So then people who enter legally but stay on past their visa? How would your “secure border” stop them?
Like, tourists?
It wouldn’t. That’s not the purpose of securing the physical border. For those overstaying their VISAs, we need other tools. ICE for instance. I’d also second begbert2’s idea about those who employ illegals. We should increase vigilance in that area and hold the very top management of the company responsible. Hiring illegals will not stop until C-suite individuals are seen on the news being frog-marched in orange jumpsuits.
And, so why spend all that money to arrest people who are here, working, obeying all the other laws? How are they hurting you? How are they hurting national security?
So, a business hires a guy, who has a drivers lic and a Soc-sec card.
Later, he turns out to be illegal, that isnt his SSN.
You’d put the CEO in jail for that?
Pretty much against the law. You can’t prosecute a business for accidentally hiring illegals, just for knowingly hiring them.
There is NO TEST a business can do which proves anyones legal right to work. None. Zero. Zip. Nada. In fact often ICE gets it wrong.
As I said-
*smart businesses have caught on and now treat their Illegals as any other employee, and get a SSN from them.
So when they are raided they have plausible deniability.
*
In January of this year, LHoD posted a new thread on Default Yes Immigration. It’s less than open borders, but still very open. I opposed the plan here. The following March, I posted a link to a Vox article on open borders: https://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=20846114&postcount=89
At any rate, the OP doesn’t grasp the essence of the immigration debate. Congressional majorities supported immigration reform but Boehner blocked a vote because a majority of Republicans didn’t support it.
The immigration debate involves mostly yammering about border security, even though about half of those who overstay their visa arrived legally, mostly via airports. If you want to protect American jobs, you should penalize American employers for hiring undocumented foreign workers. But the farm lobby, the restaurant lobby, and the business lobby adamantly opposes any sort of immigration law with teeth. So we get jabber about walls, which will do basically nothing. That makes everyone happy/unhappy.
I have issues with the general principle of requiring business owners to enforce laws about events that occur outside of their business and which they have no control over.
Telling a business owner he has to enforce laws over things like safety standards is reasonable; the owner has control of those.
But why should a business owner be held responsible if one of his employees entered the country illegally ten years before the owner hired him? That’s like telling a business owner he’s responsible if one of his employees gets a DUI on his day off.
I personally suspect there’s a hidden agenda at work. If you make business owners criminally liable if they hire any illegal immigrants, a lot of owners will follow the path of least risk and refuse to hire anyone who looks like they might be an illegal immigrant with false papers. In other words, businesses will refuse to hire anyone who doesn’t look and sound “American”.
You use the word can’t. Won’t is more appropriate. Quick, which party killed the program to help homeless veterans? Which party insists on “bootstraps” instead of education? When one country controls almost half of the world’s wealth, the fact that so many literally have nowhere to live is utterly unthinkable. Don’t worry though, Senator Grassley’s getting a few hundred thousand dollars of YOUR money to offset the damage his farm has suffered due to YOUR President’s tariffs. Don’t cry about being unable to help our own while ballooning the deficit in order to reward the ultra-wealthy. Can’t help our own? Give me a break.
I seem to recall someone giving up a trillion dollars so the wealthiest Americans could keep more of their money. Apparently they couldn’t think of a better use for it.
Didn’t you hear? They gave a big tax break to the richest, who due to the kindness in their hearts, will help them by using that money to create jobs. Oh wait, they only do that when business conditions require it, so fuck those leeches, we got ours…
It is already illegal to hire anyone without verifying immigration status. Why do we need more laws to criminalize what is already illegal?
Do you know why I want open borders?
Because as a kid I believed that America was, for the most part, a haven that welcomed the needy. A place people came to when their own countries failed them politically or economically, and that, baring a degree of bureaucracy, for the most part accepted those people in.
As I grew and became more world-aware, I learned that there was more red tape than I could have dreamed, but accepted it because, well, “we can’t take everybody, right?”
I might have continued happily in perpetuity with a slightly fluctuating status-quo of some limited numbers of migrants from specific countries, until half the country decided to start screaming about building a wall around America. It made me stop and ask what the big deal is about immigration in the first place.
Since, to me, the negative impacts of immigration are clearly only a micro-piece of the train-wreck our economic system is headed for (increasing wealth gap, decreasing wages, decreasing importance of human bodies to industry, equalizing of economic might globally), trying to solve economic problems with immigration policy is a futile idea. So obviously futile that it calls into question what the deeper motivations are for wall-building, and the sub-genre of “well, I guess the wall is kind of a dumb idea, but we still need ‘wall-like’ borders.”
Expanding government to enforce borders is a waste of money, and expands an already too-large government into bridge-to-nowheresville.
So I say screw it. Let’s let people in. Until there’s a real compelling argument against it, I think the American Way ought to default towards open borders, not closed.
We can still screen for terrorists or whatever, but barring that, let them come. Give them an ID. Tax them. Let them stay.
Ultimately, the current debate has just illustrated how deeply emotionally/politically/racially motivated immigration legislation is, so much so that it calls into question any “rational” argument for restricted immigration.
David Frum touched on a nerve when he wrote in an Atlantic article: “When liberals insist that only fascists will defend borders, then voters will hire fascists to do the job liberals will not do.” (closing paragraph of the article)
Those fantasy liberals insisting that “only fascists will defend borders” sure are terrible! Screw those fantasy, not-real liberals – they suck!
The vital paragraph of that essay, in two parts:
Why do we need a more hardheaded approach? He doesn’t really say. Later, he says that “social trust and cohesion” is eroding. Because of immigrants, he seems to imply, but does not draw the line.
He’s ass-backwards here. It’s not the “small portion” of refugees who have made it to Western countries that are up-ending Democracy, it’s the current citizens of those countries. Immigrants aren’t killing Democracy, Americans are killing Democracy.
This essay reads like a political version of spousal abuse justification: “we didn’t want to de-Democratize our country, but these people moved in next door who look different and speak a different language, and, well, they just got me so angry I couldn’t help myself!”
The left has always been for open borders…it’s one of their things (unless we are talking about a communist nation, in which case prudent measures to ensure your population can’t leave are always on tap). I don’t think that what Trump et al are doing are pushing liberals and Democrats towards open borders, though. I don’t think that actual open borders are all that popular or even that much of a thing with most Democrats. What I HOPE is that the Democrats will respond with a campaign to look at the archaic and convoluted immigration laws and policies on the books with an eye towards changing and updating them to be more sane and less stupid. I’d be all over supporting them doing that. We don’t need open borders. What we need are programs to streamline getting folks who really desire to become US citizens to, well, become US citizens. There are millions of tech jobs going undone in the US because we can’t seem to home grow the material…and there are 10’s of millions of potential folks out there who might want to become US citizens. We should be encouraging these folks to emigrate to the US, not putting up barriers because of fear and ignorance.
That’s what comprehensive immigration reform was and is. Democrats even got George W. Bush and some Senate Republicans on board! The problem is that there’s too much racial resentment among the GOP block to actually do it. As long as they have 41 Senators and some semblance of a Tea Party threat in the primaries then it ain’t gonna happen because none of them want to get Eric Cantor’d.
To put things in perspective: Uganda currently has 17 registered refugees living in the country per every 100 Ugandan citizens, plus an unknown number of unregistered refugees (if they have family or friends already in the country to help them, there’s little need to register). These refugees are given the same standard of living as the citizens. This isn’t a high-minded pie in the sky plan; this is what the country is actually doing.
And yet, Americans claim that we’re incapable of helping the comparatively meager number of refugees and immigrants we’re receiving? Are we not great? Are we not even at least as great as Uganda? How is it that Uganda is capable of something we are not?
I’m not sure that is a good comparison to use. According to Wiki, Uganda is one of the poorest countries in the world. The easy comeback to your question is “Refugees have dragged Uganda down. I don’t want the same thing to happen to the US”
Most of the new arrivals will be staying with friends and family like they planned until they find employment and get settled. They actually do have support and people they know that are already here. You’ve heard, I’m sure, that most of them are given ankle bracelets and a hearing date. Do you think they leave the courthouse and go out to live on the sidewalk?
Homelessness is a huge problem with many root causes but “too many people in the US already and not enough homes to go around” is not one of them. Homeless people are mostly homeless because they have intractable mental issues and/or drug and alcohol problems that make it impossible for them to retain jobs and housing (even housing with friends and family).
Since you seem so concerned about the refugees depleting our housing stock, would you agree to let them in if they can demonstrate that they have a place to stay and that they are employable? If so, we might have found common ground.
This problem has absolutely nothing to do with immigration and reducing the number of immigrants isn’t going to do anything to help the homeless.
Yes, and even one of the poorest countries in the world can afford that. They’re not poor because of the refugees; they were poor even before that. But they can still afford to be decent, loving people.
Are we just talking about the caravan or in general? I think the US has about 12% of our population as immigrants (about 40-50 million, IIRC) and we pretty much allow in over a million new immigrants each year, so not like we are doing nothing. I think we compare favorably to Uganda and most other countries wrt our overall track record. Not to say we couldn’t do better but lets not go overboard on how bad we are either. Even under Trump.
That said, I’m unsure what the big dust up is over 5000 desperate folks seeking asylum and why people are so worked up about letting them in. It should be a no brainer…the region is melting down with Venezuela in a death spiral and the entire region is in turmoil…and this isn’t even counting the ongoing issues with drug cartels and corrupt governments. 5000 or even double that number of refugees should be no problem for the US to bring in and integrate if they are asking for asylum.