This kind of thing is why it's important to challenge the framing of people as "illegal"; citizenship is an administrative category, and abusive governments can find all sorts of excuses to end or revoke it.
A brilliant rhetorical sleight of hand - the people aren't illegal - their act of immigration is. By this logic, we should refer to trespassers as "undocumented guests".
What do you call robbing a bank? Undocumented withdrawal? No, it's a crime.
We should call them illegal citizens. Then we can start working towards deporting such criminals as the article demonstrates.
Well international law prevents you from making someone stateless so they get thrown in jail instead. But yes, non-citizens who commit crimes are generally deported.
Also, the US classes crimes as either felonies or misdemeanours (possibly more categories?). In Canada we have indictable crimes, summary offences and things like jaywalking aren't even crimes, just ticketable offences. It's disingenuous of you to compare something like jaywalking to actual crimes.
And in the US, jaywalking is a crime. A crime is a crime, which makes jaywalking a crime all the same. If they decided to jaywalk, then they deserve to be deported for their criminal actions.
For reference: Crossing the boarder illegally is a misdemeanor just like jaywalking.
Because we should try to improve the situation not make it worse. I'm also not sure which international law violations you're talking about.
Felony is overused at the moment, IMHO. Lawmakers that want to appear tough on crime make felonies out of non-violent crimes.
Wrong. Non-citizens who are accused of committing crimes get trials.
Or in the case of asylum seekers and refugees, what is effectively being said is that it's illegal for them to flee a war zone?
Likewise for asylum seekers, it's illegal to cross into a country without permission. You can flee, apply for asylum, and enter when that asylum is granted. There are also rules on when, where, and which countries you're allowed to apply for.
These terms and concepts are not difficult, if you have no intention of misconstruing or creating outrage.
Where you have to have a concern is about ENFORCEMENT. Because the laws applied equally to a white Canadian sneaking across the border as they do to a Mexican sneaking across the border, but one is more likely to receive enforcement action than the other.
But it's important to understand the distinction between enforcement and legislation. Both should be addressed, but it's silly to throw the baby out with the bathwater and fail to understand the mechanism of action.
Yes, immigration law - both application and enforcement - tends to correlate highly with nationality. I'd wager speeding tickets also correlate with drivers.
What should it correlate with?
That is, if 10 Canadians and 10 Mexicans crossed into the US illegally, and all faced similar consequences, I think that’s fine. If there are only 1 Canadian and 10 Mexican violators and this causes limited border patrols to be distributed proportionally between the US-Canada and US-Mexico border, I think that’s still fine. But if 10 violating Canadians and 10 violating Mexicans who were all apprehended faced different consequences, that would not be fair.
French law has a similar kind of droit administrativ / droit naturel distinction.
More importantly, immigration is particularly prone to the law changing under you, so even if you have complied entirely up to that point, you may become "illegal" despite not having done anything, and it may not be possible to regularise your situation.
As an everyday example, suppose you park carelessly and get a lot of parking tickets and then don't pay them. You could run into all sorts of problems and eventually your car might be towed away and sold but generally you can't be arrested over it (unless you have a habit of illegally parking in disability spaces, also please don't treat this as a legal opinion), and your history of illegal parking won't show up on a criminal background check.
This maters a lot because people who are anti-immigration love presenting all illegal immigrants as criminals and use that to justify all sorts of human rights violations with 'but they're criminals!!!' Even the immigration violations that are crimes (like illegally crossing a border after having previously being deported) are misdemeanor-type crimes, but to listen to some political types you'd think it was worse than murder.
Bear in mind too that such misleading rhetoric is used to justify private as well as public atrocities, such as the shooting in El Paso earlier this year where 22 people were murdered.
So I still don’t see why people are averse to the term “illegal immigrant”. It seems accurate to me. The rest of what you point out - like people equating an illegal border crossing with murder - seems like an orthogonal discussion.
If you had paid attention to the context perhaps you would have saved yourself the effort of making a throwaway account to add a moot point.
Deporting people to certain countries can get them killed.
Illegally being in the country and drawing on its resources is also significantly more disruptive to the life of the society than illegally parking a car so it is only natural.
>It's also a lifetime punishment, since it nearly always bars you from further re-entry.
It is not a punishment - nobody but citizens have a right to be in the country so no rights have been denied. Most people in the world are already being "punished" this way since they have no chance to get any visa to the US.
>Deporting people to certain countries can get them killed.
Deportation per se? How? Does it mean that if a car is impounded, and I get to the bad part of town where the impound lot usually is, and some undocumented immigrants or other oppressed minorities who live around those kinds of place rob/kill me then a car getting impounded can also can get me killed?