When my great-grandparents arrived in 1907 and 1908, the forces that drove them to the US were the same as the ones driving people from Mexico to the US: poverty, corrupt government at home, etc. At the time, though, the laws were incredibly permissive, and almost anyone could come in and work.
The requirements to immigrate now are so dramatically different that none of my ancestors could have come in. The immigration laws are quite simply unjust, and equally clearly dysfunctional if that many millions of people manage to break them.
Because the laws are wrong. Because the reason they are here is that we need them. Because they are a net positive to society. Because they simply had zero legal options to immigrate properly. Because it is blatantly obvious that the grand majority of opposition to them is based entirely on racism and xenophobia.
Then I suggest you create your own thread on the merits of a borderless world. This topic is about the world in which we live and it has international borders and nations interested in those borders being respected and protected vis-a-vis movement of people.
Can you explain what this means? Let’s say a 3 year old is brought by her parents to the US, and many years later, tries to enroll in college and somehow pops up on the government’s radar screen. I’d be fine with having that person have a path to a green card and eventually citizenship. What do you mean, “a solution that somehow acknowledges the law?”
Yes, a border patrol and some sort of wall (like we mostly have) is not a bad idea. keeps out smugglers too.
Deporting criminals is a Good idea.
My Compromise: amnesty. If you entered the country legally, paid your taxes, kept your nose clean for 5 years, you get a green card and path to citizenship. If you entered the country illegally, paid your taxes, kept your nose clean for 10 years, you get a green card and path to citizenship. No felony convictions at all. Minors are exempt from how they entered.
I suppose it depends on your definition of “liberal.”
I would consider myself a classical liberal. I view freedom of movement (the ability to vote with one’s feet) to be the most important liberty of all, therefore I view all border/immigration controls as an unwelcome imposition on the right—which should belong to every human simply for being born as such—to go wherever one wants, whenever one wants, with whomever one wishes to accompany (so long as the “whomever” is a willing participant), for any non-violent purpose.
A person’s mere presence within some imaginary lines drawn on the map violates no one’s rights, and one of my fundamental beliefs is that persons who have not violated the rights of other persons should have an absolute right to be left alone by all forms of authority, no matter where they find themselves.
The OP seems to be starting from the premise that if illegal immigrants had just followed the rules, everything would be hunky-dory. In this reality, though, there is no legally-mandated process most of them even could follow, because they’re not eligible under current law.
There’s no immigration category for “I’m a hard-working and law-abiding person and I want to be an American.” We simply don’t accept applications from people for whom this is their sole rationale. All would-be immigrants have to fit into one of the approved categories (parent, child, sibling, or spouse of somebody who’s already a citizen, professionals holding advanced degrees, religious workers, Iraqi translators, people with a million dollars or more to invest, etc.); if you don’t fit into a category, you’re not eligible to follow the process.
Residents of Mexico, El Salvador, and some other countries aren’t even eligible to apply for the immigration lottery. If we had a realistic immigration process and allowed hard-working Mexican nationals to apply for legal immigration, or even legal work permits, the number of Mexicans trying to sneak across the border would drop sharply. We don’t, and therefore we have the problems we do.
It’s about whether or not one should oppose illegal immigration, and my first response was me giving my reason why I oppose it.
You’re the one who introduced a hypothetical situation into the discussion–and it, too, was perfectly relevant, because you were trying to discredit my reasoning (a perfectly legitimate thing to do).
Borders are definitely an infringement of the right to leave, so long as any state has the authority to deny entry.
The most ridiculous aspect of any of it is this: You can follow the letter of every law and regulation on the books with regard to immigration; you can apply for a visa, pay the fee, and have consular officer approve that visa, and the guards at the border still have the right to refuse you at their discretion. They don’t even need a reason any more valid than that they were constipated that morning. They don’t even need to prove that you lied on your visa application. What is that if not tyranny?
People who are refused entry at airports could easily be out thousands of dollars in travel costs, as well, in spite of having followed every rule on the books, just because the customs agent is in a foul mood. Why is that a good thing?
A borderless world mean that all nations must needs accept every other nations laws on banning materials that they consider dangerous or harmful. No taxes on tobacco or booze, no gun purchase laws, no drug possession laws, no import taxes.
Enemy spies or terrorists can pass freely in, carrying what they need.
Russia isn’t an ethno-national state, it’s a multinational state (the successor state of two multinational empires). Russian public opinion is more ethnonationalistic than public opinion in America or Western Europe, but that isn’t particularly reflected by their constitution, or the ideology of the ruling party.
QuickSilver’s question is still a good one, because the whole reason Russia and the Ukraine are currently in a state of conflict is because Russians and Ukrainians have very different views about what sort of society they want to live in. Which is, in part, the same reason countries and borders exist. If you don’t have the right to exclude whoever you want, you don’t actually have much of a society or a community.
I don’t accept that “everyone has the right to leave their country” as a general moral rule, but even if I did, your conclusion doesn’t follow.
In order for people to be free to leave their country, all that’s really necessary is for one country to welcome immigration, not for every country to do so.
Do you think everyone should have free access to your house?
The territory of a country is the collective property of a group of people (whether you define that group in civic or ethnic terms), and of the country’s government, and they have the same right, in principle, to decide to exclude you for any reason (or for no reason at all) that you have the right to exclude, say, me, from your house.
I am not opposed to illegal immigration, which is not to say that I am in favor of it. (Just as I am not opposed to abortion, which is not to say that I am in favor of it.)
I see the majority of illegal immigrants as victims of untenable circumstances. When I consider someone a victim, I am more sympathetic to their plight.
I would very much like to see a friendly approach to immigrants coming over our southern borders (similar to what we saw with mostly European immigrants many many decades ago.)
Clearly there is a labor need being filled, we should work harder to support that.
I would suggest that by treating so many people as a problem, we are diluting our ability to identify and deal with the real problems. (Kinda like chicken little, eh?)
Any “law” which makes it illegal for a person who is not a convicted felon to move is a bad law and shouldn’t be followed. Seriously, if there was a law that said “People from Tyson’s Corner, VA are not allowed to move to North Carolina”, and there was an employer there who offered you a lucrative job, you wouldn’t consider saying “Screw that, North Carolina, here I come!”?
And the borders arguments are ignorant. We had zero laws against immigration in the 19th century, and the US still had borders, laws, and military defense. Illinois has borders, but people from the rest of the country can still pass through them or settle in Illinois without issue. People equating migration with “invasion” are being disingenuous at best.
And why should societies have the same rights as individual humans? Society doesn’t have emotion or feeling, neither does it suffer in any way, as those things are experienced only by individuals. Why should the collective be entitled to enforce anything other than peaceful coexistence on individuals? Why shouldn’t all individuals be treated equally under the law, no matter whence they originated?
If a person born in Mexico uses his own money to buy or rent house next door to me, and then moves into it without permission from the United States government to immigrate, how have my or anyone else’s rights been violated? What freedoms have I lost as a result of his buying or renting that house and living in it? In what ways have I suffered from the fact that he is not an American or otherwise “legal” resident?
Would not my taxpayer dollars be better spent on fighting actual crimes—the kinds of crimes that actually contribute to suffering in this world? Rather than treating someone as a criminal simply because he’s on the wrong side of a national boundary?