Since you’ve got some first-hand experience with the topic, how much would you say the barrier’s effectiveness relies upon patrols and surveilance of this sort, as opposed to just having a physical barrier sitting there being a hinderance?
That could be because the United States has better grounds to trust the United Kingdom, Canada and Germany to clamp down on contraband, criminals and infectious diseases, and immigrants from two of the three simply don’t have the same opportunity to enter the country illegally. Personally, if you’ve come through customs and checked out, I don’t give a damn if you overstay your visa. What I have a problem with is people who try to bypass this safeguard altogether.
The problem with cries of racism, is that the vast, vast majority of legal immigrants to the US are “non-white”. I’d like to see every illegal immigrant without a felony offered citizenship or permanent residency, but somehow we need to control the border if for no other reason than National Security.
Ha. The old ad hominems. You know, even IF they were true, I’d embrace them rather than see the world through your mind. And THAT is the truth.
Back to the point: you’re wrong. You keep claiming the the motivation of people is racism and they want to punish brown people while giving whites, like the employers, a pass. But there have probably been a hundred posts in this past week alone that people have explicitly stated that going after the employers in a serious way is one of the best things that can be done to reduce illegal immigration. People have suggested heavy fines, seizing assets, closing the businesses and putting the employers/owners in jail. What the fuck more do you want?
Then you switch from motivation to it “won’t ever happen” and conflate the two. Now, that has not been the case. But I any many, many others have been arguing that it should be the case; that we want it to be the case. Why do you think we keep typing that the government should go after the employers (who, by the way, are not all white) because it would be an effective step to reduce illegal immigration? Why have people been arguing that, again and again and again?
Why?
I know what you want—nothing. You want no enforcement of our immigration laws. At least not any that might cause a non-white person to suffer any consequences. Fuck the rule of law. Fuck the additional burden they put on many of your institutions. Fuck the dumb suckers who who did not sneak in or overstay the visas. Fuck workers on the lower end of the economic scale who have their wages depressed and jobs taken. Fuck it all just so that someone who breaks our laws and comes her illegally doesn’t have to suffer the consequences of his actions—because he’s not white. :rolleyes:
I’d say that the barrier is an integral part of the system - but that’s all it is: part of a system. Without the other parts and the people to operate them, it’s essentially useless.
Here’s what’s so sinister about this argument. Until very recently, Canada & the USA had completely open borders. No visa, no passport required to cross from either side. (And it was pretty similar, if you go back a bit further, between the USA & Mexico.) No one worried about illegal migration between Canada & the US because it wasn’t illegal!
So how much should we fortify the Canadian border? Remember that Canada is mostly land of low fertility. There’s the St. Lawrence floodplain, a few valleys in B.C., & the rest is a whole bunch of rock. If not for socialized medicine, Canadians might flock to the USA in droves. Lots do, in fact, but Canada is so low in population, & Canadians so “normal” to Yank Anglos, that we mostly don’t notice.
15 years ago, NAFTA was supposed to open the borders to general trade. But now we have open trade & more closed borders. Mexican agriculture has a hard time competing with US agriculture, but if a Mexican farmer wants to cross the border open enough for all the cheap corn underselling him, he’s a criminal?
Canada has far more arable land per capita than the United States
US: 1,650,062 sq km of arable land for 300 million
Canada: 415,573 sq km of arable land for 30 million
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_use_statistics_by_country
oh, and there still aren’t any visa requirements for Canadians - the entry requirements haven’t changed. It’s a documentation standard, they’re just not going to accept oral declarations of citizenship anymore or random paper-based birth certificates.
I’m going to come out & say that I don’t believe in going after the employers. This is a way for Democrats to appeal to a stereotypical working-class voter, but it doesn’t cut any ice with me. I don’t believe in punishing those who hire undocumented workers, because violating politically determined quotas on how many Mexicans (or Canadians, or Chinese, or Nigerians) can work in this country should not be a crime. To talk about going after employers is to concede the point to the anti-immigration crowd.
I am against immigration quotas, pure & simple. They are necessarily politically driven, & it’s better in this case to set reasonable requirements for entry, & let the labor market operate freely. (I’m not a great free-marketer, as you may know; but letting the market operate is better in this case than criminalizing people for trying to do what others do legally–simply because they got ahead in line.)
. . .
Now, I have to grant that I overstated things a bit earlier. On reflection, I think it is possible to build “fences” with sensors that will spot tunneling underneath them, for great chunks of the border. With the right sensors, we might not even need the fences; thus we may allow wildlife migration more readily. We can put bases in every few miles, staff them, feed & water the staff, & be able to interdict smugglers.
And we don’t have to use lethal measures except against those who attempt lethal measures against law enforcement. Funny how the advocates of sealed borders evoke the Berlin Wall as if it were a good thing. Why even go there?
We are doing some of this already. But it will consistently be more logistically expensive to patrol the border than to penetrate it.
If we abandon the quota theory, we can focus on interdicting the drug runners, gun runners, & fugitives from justice. But right now it’s easier to enter as a criminal than as a law-abiding citizen; we’ve abandoned the regulation of what sort of person enters to organized crime.
I want our immigration laws to be changed so that they don’t rely on politically motivated quotas. What’s wrong with that?
And what should be the consequence for daring to enter this country as a non-white, Mags?
I believe in the rule of law, possibly more than you do–when the law is not being an ass.
“Fuck the dumb suckers who who did not sneak in or overstay the visas.” What does this even mean? The dumb suckers back in Mexico?
Lower-income workers will be helped a hell of a lot more by collective organizing than by some immigration law that comes out the DC sausage factory. And in the present environment, the labor unions’d better reach out to illegals or they will fail to help anyone.
Before I answer this, can any quotas at all be used? Which ones are okay?
Deportation. As is the law for five or six decades, at least. And what do you think the penalty should be?
So, you believe that illegals that are found out should be deported, right? and employers who break the laws to hire then should be punished, too, right?
The dumb suckers from any country who seek to enter through legal means. Many of whom wait years to come here. Those who don’t sneak in or establish residency longer than their visas allow them to.
Now you want illegals to be able to join labor unions and gain the benefits and protections that come with membership. I think I’m in Bizarro World. They don’t belong here. They should receive ZERO benefits of any kind.
But your defense here is hollow. The fact is that illegals drive down wages through two means: 1) they artificially increase the supply side of the equation, diminishing the bargaining power of unskilled workers that they would normally enjoy. 2) by virtue of them being illegal, Number 1 is exacerbated, as their status gives employers more bargaining power than they would have with a legal glut of workers.
Of course we could secure the border if we wanted to. Maybe not 100% but I’m sure we could cut illegal border crossings down less than one person a week. There are hostile borders in the world that have military defenses and stop all movement; you didn’t have a million people walking across the iron curtain for example.
Right now, we have a system which, in order to work, depends crucially on the laws not being enforced. Those who have respect for the law are the ones who want to change the laws to open the borders, because then the system could work the same way it does now within the rule of law. Asking about how much it would cost to “secure the borders” is like asking how much it costs to get one’s own nose cut off.
This argument is trotted out constantly. Yes, businesses want a steady stream of cheap labor, but they don’t need it. If no one was allowed to be here or work illegally, labor costs would go up, making a good dent into unemployment. The costs of lettuce and construction would go up a little, but more Americans would be employed, and at a better wage. The problem for businesses is short term—no one wants to be the first one to raise his costs and cede a cost advantage to competitors. Strict law enforcement could help minimize and shorten the time of adjustment.
I don’t think we need illegal immigrants (or immigrants in general) for the United States to function. I think we could ban all immigrants, enforce that ban, and survive.
But I think that would be a huge mistake. I think immigrants make our country better. They have historically and I don’t see how the situation has changed. The flow of immigrants into the United States is one of the things which had made this county a success. And it’s a good feedback system because by making the country a success, future immigrants are encouraged to come here.
The way I see it, leaving your home and moving to another country is not an easy decison to make or an easy thing to do. So the people that immigrate to another country are usually people who have a larger than average share of ambition, initiative, and ability. Which makes them good potential citizens.
Anti-immigration and anti-illegal-immigration are not at all the same thing.
It is possible to be both against illegal immigration (and employment of illegal immigrants) and against immigration quotas. My concern with illegal immigrants is not that they are immigrants (and certainly not that they are “brown,” as Der Trihs imagines to be the only possible issue), but that they are illegal, which not only makes them exploitable but thereby undercuts protections for all other workers. If the very same people were coming here legally and openly and working in full compliance with American labor laws, that would be a very different situation.
As I see it, there are two camps in the anti-illegal-immigration movement.
Here are the facts: 1. Most of the people trying to immigrate to the United States are Mexican. 2. There’s no legal way for the average Mexican to immigrate to the United States.
So the result of these two facts is that a lot of Mexicans illegally immigrate to the United States.
So here are the positions of the two camps I mentioned. Camp #1 wants to eliminate illegal immigration and expand legal immigration. Camp #2 wants to eliminate illegal immigration with no change in legal immigration.
I’m in Camp #1. As I said above, I think immigrants are a net gain for the United States. I’d prefer to have legal immigrants over illegal immigrants. But if legal immigration isn’t possible, I’d prefer illegal immigrants over no immigrants at all.
Camp #2 are the ones who don’t want any changes in the law to allow Mexicans to legally immigrate to America. They just want to stop people (who are predominantly Mexicans) from illegally immigrate to America. Which makes them subject to accusations that they’re more against Mexican immigration than they are against illegal immigration.
