How much will immigration stances matter? Lots of candidates have expressed lots of different views of what should happen with immigration. For example, John Kasich (I know he’s not an official candidate yet) spoke up today:
Four years ago, this might have sunk him. What about now? Are things different, or different enough?
The real issue is whether immigration laws should be enforced, but it’s not something that anyone is going to clearly talk about. The immigration reform bill would still leave millions without legal status, which means that we all agree that we’re going to deport a few million people. The question is whether we’ll deport 11 million or just 4 million.
That’s not the question, because we’re not going to do either. Deporting millions of people is not feasible, neither politically nor practically, and it’s not going to happen.
So the immigration reform bill is actually a sham. Good to know. Someone should make an issue of the lie being foisted on the American public.
No, your analysis is just wrong.
What is going to happen to the undocumented not covered by the amnesty if the immigration reform bill should pass?
Answer: deportation. Not all at once, of course, and some will evade the authorities for their entire lives. But we will actually deport millions. We already have. We’re almost up to 2 million under Obama. If 4 million are left uncovered by the amnesty, we will be rid of the bulk of them within 16 years.
I disagree – I think any (with no criminal record, etc.) not covered by this immigration bill would be eventually covered by a future bill, were this bill to be passed.
So we’re going to pass this bill and stop deportations even though the bill not only doesn’t allow for this, it stiffens enforcement?
Who said we’ll stop deportations? I doubt we’ll ever stop, and I don’t really have a problem with deporting certain undocumented immigrants (criminals, obviously, as well as those who have immigrated very recently and have no special skills).
Which, is a few million people currently here. And when you say “future bill”, I’m not sure what you’re talking about. We only do these kinds of amnesties once every quarter century or so. Anyone not included in this bill is SOL.
Really, though, with this dialogue we’re just highlighting the insanity of the current national debate. As in, there isn’t really a debate. Whether we pass a reform bill or not, we’ll still have an illegal immigration problem and we’ll still be breaking up families and leaving millions terrified of getting discovered and deported. But we can’t just say, “Amnesty everyone”, nor can we say “deport them all”. We can’t even say, “Let’s keep doing what we’re doing”. Yet those are the choices: open borders, mass deportation, or what we do now. The immigration reform bill is basically “what we do now, only hopefully marginally better.”
Mass deportation is not one of those options – it’s not physically possible (even if we tried, the optics would be so devastating that they would quickly end the policy).
I don’t buy your predictions about future bills. And any insanity of the current national debate is on only one side of the issue.
Why would mass deportation be impossible? We’ve deported almost 2 million under this administration. Maybe we just disagree on what constitutes mass deportation?
And if you actually believe that we’re going to amnesty two thirds now and then the other third a short time later, then you’re ignoring what the public expects from an immigration reform bill: better enforcement. If we’re just going to amnesty everyone, that takes a one page bill. If that’s what Democrats actually want, they should have the balls to stand up for it.
We could use the Romney approach and induce them to self-deport.
A lot of restaurant dishes will go unwashed and lawns will go unmowed and fruit will go unpicked, but that’s the price of purity of our precious bodily fluids.
What bill are we talking about? there is no bill atm.
The DREAM bill can be reintroduced.
Or maybe it’s the Republican bill they’re going to introduce right after their alternative health care bill.
It won’t matter so much in the general election as Jeb isn’t that radical about immigration compared to say Cruz. It will make Jeb sweat the nomination process a bit as the clown car tries to take him down as being soft on those brown-skinned folks going after our jobs and our women, but in the end you’re going to have two candidates- Jeb and Hillary, who are both on the side of sanity.
Jeb still belongs to the party who stopped the bill, and there is the matter of Obamas executive action. I doubt Jeb will go as far as saying he wouldn’t get rid of that.
El Jebe may be mostly immune to that kind of attack, since it means implicitly going after his wife and kids. Conversely, he can afford to be comfortingly hard-line against Clinton, if he plays it right, which is by no means a given.
The DREAM Act is an amnesty for a minority of immigrants, namely those who have known nothing else but America and wouldn’t even fit in in their technical homeland. The immigration reform bill that Democrats overwhelmingly supported last year amnesties most of them, but still leaves millions subject to deportation.
The folks at 538 think that Donald Trump’s immigration comments will reverberate with the Republican electorate. Will other candidates have to react to it?