I am generally pro-immigration but I like to challenge my own thoughts and biases to make sure I don't have any blind spots.
Just because something is set in law does not make it morally right.
They're illegal because what they are doing is against the law. Broken system or not, it's still illegal.
>Just because something is set in law does not make it morally right.
No, but it does make it the law, and breaking it is still illegal. Morals are grey, while law is much more often black and white.
Really? Why does so much time get wasted in litigation if law is black and white? In the case of an immigration law, was the law made in accordance with the constitution? What about the Geneva convention? Should you obey a law that is unconstitutional? What if it was brought in without due process. Doesn't sound black and white to me. [Add your own black vs white joke about white law enforcement and black immigrants here]
No, it's not quite the same, but my point is that this is absolutely a case where the law is not working well, is not 'right' and ought to be fixed.
There are a lot of similarities with MJ legalization: by legalizing, regulating and taxing, states like mine (Oregon) have hurt criminal enterprises and taken in millions of dollars in revenue, and brought a lot of businesses out of the shadows. It's a win all around.
> Just because something is set in law does not make it morally right.
...and neither does "the market."
Exhibit A: the "war on drugs".
There's still demand for those people, and so they'll keep coming (and especially if by various means we contribute to wrecking the Mexican economy!), but they'll be pushed further towards the margins of society, and will be easier to exploit.
Look at this, for instance: http://www.elpasotimes.com/story/news/2017/02/15/ice-detains... - woman takes domestic violence to the courts, but gets detained herself. What will the next woman to be beaten or raped do? Probably not go to the cops.
edit also: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/02/mexico-immigr...
...at those wages. The whole point is that if your business can't survive by paying wages that american citizens will accept then you should welcome the creative destruction of capitalism. Your business shouldn't exist and more importantly you should get out of the way so that a business which can exist and pay wages that american citizens will accept can take your place. No more race to the bottom.
>Or, in some cases, pay a lot more for things.
I realize that, I'm just not opposed to it.
EDIT:
>and many of them are not easy/cheap to automate.
Many of them aren't easy to outsource either. An illegal worker in the United States is much more expensive than a child in Thailand. There's a reason those jobs still exist here.
I listened one day to a pro-trump Tawainese immigrant (now a citizen) explain why he was pro-Trump -- one of his primary reasons was illegal immigration. He felt everyone should go through the same process.
Those who have had to make hard choices often cannot accept that their sacrifices are being undervalued when someone else can obtain that high hanging precious fruit so very easily and via shortcuts.
I certainly can understand where this immigrant friend of yours come from.. not easy to reconcile all those complicated feelings on the issue of immigration.
To one with such a world view, 'illegal immigration' is illegal in the same way parking incorrectly, or crossing the street without an intersection is illegal----annoying but not worth arrest.
Yes - this happens. We still don't know how many Sherriff Joe and other officials in Arizona deported. It was basically a program here of "if you're brown enough, don't speak enough english, and can't produce any docs on the spot" you had a good chance of being rounded up, sent to an ICE facility, then deported. Even if you were a born-here American - just because you were of Mexican descent, and didn't learn english.
Similarly, if you're Hispanic, it would be hard for you to learn English if everyone else around you speaks a convenient language (i.e. Spanish), even if they could speak both the languages easily.
It's kind of a trap, you'd learn English more easily if you left Spanish speaking community, but because you don't know English, it's hard to leave that community.
That sounds exactly like a choice to me. You chose to take the easy route and communicate in a common language. I'm not saying it's right or wrong, but absolutely a choice.
Why did you choose that option?
I lived in Chile for a while. Although many people spoke English, I chose to learn their language and communicate that way.
Was it hard? Yes. Was it worth it? I believe so. Not only did I pick up a valuable new skill, I assimilated into their culture and learned the nuanced differences between us. It was highly rewarding.
English isn't our national language—the US doesn't have one.
Lots of people immigrate illegally, and many of them stay at length, work hard, and build lives. The government pretty explicitly turns a blind eye to their presence. Then we change leaders, and suddenly responsible residents of 30 years are kicked out to a country they haven't lived in since childhood. Meanwhile, a great many other people in the same situation aren't.
It's a bit like my reaction to marijuana laws. I think the law isn't very good, but that's just grounds for reform. What I think is immoral is seriously punishing 1% of people violating an unimportant law instead of lightly punishing lots of them. It's about limited or variable enforcement of the law, which encourages people to play a lottery where a handful of players get their lives ruined.
America is great at throwing tons of cash, our vast technical and industrial infrastructure, or military might at the problem. Not so much at utilizing the scientific method to determine a sensible course of action as other nations do.
The easiest example I see is the long list of policies which were assessed via some known value like inflation, but never pegged to it. As a result, they're grounds for new fights every couple of years when it comes time to re-assess them. I'm not even thinking about minimum wage here (which still sees fights over its existence) but inside-baseball funding for various executive branch positions and agencies. Similarly, the alarming number of laws with hard cutoffs (on salary, or employee count, or whatever) that create weird anti-growth, anti-work incentives.
I think it was in a recent discussion of cost explosion (e.g. in healthcare or infrastructure) that someone pointed out that the US isn't over- or under-regulated compared to similar nations; it's just worse regulated. A disturbing amount could be gained by going through the Federal Code and just fixing the bits that every expert agrees are stupid.
Our immigration process is severely broken especially for migrant workers. They are an integral part of our economy and would, in most cases, choose to come here legally if they were given the opportunity. What we should be doing is giving these people work visas with a path to citizenship. We have already seen the adverse effects of eliminating illegal immigrants from being able to work as farm labor, crops rot in the field [2], and when prices rise, it will present opportunities to importers to put farmers out of business for good.
I should also state that I have no issues with deporting, though I don't understand why we don't incarcerate, unauthorized immigrants who commit violent crime(s). These people should be removed from our society.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2017/01/13...
[2] http://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2012/05/17/the-law-of-u...
I read the other day that this is an artifact of a change made under Bush that redefined deportation to include turning anyone away at the border.
These statistics are hopelessly confounded by changes to the definition of "deportation" and are not to be viewed as reliable: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2014/04/2...
"CORRECTION: The original post claimed that Obama had de-emphasized removals and concentrated on returns and that the ratio of his removals to returns was skewed toward returns compared to his predecessors. That claim is not correct because based on DHS’s data, (Table 39: Aliens Removed and Returned, FY 1892-2012) his cumulative numbers since taking office show Obama has removed a total of 1,974,688 people and returned 1,609,055 others. There have been more returns than removals only in FY 2009 and 2010. Moreover, comparing across administrations is not wise given the changes in law and counting procedures."
So even if you count removals only, they removed ~2mn people and this article was published in 2014. If you add returned, this swells to nearly 4mn
http://johnhcochrane.blogspot.com/2014/06/the-optimal-number...
http://www.cnn.com/2016/08/29/opinions/making-legal-immigrat...
Because the current system is really broken: see what it's like to try and immigrate, legally, from Mexico if you just want to do manual labor.
See, this is what would be most interesting for me to discuss with my friends. There is obviously a demand for those services that Americans possibly don't want to do (I'm not completely clear on if they want to or not). What can we do to make this a more sane process for everybody involved? I thought there was some progress in the past and the Republicans were almost on board but it never got over the hump for whatever reason.
It probably doesn't involve starting from the premise that they're "bad people".
My answer would be more along the lines of "ok, you can come and work, just register and complete this background check, and you'll be good to go in a month". It might involve a longer wait for citizenship or no access to certain benefits, which is something that is, of course, already in place for legal immigrants, or other compromises, but making otherwise honest people 'illegal' isn't really working. Letting honest people go through an easy process also has the benefit of 'separating the wheat from the chaff' - if you see someone who is sneaking around or otherwise not documented, you have a much stronger reason to think they're up to no good, rather than simply washing dishes on the sly.
The "whatever reason" you're grasping at is the latent racism of the Republican base. As much as you want to believe the focus is on "illegal" immigration the Republican base understands this as a coded dog whistle for not liking Brown people.
It's not about a marketplace of ideas, it's about signaling which tribe you align with. The marketplace of ideas happens in the policy world, not the political world.
There are also a lot of people who are victims of zero sum thinking and the lump of labor fallacy.
No, but it is wrong if it breaks other laws in the attempt to enforce the law. Any realistic attempt to deport millions and millions of people will almost invariably run afoul of the 4th amendment because there would be no way to find that many people without unlawful searches.
I mean, I'd love to not be pro-illegal immigration, and if we significantly loosened our immigration laws (not to the point of genuine open borders, but to the point where a reasonable person had a path to permanent residency in the US without it being a lottery), then I'd be anti-illegal immigration. But with the status quo, I'm pro-illegal immigration.