the ones in the executive branch are virulently anti-immigrant.

7

I don’t accept that statement as being true. Emphasis added.

8

I’m against illegal immigration as well, but I’m more against deporting people who have been living here for decades, some the majority of their life, are indistinguishable from other members of their community, have not committed any major crimes, have little to no knowledge about their birth country’s culture, and have benefitted their community and the government as much as anyone else. With our broken immigration system and border enforcement, our government or society has tacitly accepted to use illegal immigrants for its benefit at all levels, so it seems quite hypocritical to suddenly deport them solely for being illegal immigrants. And given how difficult it can be to differentiate the above set of people to newer, less integrated immigrants, deciding whichever groups of immigrants here illegally to deport becomes confusing. But again, this confusion is more acceptable to me than the alternative.

While the United States of course has the right to enforce its borders and deport anyone here illegally at any time, in what circumstances they should are murky at best save for at the margins where serious crimes were committed.

9

Because the laws are unjust.

Borders are a human rights violation.

10

I’m sure Pres. Putin would agree with you vis-a-vis Ukraine.

11

As a liberal and as someone who has legally immigrated twice, once to Canada and once to the US, I am strongly in favour of legal immigration practices. That said, the tacit approval of illegal immigrants by the US economy leads me to think that special consideration is not out of the question for those who have established themselves as defacto residents and have conducted themselves in an otherwise lawful manner for an extended period of time.

12

I disagree. When the law makes all normal immigration illegal, then immigration and illegal immigration become one thing.

And that’s the situation for a regular Mexican who wants to immigrate to the United States. There is no legal path to do this. Any legal path requires the Mexican belong to some special category. So a regular Mexican has to either immigrate illegally or not immigrate at all.

I’m the descendant of people who were allowed to immigrate to America. I’m sure most of the people in this thread are the descendants of people who were allowed to immigrate to America. The President and most of the members of Congress are the descendants of people who were allowed to immigrate to America. So why do we now have laws that make it illegal for Mexicans to do what are ancestors were allowed to do?

If we want to cut off the flow of illegal immigration from Mexico to the United States, we have to open the possibility of legal immigration.

13

Ok, was hyperbolic here, make that the current leaders of the executive, and the issue though is that what they are and do percolates thought the ranks. I know because over here in Arizona we had many years under bigoted leaders like Sheriff Joe Arpaio.

14

Pure ideology.

In a borderless world, the very concept of an ethnonational state–never mind an ethnonational state with aggressive extra-national imperialist aims such as Russia currently is–would be entirely meaningless.

15

Look, the bottom line is that we have a number of much less prosperous nations to our south, including a very long border with Mexico;

USA GDP Per Capita: $53,000
Mexico GDP Per Capita: $10,300

Not to mention the problems with drug cartels.

Anytime you have that kind of disparity, you’re going to be faced with mass migration from the poorer nation to the richer nation. It Just Is.

Not a goddamned thing is going to slow that down until that disparity narrows. And yes, one of the best ways for that to happen is US investment in Mexico and creating jobs there.

16

And also, ending the stupid war on drugs.

A lot of the corruption and violence that makes many to seek refuge in the USA is caused by the war on drugs.

17

In the case of otherwise law-abiding immigrants, especially ones with American family members and/or an established productive life in the US and/or a seriously oppressive situation in the country they fled, I just think deportation is not worth the cost, either financially or socially.

Similarly, while I don’t approve of people skipping a year on paying their taxes, I don’t advocate throwing them in debtor’s prison for it. There are more constructive ways of handling the situation, such as making them pay the back taxes and fines.

Likewise, I wouldn’t have a problem with imposing fines, community service, etc., on people who have broken immigration laws, as part of their path to legal residence. But it’s not something that’s worth uprooting established residents and breaking up families for.

[QUOTE=CookingWithGas]
The situation is grossly unfair to those following the law who are still awaiting their opportunity to come here using the legally mandated process.
[/quote]

Granted, but deportation of people who are already here doesn’t benefit people who aren’t. Just as, say, throwing someone into debtor’s prison for not paying their taxes three years ago, and thus eliminating their contributions to society as a (mostly) taxpaying productive worker, doesn’t benefit the people who did pay all their taxes.

Two injustices don’t make justice. It’s unfair that some people gain an advantage over others by breaking laws, true. But massively and disproportionately draconian punishments for lawbreaking are also unfair, and don’t do anything to rectify the first unfairness.

[QUOTE=CookingWithGas]
There are pragmatic and humanitarian arguments to favoring those who are here without having gone through legally required channels, but you could make similar arguments for those who break other laws. Why is immigration law treated so differently than laws broken by our own citizens?
[/QUOTE]

Why do you think it’s treated differently? Liberals are generally in favor of humane leniency for minor violations of drug laws too, especially where there are extenuating circumstances and the offender is otherwise a law-abiding responsible person.

Liberals tend to oppose all unnecessarily harsh and counterproductive punitive measures, not just ones affecting undocumented immigrants.

18

Who’s being an ideologue now?

Meanwhile, in the real world…

19

I think most (not all) liberals are against illegal immigration and would welcome effective and humane ways to stop it. I’m against speeding too, but I wouldn’t ruin someone’s life because they violated that law once or twice.

Being against illegal immigration is a completely different question than what to do about people already living here, who may have come here illegally. (it’s also a different question than whether the “wall” makes sense. (I don’t have a problem stopping people at the border, but the wall is expensive and ineffective).

20

Is a creation of human choice, and can be changed through human choice.

Here’s the thing, though. When I said that I would prefer a borderless world, you yourself raised a hypothetical: that in a hypothetical borderless world, there would be no obstacles to a Russian takeover of all of Ukraine.

When you’re the one who introduces the hypothetical, and someone else challenges whether what you say would be the outcome really would be the outcome in such a hypothetical situation, it’s really not relevant to object based on what happens in the world as it is currently constituted, because the whole point of a hypothetical is to think about the outcomes in a world other than the one we currently have, in order to figure out what changes we’d like to make to the world as it currently is.