Hacker News Reader

Comment by rmilejczz | Hacker News Reader

Sad that you make almost no effort to push responsibility on the people hiring undocumented workers

This needs to be repeated often. If you want to stop illegal immigration, arrest those who employ illegals. A few business owners spending the night in jail, being charged with felonies, and facing huge legal fees and fines will have a large chilling effect. If there are no under the table tax free jobs to be had, the flow of migrants will diminish quite a bit.

Here's a thought: make those who employ illegals liable for back taxes and back wages at US minimum wage. That will hurt.

Or is that already the case? If it is the law is not being enforced at all.

How? Good luck conducting an ICE raid on a business in 2019.

ICE raids businesses in 2019. They just arrest the workers and not the management that hired those workers.

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/adolfoflores/ice-raids-...

Your low-effort comment on a throwaway account is detracting from this discussion. I absolutely support harsh punishments for those who employ undocumented laborers illegally (why would I not?). That issue has zero bearing on whether Anduril’s work is “evil.”

All I’m saying is that it’s appalling to see all of these “solutions” almost completely ignore the root problem and instead become obsessed with “border security”. Our borders are secure, immigration is not a threat to your life, the problem is almost purely economic and I think that is the more fruitful discussion

I meant no particular offense to you, I see this sentiment regularly in online forums and repeated throughout comments here, your comment was just the one I happened to reply to.

> immigration is not a threat to your life

My wife and I have both been hit by illegal immigrants. One of them driving drunk and drinking in the car while he hit me, and had no insurance or license, and had a prior DUI that he missed court for. The other (one that hit my wife’s car) simply didn’t have insurance, but wasn’t drinking.

My wife’s car had to be repaired heavily (over $5,000), which was paid for by our insurance, and the $500 adoptable was paid for by us. When my car was hit in the back, both of us were in the car, both of us had serious concussions because this accident was much worse. This is the one where the guy was driving with a beer in his hand, and he tried to leave the scene of the accident but one of his engine’s Peripherals was hanging out Of his hood and he couldn’t get his car to start.

The fact that the people in question were immigrants (one from Honduras, the other I’m not sure) Is not the problem. The problem is that they are here illegally and in a sanctuary county, which means that the law-enforcement is in a Weird position where they cannot really do anything about petty crimes like driving under the influence, because it’s an expensive process of dealing with the county. So, in both cases, these people are still roaming around probably hitting other people, meanwhile both of us have had to pay to fix our own vehicles and had at least medium level injuries (concussion symptoms last for a lot longer than I realized, and we were both Having serious issues a month later).

So, while immigrants don’t necessarily Harm people, illegal immigration certainly does.

That’s awful. I’m sorry that happened to you. But I’m not sure I understand your argument. If one or both of these drivers were legally in the US, what would law enforcement do differently? From my reading of your situation, it sounds like you had the misfortune of twice encountering under-insured drivers, and had to deal with the consequences. How did you make the (il)logical jump from that to, “Illegal immigration harms people?” It sounds like a causal logical fallacy to me, but I’d appreciate being corrected if you think I’m wrong.

Some general problems your situation unintentionally alludes to (not perhaps in your state, but common in the south) are criminalizing the issuance of drivers licenses to undocumented people (which literally prevents them from obtaining insurance), and the fact that these people are working in the shadows and thus being underpaid (and thus not being able to pay for insurance).

The problem of under-insured drivers (estimated about 13% of all drivers) is real. Many folks have proposed ways to quantify and address the problem (e.g., [1]).

[1] https://www.naic.org/cipr_topics/topic_uninsured_motorists.h...

Thanks for the reply. Both were illegal immigrants; one had a license and wasn’t DUI. The answer to why I think this is caused by the illegal status is that, pertaining to when the Honduran immigrant (the DUI one) hit me, I went out of town with my wife during the period of time when he was supposed to go to court and obviously go to jail because he had done the same thing 11 months before and actually left the scene in that case, so he was already wanted, and so I thought “surely he will go to jail for many months...” when we got back to town I called the prosecuting attorney to ask her what happen with his sentencing/verdict/etc., and she told me that he didn’t show up to court. So I asked her “so are you going to go arrest him?“, And she informed me that they don’t handle cases like this by going to the house to arrest him. I was confused thinking ‘oh so this is going to be like an outstanding warrant and he will get arrested when he gets pulled over at some point’. I was frustrated but I thought ‘well it’s only in evitable that he will go to jail eventually’. But then I realized, ‘wait a minute, if he was already arrested for the same thing 11 months before and they didn’t even keep him in jail longer than 12 hours in the drunk tank, why would they ever put him in jail...’. That’s when I started asking more questions and found out (from the PA’s secretary) that the reason they couldn’t arrest him is because if they were to try him for contempt of court they would end up having to deport him, and this is when I found out we were living in a sanctuary county.

So the reason he was drinking and driving isn’t because he’s an illegal immigrant or because he was from Honduras. It’s because there is no rule of law when you are letting people break your laws to get into the country to begin with. And if there is no law there is no accountability. If I didn’t have to worry about getting in trouble myself, I might be out drinking rum runners on the highway 24 hours a day.

We all like to think of ourselves as virtuous, but, without accountability to the rest of society, we are just wild animals on this rock floating through space.

>Our borders are secure, immigration is not a threat to your life

Police keep finding bodies [0] of MS-13 victims [1] buried in parks [2] in my area, so pardon me if I disagree.

[0] https://beta.washingtonpost.com/local/public-safety/ms-13-me...

[1] https://patch.com/virginia/greateralexandria/teen-pleads-gui...

[2] https://beta.washingtonpost.com/local/public-safety/fairfax-...

Risk is relative. What’s your standard for being secure? The homicide rate in the US is 4.9/100k people, which is lower than the global average. Is your standard for security measured by this metric? If so, you should feel quite good; the rate in Fairfax county is 1.9/100k people. Or is it that you’re allowing the emotion aroused by the splashy headlines you linked to color your judgement?

In response, I'll ask you this: how do you feel about the private ownership of assault-style rifles?

Risk is relative. What’s your standard for being secure? The rifle homicide rate in the US is 0.18/100k people [0], which includes hunting and "traditional" rifles in addition to assault-style weapons. Is your standard for security measured by this metric? If so, you should feel quite good. Or is it that you’re allowing the emotion aroused by splashy headlines to color your judgement?

To answer you directly: I wouldn't make my home more dangerous if I can avoid it, barring some counterbalancing upside. The counterargument that, "it's still way better than living in a favela!" doesn't work for me.

Economically, mass low-skill migration has significant downsides for low-skill American workers. The "upside" is an increase in the total economic pie for U.S. citizens, but only because capitalists can exploit migrant workers even harder, and non-citizen workers' shares of the pie don't count.

[0] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/08/16/what-the-da...

[1] https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/09/trump-clinto...

Wrong. I’m not bothered by privately owned assault rifles because of the homicide rate. And, this time, you went to a straw man logical fallacy. I said Fairfax was better than the rest of the US, and not a favela. So, I’ll go back to my original question: what’s your standard for feeling secure?

>Wrong. I’m not bothered by privately owned assault rifles because of the homicide rate.

Sure, and neither am I bothered by your statistics.

My standard is feeling safe when I walk late at night. I don’t feel safe when gang members dig shallow graves in the park up the road, or tag buildings in my neighborhood with gang signs, or recruit in increasing numbers from local high schools. I don’t feel safe when the police chief describes gang murders as “out of control.” [0]

Nor am I comforted when Internet strangers patronize me, and deny the validity of my own thoughts and experiences. I don’t have anything left to say to you within the HN community guidelines.

[0] https://www.fairfaxcounty.gov/springfield/sites/springfield/...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com