Well, that’s pretty obvious considering the questions from the OP are:
I’m guessing that you want a certain amount of allowed immigration to be for humanitarian reasons? That’s great; I and several other posters agree with you. Do you think it’s rational for the US to accept every poor, desperate person in the world as an immigrant, or should there be quotas? Do you think Central Americans should be prioritised since they have land access to a US border, or should the US seek humanitarian-based immigrants from refugee camps around the world? How do you address the unfairness of someone who “jumps the queue” versus someone who waits for their visa?
US immigration policy is, in my opinion, so irrational as to be asinine, but I don’t think the answer is open borders either. That means there needs to be immigration controls, and penalties to those who would circumvent those controls. I’d like to think that the US government could come up with a rational policy if they really wanted to. Crying about the current policy may emphasise the needs for a new one. However, it doesn’t provide much structure towards discussion of what the new policy should be.
I think the validity of this question is… misguided. We’re not in the top 50 when it comes to accepting refugees. We’re also richer than any other country on that list, and much richer than anyone in the top 5. Why couldn’t we take the vast majority of those who apply?
Again, I think we’re asking the wrong questions here. Queue-jumping is bad, yes. Is it as bad as… I dunno, just to pull an example out of a hat, orphaning a bunch of American citizens?
These are some of the bizarre contradictions we end up with. Make the consequences for “queue-jumping” proportional to the seriousness of the crime, and people won’t bother with the queue. Make it enough to plausibly deter queue-jumping, and those who decide to risk it and get caught face an insanely unjust punishment.
Maybe it’s my lack of imagination, but I cannot see a way through the contradictions and cruelties of our current system to a system where immigration is still drastically limited and isn’t also cruel, largely without good reason for being that way. Why couldn’t our borders be drastically more open? (Other than it being outside of the stated scope of the thread, anyways.)
I’m mostly interested in highlighting how a lot of what we currently do, as well as much of what has been proposed, is monstrous. That there will be horrific consequences, and that we need to talk about these. And there’s nothing wrong with acknowledging human cruelty, even to “criminals” or “illegals”.
Refugees is a cherry picked stat that downplays just how much immigration the US has. We are, by far, the nation with the most immigrants. Almost 50 million.
Russia is #2 with ~11 million. I think the criticism the US receives is absolutely nutty when those numbers are considered.
Ultimately it comes down to whether or not the citizens of this country get to decide who can come live here from someplace else.
If we have the right to manage immigration, we must have the right to tell some people they can’t stay here. It’s ugly and cruel and mean, and a shitty meat grinder for the people involved, but you cannot manage immigration into your country without the ability to tell someone to leave.
I’m for the borders being drastically more open, with far more legal opportunity to come here and take part in our vibrant economy, but the flipside of this is that we, the current citizenry, do not give up control of immigration to the immigrants.
The world is a different place than it was 100 years ago, it is comparatively trivial these days to cross continents, if you don’t manage immigration, it would spiral completely out of control.
There are 70.8 million refugees in the world. Figures at a Glance – UNHCR Philippines
If the US accepted the majority of those refugees as humanitarian immigrants, that’s over 35 million people. That doesn’t include people who are in desperate conditions, but prefer those conditions to being in a refugee camp. According to The World Bank, in 2015, 731 million people were living in extreme poverty. Poverty and Inequality Platform
From your cite:
I believe that was over five years, 2012-2017. Applying that to the US, that’s 460 thousand humanitarian immigrants per year. Apply it to the UK and it’s 92 thousand per year. I’m okay with both of those amounts. There’s a big difference between those two numbers and “the vast majority of those who [would] apply.”
Deportation of families is a very serious issue and one with no good solution and many situational nuances. In general I think families should be kept together if they are in detention and deported together. If children are birthright citizens, then I suppose the parents should be given the choice of keeping the family together, or placing the children into foster care. I think the better choice is not illegally enter/overstay in the country in the first place. For failed asylum seekers, I think the first step is to be clear what the standards for asylum are. And the standard needs to be higher than being from a poor, misgoverned country. To even be let in, the asylum seekers should need to pass an initial interview and prove they’re more than economic migrants. If that means more information in the system, more interviewers at the border and entry points, and more infrastructure, then I’m all for it. For that matter, at least as far as refugees are concerned, I’d be happy for the US, UK and other countries to work with the UN to allow refugees to apply for asylum from abroad. I’m pretty sure someone who’s been living in a refugee camp for two years is a genuine asylum seeker, as opposed to someone caught after sneaking over the border.
Clearly the Trump administration is going down the path of a by-any-means-necessary approach to ending illegal immigration to this country. This new policy is nothing more than an admission by them that it cannot be stopped by a wall or more border patrol agents, or anything else, and that as long as the homelands of people are such that fleeing to the US is seen as the only option to a better life, it will continue. Thus, if it means “getting the word out” that if you come here illegally and we catch you, you will be thrown in a hole somewhere, we will give you only subsistence level food and health care, and whatever else happens to you, we don’t care*, then that is what the administration is willing to do. Welcome the fuck to America!
Google search, take your pick of descriptions of current detention centers…
Note, ending legal immigration is also a goal if the immigrants aren’t white, your own cite calls this out.
Note that I expect that the courts will squash this under the Speedy Trial Clause or another clause, but it does cause more issues with the far right justifying the claim that these are not edging towards internment in concentration camps.
Pure sophistry, In some cases, like some people who are seeking asylum entering the country “illegally” is the only actual path for “legal immigration” because the government has chosen to illegally ignore our own laws and international treaty.
1/3 of the people who hold jobs in Switzerland are not Swiss. That’s only the job-holders, it doesn’t include their dependents. Those numbers always need to be put in relative terms: Costa Rica gets a lot of immigration, but it’s a lot compared to a total population in the 4M range; in the US their total amount of immigrants would amount to statistical noise.
I honestly thought it’d be forced labor — you know, building a wall, any wall, so that Trump can point and say, “see? SEE? I told you Mexico was gonna pay for it!”
Right, additional information doesn’t detract from the point that the US has 4 times the nearest nation in terms of immigration and that for some to criticize the US as some inhumane aberration when we have more immigrants than any other country, by far, is based on naivety at best.
Now, I think that the US can and does benefit from immigration. However, I don’t think we could or should hold 8 billion people in the US. Therefore we need border control and some mechanism of determining who is acceptable and who is not.
The United States is, roughly, the size of Europe (actually a bit bigger, but who’s counting*). Europe’s population is over 750 million. The US boasts 327 mil. We just think y’all could squeeze a *few *more in if you’d just scootch over a little.
Surveyors. Surveyors keep counting it over and over. And you thought your job was boring.
That’s true for the majority of the area, but the population in the Southwest is unsustainable as it is. I don’t think Alaska would be a worthwhile place to have to support more people in, either.
You can reread my post as often as you’d like and nowhere in it did I say that 1/6>1/3.
But I’ll reiterate. The US has 30 million more immigrants than the next nearest country. That should be sufficient evidence that the US is not some outlier in enforcing who can enter. On the contrary, we are an outlier an how many we do have. So, to say that the US is some evil country because we don’t let in the whole world when no other country comes close to who we do let in is crazy.
Either have the interviews at border stations at the US-Mexico border, or at way stations near the Guatemala-Mexico border. Which of course means that the potential migrants will wait for their interview in Mexico.
A large part of the Central America migration wave is economic, and not because the migrants are fleeing violence.
From The Atlantic:
Also:
Some of the people crossing the border illegally have walked there. Some of them have taken a bus.