A system which has been in place since the foundation of the nation and has been fully publicized as being the state of affairs. It’s not like illegal immigrants came here unaware that they were choosing to break US and international law, nor that they were unaware that they were committing fraud by creating false documentation.
Laws weren’t created after-the-fact just to piss off Mexicans. It’s never been legal and there’s no other country in the world which doesn’t view itself as having the right to determine citizenship and immigration laws.
Pretending like the entire history of national borders was made up five years ago rather than 10,000 years ago is sufficiently disingenuous that I’d have to vote insanity or gross cognitive dissonance on your part.
And if AMERICANS were doing those jobs instead, paying ALL their taxes, and getting at least minimum wage for doing it they would be paying even MORE into the social security system.
The system has not not “been in place since the foundation of the nation”; we had no reason for such a system during the slavery era, for example. Nor has Mexico been so badly impoverished relative to the US for its entire history. You are confusing generic border control with a system designed to produce a population of illegal aliens whom we can exploit.
But they would also be withdrawing benefits from it.
What changed when, exactly, that you’re blaming? I’ll bet you that I can show that we had legal borders back when slavery was still legal. I’ll bet you that I can show that we have had an naturalization process in place since longer than a decade or two. I’ll bet I can show that the need to attain a work visa if you have not been naturalized has similarly been in place for longer than a decade or two. And I bet I can show that Mexico is an entirely different country from ours and that the state of their economy is not really something controlled by us.
What did we do, when, for the specific purpose of procuring illegal aliens into our country?
What international law are you talking about? How about a cite? And regardless, since when does the US respect international law?
Actually laws were created especially to discriminate against Mexicans. You should read up on the history of your policies toward Mexicans. Even had a nice little program called “Operation Wetback” at one time. Its funny, when the US wanted us to do the menial labor we were always welcome. As soon as the economic situation changed we went back to being considered unworthy of being there and were treated like shit.
We’ve been screwing other nations in our sphere for a long time. We also flood Mexico with guns and pour huge amounts of money into the criminal drug empires there. We are partially responsible.
Created a vast job market for them while making sure that legal immigration is highly difficult. And avoided punishing the people that hire them; just punishing the poorer, browner people from Mexico.
The idea behind it would be a deterrent, not a punishment. Who is actually going to scale a barbed wire fence with signs that say CAUTION: LAND MINES (CUIDADO: MINA TERRESTRE)?
They’ll go under it, or through poorly built or destroyed portions of it. Or simply take their chances; they already risk and sometimes lose their lives trying to get in. The usual result of our occasional attempts to go through the motions of closing the border has been to kill more Mexicans without stemming the flow ( which is as intended, I expect ).
Building the border fence that has been proposed is expensive enough, as has been mentioned in this thread already. But can you imagine how much it would cost to confiscate (via eminent domain, presumably) the land within that 100 yard stretch along the entire length of the border?
Well, for instance the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights:
So, at minimum, there is such a thing as nationality. And a person is allowed to change his nationality. However, a nation isn’t required to accept a person into their populace. As stated in international law, the right to change nationality is a one-way door. The other direction is open to the whims of the nation itself. And most specifically, it appears to be fully open for a nation to decide the requirements for visitation by non-nationals in any case outside of those seeking asylum.
So international law for visitation by foreigners is that it’s up to the nation at hand.
And are…any of these still in effect? Do any of them encourage Mexicans to come here and work illegally? If so, does that appear to have been an actual intent of the legislation?
Are you kidding? People in harsh circumstances make the choice to take their chances of death or dismemberment by entering known and signed landmine areas all the time. To take just one example, Iraqi Kurdish shepherds in 2008 were faced with the grim choice between trying to pasture their sheep on fields starved by drought, and moving them to richer fields that had been under-grazed because they were known to contain landmines:
If you can’t even imagine a struggle for subsistence desperate enough to make you willing to risk stepping on a landmine for the sake of getting a chance at a better life, I congratulate you. But there are many poor people in the world who aren’t so lucky.
This is true, but frankly there’s never going to be a 100% solution. The harder entry becomes, the fewer the number of illegals who will choose to enter the country. But yes, some number will strive forward no matter how hard it is, so long as Mexico is felt to be that much worse. But, I seriously doubt that we would need to use particularly life-threatening measures to significantly reduce the number of foreign nationals illegally in the country.
How much do you think a tomato would cost if you had to pay minimum wage to the pickers?
Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for the end of cheap food & for farmers being compensated properly.
But the idea that illegals are just abusing us & using our hospitals & schools–when they have public health care & public schools, provided in their own language, back home–is ridiculous.
These people have messed-up economies back home. They should be fighting to fix them. But we should be helping them do that, not exploiting them for cheap labor & then calling them criminals.
Not remotely true. This country has historically had very open borders–with Europe. And we used to have open borders with Mexico. There were restrictions on East Asian immigration for racist reasons at one time.
The system has changed repeatedly.
Most of the world had no well-defined national borders, & even civilized countries lacked such restrictions on movement of civilian laborers across national borders, even 600 years ago.
I’m not saying that it hasn’t been tightened. But I think you’ll find that if there ever was a period of time where you could just plunk yourself down and have all the rights of anyone else, that period of time was very short.