It means that the majority cannot get what they want. We don’t have the resources to actually police illegal immigration, and the only other way to handle the situation would be to punish the companies that use illegal immigrant labor, which is something that will not happen in a society where said companies are given extra power.
What we can do is decrease illegal immigration by making it easier. It’s similar to how prohibition didn’t work.
Sometimes the majority is factually wrong. That’s why we wind up making laws rather than just going by mob rule.
The majority can get what they want as far as resources allow and resources allow for a pretty decent amount of enforcement: 400,000 deportations per year.
It is a similar concept, but that’s not really an argument for no laws for drugs or immigration. It just means that laws must not be overwhelmed by demand. Prohibition was an extreme case because most people drank and expecting that everyone would just give it up was crazy.
We obviously can’t stop illegal immigration, but we can end the culture of impunity and entitlement around the issue.
The laws allow for rather low immigration levels compared to demand, and the laws require deportation and outlaw the hiring of people here unlawfully. The laws actually match public opinion pretty well. What doesn’t is the actual enforcement, and that has less to do with the difficulties of enforcement and everything to do with the policy preferences of Democrats. This is less akin to prohibition than Republican failure to enforce business regulations when they are in the White House. They just don’t want to. But don’t have the guts to change the law.
In some situations it might be reasonable to do so at sub-national levels too. If you’re worried about some tribal group being overwhelmed by outside migration it might make a lot of sense to forbid people moving to their area. If you have an autonomous region populated by a distinct ethnic group it might make sense to forbid people from moving there. Likewise if you want to prevent some cities from becoming overcrowded, or want to ensure economically thriving communities in a particular place, internal restrictions on movement would make a lot of sense.
I wouldn’t call it a social good necessarily, but I’m a partisan of the GDR and I think it was necessary, and in their place I’d probably have done the same thing. Again, i’ll repeat, entire communities were ending up without a single doctor, because the salary difference between doctors and workers was much smaller in the GDR than in the west. (I like the fact that they had relatively small salary differentials, and think they were entitled to take steps to defend that social order).
No it means there’s a perceived major problem, not necessarily an actual one.
You do realize that prohibition actually did work, right? Most people who’ve studied the issue conclude that alcohol consumption and alcohol-related public health issues decreased during Prohibition.
Tough immigration laws can work too, as the experience of some European countries, and more recently Australia and Israel, indicate. Whether they should work in the US is a separate issue. We are a different sort of society than Israel and Poland, and I think there’s a lot to be said for having a few countries, like America, were people who are unhappy with living in Mexico, or Somalia, or wherever else, can move to and live. But if we really wanted tough immigration regime we could probably have it.
In any case, the issue of Mexican migration to the US is probably going to solve itself eventually. Mexican fertility has collapsed from 7.2 children per woman in 1965 to around 2.2 today, and will be lower than American fertility by around 2040. And as Mexico gets richer the economic incentive to migrate will be lower.
Poland is a perfectly nice, middle income country that seems like a good place to live. They have minimal migration largely because people prefer to move to Germany or France than to Poland (and specifically to the western parts of Germany: eastern Germany has seen a hemorrhage of people, just as the communists knew it would if the wall ever came down). Suppose someone would prefer to live in an ethnically homogenous middle income country to a diverse rich one: is that an unreasonable preference?
You have me there. From the rhetoric one would imagine the Democrats were in favor of almost porous borders, extending a welcome to all in line with the verses on the Statue of Liberty (although that invitation could not be open-ended). In practice though things were very different, at least in the only branch of government the Dems controlled, the Presidency. Obama is said to have deported more illegals than any President before him. Go figure.
Which is of course precisely what is described in the Democratic platform linked upthread. But you certainly wouldn’t get that from the rhetoric or actions of any of the Democratic leadership. They appear to be terrified of the nativists and have opted for Republican-lite positions which satisfy no one.
I continue to be utterly boggled that the Democratic Party won’t embrace immigration. To me the moral and practical appeal of increased legal immigration is so profound and immediately relatable that it seems a perfect campaign issue. “I want us to be a shining city on a hill and all the people will flock to us. My opponent wants us to be more like East Germany or China” sort of thing. Try reading The New Colossus out loud and see if you aren’t inspired.
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So, you are for making emmigration illegal as well. You have to get permission from your government to leave?
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Okay, so you are not just for restricting people from leaving a country, but also for restricting travel within it as well?
Everyone was trying to leave east Germany. It was an oppressive regime that did not allow people to emigrate, and restricted their internal travel, oh, just like you wanted.
If you make your country a worse place to live, how is that not a bad result. It is a worse place to live.
Then move to one, don’t try to turn the United States into your preferred police state with control over whether people can leave, where they can live and travel. Are there any rights that you would allow the citizens of your imagined state? If they don’t like the fact that they have no right to travel or move, would you allow them to complain about that to the govt? If you suspect that they may be planning on trying to move, would you send in special relocation monitors to ensure that they don’t?
At least if you were to have a state like that, you would not need to worry about immigration legal or illegal.
Which is of course precisely what is described in the Democratic platform linked upthread. But you certainly wouldn’t get that from the rhetoric or actions of any of the Democratic leadership. They appear to be terrified of the nativists and have opted for Republican-lite positions which satisfy no one.
I continue to be utterly boggled that the Democratic Party won’t embrace immigration. To me the moral and practical appeal of increased legal immigration is so profound and immediately relatable that it seems a perfect campaign issue. “I want us to be a shining city on a hill and all the people will flock to us. My opponent wants us to be more like East Germany or China” sort of thing. Try reading The New Colossus out loud and see if you aren’t inspired.
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K9bfriender, aren’t you following? According to Hector, they only perceived that they were in an oppressive regime. If they only knew the Truth they would have realized that they were in a perfectly nice country where everyone was the same and everyone was happy.
Whose rhetoric, though? Certainly this thread demonstrates that a lot of people, and particularly right-leaning ones, believe many things about Democratic immigration policy that are not remotely true. I would also argue that a lot of this mismatch is deliberately cultivated by the right-wing media. Which takes us back to this:
Which then leads to…
Deported or stopped at the border, yes (although obviously not personally). And by prioritizing deportation of those who have committed other crimes (particularly violent crimes), I would suggest that the overall outcome for America was improved as well.
As for me, I continue to maintain that the biggest hit to illegal immigration could be achieved not by targeting the immigrants but by targeting the big employers, an approach most people seem to like in theory but are less keen on in practice, either because they have a particular reason not to penalize large corporations and their owners or because they know that food and other prices would rise as a result.
Of course the real way to choke off illegal immigration isn’t on the supply side, but the demand side.
Why do people risk their lives to cross the border? So they can get a crappy job at a chicken processing plant and send money back home.
If that job didn’t exist, they wouldn’t come. Put the owners and managers of the chicken processing plant behind bars, and suddenly our illegal immigration problem is solved.
But of course the Republican donor class is unalterably opposed to anything like this, because they’re the ones who hire the illegal immigrants. So they’re happy to go after illegal immigrants who come here to steal jobs from Americans, but they will never go after employers who steal jobs from Americans and give them to illegal immigrants.
Absolutely not. I believe that the Democrats are doing an excellent job and should not change a thing. I’m not sure they could change even if they wanted to.
The Democrats are against it more now. It wasn’t Bush that stopped workplace raids, it was Obama. Democrats abandoned even the pretense of caring about employers hiring illegals early in Obama’s term. I don’t even know why we keep bothering to force workers to document anymore. I should just be able to walk in to any employer and get a job, just like the old days, no documentation needed unless the employer wants it.
We are. We’ve been pressing for that for decades. The Republicans have refused to enter into negotiations, and, at times, when there actually might have been enough votes to pass CIR, the Republican leadership has refused to allow a vote to be held.
The Democratic Party is very much in favor of a compromise measure, tightening the border in return for a pathway to citizenship for those here now. We also are not particularly opposed to strict enforcement of deportation for those who are here illegally who commit serious crimes. We don’t want them in our neighborhood any more than Republicans do!
But the Republicans have insisted on strengthening the border first, without being willing to negotiate the rest of the package…and so we’ve gotten nowhere. It is not the Democrats’ fault!
That’s not a compromise though, especially since Republicans know Democrats are lying about border security. We don’t need new laws on border security, we just need Democratic Presidents to enforce the laws that exist. New laws are just something else for a Democratic President to ignore.
Basically, what Democrats are offering is to do what they were already supposed to be doing in exchange for amnesty and higher immigration levels. And then they are surprised that Republicans won’t take that deal.
I asked about the justifiability of preventing people from leaving an area, but you mostly responded with reasons to prevent people from entering. Those are very different.
A group of people who live in a certain area deciding that they don’t want outsiders to enter is much more justifiable than that group deciding they don’t want any of their members to leave.
There are two primary freedoms in question here: freedom of movement and freedom of association. Restricting immigration is a restriction on freedom of movement, but in support of freedom of association. Restricting emigration is a restriction of both.
I don’t deny that things like communities without doctors is a problem. But making people prisoners within their own communities is a solution that makes things worse.
Perhaps we should let people decide what constitutes a major problem for themselves.