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Comment by tomschlick | Hacker News Reader

I can see how people empathize with that but on the flip side I've known plenty of immigrants who went through the process the right way, waited months or years, gone through naturalization process and did the same to get get their families here.

They, along with others still in line feel cheated by the people entering illegally / abusing the asylum claim systems. If you're escaping a bad situation in a central or southern American country, and then pass through 4-5 countries to get here, you're not seeking asylum, you're an economic migrant no different from immigrants from India, China, etc all seeking a better life.

No other developed country would or should allow people to illegally enter and skip the legal process.

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That's just hazing bullshit, "I went through this misery so you must, too!". You fix it by making the legal route less awful, not by intentionally inflicting even more suffering.

It won't be politically possible to change much of anything about the legal immigration system until we stop the ~200K[1] of people illegally coming across the border every month.

The minute you announce some kind of concession for people already here (which would most definitely be part of a broader immigration reform bill) then the floodgates will open with people trying to make it in before the effective date.

[1] https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/stats/southwest-land-border-enc...

Are you a US citizen making this statement? If you are, then you don’t know the scale of social spending that you will be hit with if that legal route for that comes to pass.

Either way, I can’t see any progress on immigration reform. It’s not happening, unless the flow at the border stops or reduces significantly.

Undocumented immigrants in the US already pay taxes today. Their employers pay into the tax system and the undocumented workers never get any of it back, unlike citizen taxpayers.

The idea that immigrants are a net cost in terms of social services is nonsense.

> No other developed country would or should allow people to illegally enter and skip the legal process.

Perhaps the situation in the UE since 2015 did not reach you. Google "Wir scaffen das!"

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