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Comment by sergiotapia | Hacker News Reader

It's so alien to me how this line of thinking is normalized in the US.

In other countries illegal aliens are deported because they are breaking the law. In Bolivia you would have a very difficult time finding bolivians who want to allow illegal colombians or brazilians to stay in the country. They want them out because they disproportionately commit more of the drug/violent crime.

In argentina, they want illegal bolivians out because they take jobs for very little money.

You can go on country by country.

Why is the US so divided on this? Who spent so much money to push this train of thought for decades onto people?

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The liberal (not progressive) argument is this: To solve the issue of undocumented immigration, we should:

1. enforce e-verify nationwide. If a company is caught employing undocumented workers and the company is not using e-verify, the executives are put in prison. Documentation fraud from the immigrant remains a crime punishable by prison and deportation.

2. Regardless of deporting or not, those in detention should be treated humanely, given food, water, shelter, and adequate space. Parents and children should not be separated. For those not charged with a crime, it should not be built the same way as a prison -- It doesn't have to be the Four Seasons to be humane.

3. ICE raids terrorize legal residents and citizens of color. As mentioned in #1, any such "raids" should be against HR. If you make employers accountable, the problem becomes much smaller. Yes, if someone is arrested and is undocumented they should be deported. No, we shouldn't be breaking down doors and sending militarized teams to do so.

4. Immigration reform is a completely different topic.

Because we're the land of the free? When was the last time you showed your passport to go from Iowa to Illinois etc? We wrote it into our Constitution that interstate travel would be unfettered. And back when that was written, each 'State' was indeed an independent political entity.

Extending this today to other Nations is not so foreign an idea.

The land of the free, pretty much by definition assumes no social services.

That being said, I personally would not mind retiring in the UK with British medicine, British housing and British retirement benefits.

Social services have been present in America since before Revolutionary times.

This idea that 'America Great Again' means selfishness and abandoning the old and poor, is a purely modern idea of the last decade.

I don't have the answer to these questions: who benefits from people staying in usa illegally and why? Why are (some) people illegally staying in usa being 'weaponized' as a political tool? As long as we have borders and nations, why shouldn't a country decide who gets in and why?

Enforcement of immigration policies in those countries, with the possible exception of Bolivia, is far laxer.

Is it? Mexico deports roughly as many migrants as the US. Proportional to the population, this is over 2x as much. And let's not get started on India's deportation of Muslims to neighboring countries.

This assumption that the US is uniquely strict in its border enforcement does not seem to hold water.

America wasn't for a long time. You can find footage of most leftist politicians supporting stronger borders. Basically, President Trump made it a campaign issue, and so the left stopped.

Orange Man bad, basically.

strong borders != a dumb, expensive wall.

The left's position has not changed much on border security at all. Process asylum claims faster, penalize employers for participating in illegal hiring, and use modern tech to control borders.

Interestingly, two terms of Obama presidency have a notable dip in a number of processed applications: https://trac.syr.edu/immigration/reports/539/

I'd believe that under the Obama administration but it's a much tougher sell now.

I refuse to believe that you actually believe what you wrote, upon a moment's reflection. Opposing Trump's approach to immigration doesn't equate to opposing better border security. That's like equating opposition to "No Child Left Behind" with opposing "improving K-12 education." Trump's border policy promises to be both ineffective, extremely expensive, and a semi-permanent symbol of xenophobia and racism.

If I had to stack-rank:

(a) a literal Southern border wall motivated by President Trump's vile campaign rhetoric.

(b) making the border completely open and defunding ICE entirely

I'd prefer (b) - but I still think (b) is a terrible idea. I actually (unlike most people who are "afraid of immigrants") know a convicted violent felon who was deported from the United States to their home country (in Europe) after serving a prison sentence who I legitimately think is a threat to people I care about, and who I don't want re-entering the country under any circumstances (Ironically the deportee is a diagnosed pathological narcissist) - and I still prefer open borders to what the current executive leadership of the United States is pushing.

The question is not whether to have controls on who/what crosses the border, the question is how and why.

I personally think the marginal utility of spending additional Federal dollars policing the border and enforcing immigration controls is a net negative to the United States given our current infrastructure, so I believe we should spend less time and money doing it. That doesn't mean there aren't other avenues for controlling externalities caused by illegal immigration (such as they are).

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