The Border Crisis Won't Be Solved at the Border | Hacker News Reader

The Border Crisis Won't Be Solved at the Border

texasmonthly.com

54 pointsbikenaga57 comments

This is actually a decent article but it misses a few things.

People need to understand that undocumented migrants are nothing more than a political football. The article (correctly) points out that nobody really wants to "solve" the problem. I'd go even further and say there is no problem. It's completely made up.

The article points out that if you really wanted to address this (made up) problem, you'd go after the employers. Nobody does that. It has been tried, however. For example, the Alabama agriculture sector collapsed when they tried [1].

Chicken farms are notorious for bad practices. Underpay undocumented migrants. When they start demanding safer working conditions and more pay, you simply call ICE for a sweep, pay a token fine and then start with a new batch.

Undocumented migrants, from the perspective of employers, are about cheap labor and suppressing wages. The easiest solution for this is to document them. We used to do this. It was called the Bracero program [2].

Top of this political theater is the "migrant crime" panic. For example, in a country with >20,000 homicides per year, so far this year 27 of them have been committed by noncitizens [3] and that includes documented and undocumented people.

Construction and agriculture are utterly dependent on undocumented migrant labor.

[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/oct/14/alabama-immigr...

[2]: https://guides.loc.gov/latinx-civil-rights/bracero-program

[3]: https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/stats/cbp-enforcement-statistic...

> People need to understand that undocumented migrants are nothing more than a political football. The article (correctly) points out that nobody really wants to "solve" the problem. I'd go even further and say there is no problem. It's completely made up.

For the American political class, nobody really cares about the immigrants except to make sure they don't get too uppity. Perpetuating an underclass is the entire point. If they truly cared, they would issue easy to get short term work visas like the Gulf states. This is the legacy of the Monroe doctrine, the Hispanic countries are basically taken for granted as a cheap labor pool given that no other country will try to uplift them and their general corruption and crime are tolerated by the US so long as they don't go full Cuba.

>Top of this political theater is the "migrant crime" panic. For example, in a country with >20,000 homicides per year, so far this year 27 of them have been committed by noncitizens [3] and that includes documented and undocumented people.

Illegal immigrants would have to be really stupid to commit crimes; after all, they jumped through huge hoops just to get into the country, so of course they're going to keep a low profile.

What I'm curious about, however, is how many crimes are committed by their kids? One thing I've noticed about immigrants in many countries is that, while the actual immigrants (the "first generation") went through hell to immigrate (illegally or legally), and generally are extremely hard-working and want a new life, their kids aren't the same. The kids didn't grow up in the old country and don't know what it's like there, and don't understand their parents' sacrifice. But in the new country, they frequently don't fit into the society (particular if they come from an extremely different culture and ethnic background), and then this can lead to big problems later, like joining criminal gangs.

Second generation children of immigrants vastly outperform children of non-immigrants, when you compare them by family income.

There are some differences by a demographic, but by and large, The stereotype of the hard-working immigrant parents pushing their children harder to succeed is accurate.

I don't know if they work as hard as their parents, but they have higher social mobility and lifetime income then their native economic peers.

Besides that data-driven point, My personal take on the original question is that the children generally don't work as hard as the parents, but that is simply a regression towards the American mean.

That said, just like not all people are the same, not all immigrants are the same. It is a broad classification that by definition includes both doctors and human traffickers. It's pointless to talk about immigration policy without getting into the details

There’s a joke that basically goes the first generation are immigrants, the second generation are Americanized, and the third generation have opinions about immigrants.

>Second generation children of immigrants vastly outperform children of non-immigrants, when you compare them by family income.

Do they? Can you provide a citation to back up this assertion, in France?

They do in the US. I have no clue about France.

Here is a source:

Intergenerational Mobility of Immigrants in the United States over Two Centuries, Ran Abramitzky American Economic Review, vol. 111, no. 2, February 2021

https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.20191586

Here is a podcast with the study authors:

https://www.econtalk.org/ran-abramitzky-and-leah-boustan-on-...

My point is that immigration in the US is somewhat different from immigration in most other countries. The US does a much better job of assimilating people from other cultures. How much this can be blamed on the immigrants, geography, or the host countries is debatable though. But instead of doing the American thing and ignoring everything outside US borders, as Americans almost always do, I think it's important to look at how things work elsewhere and see if there's lessons to be learned there.

I dont disagree that there are multiple factors. That said, you do realize that this is an article about the US and the Texas boarder, right?

It seems you want to talk about other countries. Do you have any lessons you would like to share from abroad?

> in France

Lol

My niece is the child of an "illegal" immigrant. She graduated from University of Oregon last year, works in HR, is starting law school next fall. She was nationally ranked as a cheerleader in high school. As far as I'm aware, she's never committed any crimes. Her dad, whose mom brought him here as a 2 year-old or something, went to school with me and my sister, and he was a bit of a punk back then, skateboarding kid who hung with guys that liked to put firecrackers in lockers and throw bottles of piss at pep rallies, but he's actually a good guy now in his 40s. Didn't marry my sister, but married, three other kids. Never got that citizenship for whatever reason, but living a normal life.

I'm really not sure where these impressions come from. They're just people, humans being humans. They're not any different than me. They're not any different than you.

For what it's worth, Mexican culture is not an "extremely different culture" from California and Texas, which were both part of Mexico and are majority ethnic Mexican. I'm ethnically Mexican, born in California, currently living in Texas.

>For what it's worth, Mexican culture is not an "extremely different culture" from California and Texas

For what it's worth, MNEA cultures are "extremely different cultures" from France and Germany.

You're aware this is an article from Texas Monthly Magazine about the border between Texas and Mexico?

You're aware that discussion threads can go on tangents, right? My original message said "One thing I've noticed about immigrants in many countries is..." The US is not "many countries", it's just a single country, and this is a discussion about immigration in general.

I'm guessing that you're a French Islamophobe, since you keep trying to make this conversation about European immigration. But it's not. And you're not taking the conversation on a tangent, you're trying to change the topic of the conversation to something that no one else is talking about.

WTF is MNEA ?

A typo of "MENA"

What on earth does MNEA mean?

Is don't know if it's a problem or if it's related but in Los Angeles, the city is covered with illegal food stalls setup on sidewalks. I think that's an issue. For one, it takes customers from the stores they set up in front of.

I'm happy to hear arguments this is unrelated to illegal immagration and is a net positive.

the idea that immigration is always a net positive seems to have been challenged recently

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

Nobody is entitled to customers

Sure, but you are entitled to equal application of the law protection from competition blatantly flaunting the law.

Have any of the local stores tried opening their own food stalls on the sidewalk?

That'd be the best way to test equal application of the law, it may be that the stores are choosing to follow a law that won't be enforced either way.

How terrible.. Let's enforce draconian ID checks, destroy families, corral people into human warehousing centers and then aggressively throw them back into the hell they escaped from over the border..... because some Los Angeles residents (and residents of other cities) cant stand the site of a food stall on their otherwise "perfectly clean" streets.

If those food stalls weren't offering an attractive service at a good price, they wouldn't be stealing customers from anyone anyhow. The restaurant owners aren't owed an income and customers aren't a product to be "taken away" or given. They make their own choices that others decide to serve in this context.

Among all the arguments against illegal or legal immigrants, this has got to be one of the more pedantic and absurd examples.

Wait, the food stalls are getting customers who would have otherwise gone into the other stores? Sounds like the free market, baby! If you can't compete with food stall tacos or whatever, maybe you're in the wrong line of business.

> in a country with >20,000 homicides per year, so far this year 27 of them have been committed by noncitizens

Two thoughts on this. First, you appear to be comparing all homicides to homicide convictions. I'm not sure what the national conviction rate is but it brings that number down.

Second, if those unsolved murders, I would suspect that illegal aliens would represent a disproportionate number, given that they are more difficult to find and can easily return home to escape conviction.

Even accounting for that though, it's still a relatively small amount in total but I have no idea what those rates would be like proportionately.

almost no illegal immigrants can easily return "home".

It's significantly easier to flee to where you are a citizen than it is to flee to where you need a passport.

Maybe "easily" wasn't the right phrase but significantly easier, especially in a mental/personal sense.

> I'm not sure what the national conviction rate is but it brings that number down.

It's like 25% for homicide

This is certainly not made up. I used to think this way and also just cite statistics. But my small town has had central american and mexicans dumped on us the past few years. It's not nice.

How many additional deaths do you think are appropriate to accept with the undocumented immigrants we accept each year?

It is a serious question because some of your other points relating to agriculture are spot on. That we require the people who harvest our food and build our houses to be illegal is ludicrous.

It may be worth noting that a significant proportion - 42% - of "other-foreign-nationals" or "undocumented immigrants" arrived here at airports or other ports with a legal visa, and then overstayed their visa, thus never crossing the "border" (implicitly with Mexico) that looms large in all discussions of this topic.

[1]https://sgp.fas.org/crs/homesec/R47848.pdf#:~:text=An%20esti....

So those immigrants are actually "documented", in some way, because they have got their visa after passing some screening processes.

they "were documented" -- who knows if they're still at their stated location / job / school / whatever.

> But one metric stayed virtually static: the number of managers arrested for hiring undocumented immigrants.

This was especially obvious during the last administration* when ICE was raiding businesses left and right to deport people and as far as I know, almost never went after the meat packers and farms and other businesses that knowingly hired the migrant workers. As long as the employers don’t see any penalties or they’re so small as to be the cost of doing business, there will always have a large pool of undocumented immigrants who will replace the ones deported.

I think if they were actually investigated the well would run deep with plenty of employers actively helping their new hires commit fraud to get past their I9 verification. It’s unfortunate that this approach has never been politically viable because I suspect a majority of the population is willing to approach illegal immigration humanely while punishing the actual lawbreakers upstream to address the core economic impacts.

* It was obvious to anyone paying attention during the Bush, Obama, and Biden administrations too but the media focus during Trump’s made it especially stark how little enforcement was going on at the employer level.

This just goes to show you how unserious the whole debate is. You start imprisoning employers, and illegal immigration would dry up with quickness. Everyone in power knows it. But they also know doing so would absolute cripple the U.S. economy. Republicans create window dressing in the form of tough talk, raids, and somewhat increased border enforcement. Democrats don't even bother. They just leave the border wide open.

What in god's name will it take to cause politicians to get serious about sensible, economically viable immigration reform? My guess: there would have to be a very significant terrorist attack on U.S. soil in which the perpetrators are shown to have crossed the Southern border illegally without a shadow of a doubt.

I'm sure that scenario would create something, but I'm not sure it would be serious. See the security theater around wearing shoes through airport security.

That "knowingly" part is more subtle than it sounds. A friend of mine managed a restaurant in Sili Valley for many years. He was required by law to accept workers' documentation at face value. He could get in trouble for accusing someone of using forged documents. So.... by the nature of his business he had constant turn over in dishwashers and bus staff, and hired a lot of staff with "correct", but obvious to the most casual observer, forged paperwork. All he could legally do is shrug and add them to the payroll.

Aside from the content of this article and its merits (or problems), that header photo is just excellent. The photographer perfectly captured the visual essence of what it sometimes means to be an illegal migrant.

Not only the header photo. Scrolling through the article just to look at it's 14 photos is worth the effort. In these days of "slap a shutterstock image on it and move on", it's a beautiful thing to see.

If you enjoy good photography, on Fridays The Atlantic has a 'photos of the week' post curated by Alan Taylor for events that happened over the past seven days:

* https://www.theatlantic.com/author/alan-taylor/

* https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/about/

There are also 'off schedule' posts for notable events like the Olympics, hurricanes, or (like this week) if the winners of a photography competition were announced, etc.

I guess there are a least two classes of good photos. The examplar of the sort I see on those links is this: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/b/ba/The_Ter... To this day it remains one of the most powerful photos I've come across. But what makes it special is the subject matter. There is nothing special about the phtograpy.

Those photos on the texasmonthly were different. The second one was a titled "A National Guardsman standing watch in Del Rio". It was literally a photo of a national guard's man doing his job. He is probably bored silly. There is nothing about the subject matter that would hold your attention. But the composition is something else. It's a piece of art.

Suspiciously, most of the 14 photos were like that. How do you find 14 topical photos of that quality to put in a story? Seems like an impossible ask, unless the photos really are art. By that I mean they were heavily modified. So, my guess is they are a chimera of camera and imagination, which does take the gloss off them a little.

Still, I haven't seen any website put that much effort in to the photos on a single page, nor have I seen it done so consistently well. Very impressive.

Agree with the premise. If you want to stem immigration, you have to help potential immigrants where their original home and roots are.

So why isn’t this a problem in China, Russia, Korea, Japan, or Taiwan? There are many poor countries with people who would benefit from the increased standard of living in the countries I listed.

Also it’s obvious that many incoming migrants are not from central or South America, there are significant numbers of people coming from Africa and Asia to the US southern border. Is the only way to secure the US southern border to raise the standard of living in every country in the world?

US is way more immigration friendly than those countries and more accessible

Current problem is due to US processing asylum claims internally. Make them apply in home country or first neighbor.

This policy has been a huge magnet for immigrants, and created problems for Mexico since everyone now tries to come through the southern border

What used to be Mexicans only has turned into Mexicans + the rest of the world

So before you had to contend with security with 1 neighboring ally, you could share info with, but now you get people from who knows where

Why isn’t immigration via Mexico into the US similar to immigration into Taiwan? Uh. I suppose you could start with the difference between a land border and roughly 100 miles of ocean separating the nearest country.

Why isn’t it similar into Russia? From where? Whose life is going to be that much better in Russia?

Why isn’t it similar into Korea? I mean, I imagine the highly militarized border might play a role.

Did you think these were serious questions?

It's the same situation in most countries.

You need young, cheap labour from somewhere in order to sustain domestic agricultural and manufacturing industries. In the US it comes from people crossing the border, UK it was Schengen migration and in Australia legal immigration via loopholes that were never closed.

And as we've seen in the UK the minute that goes away those businesses fold en masse as either (a) they make themselves uncompetitive to attract domestic workers or (b) they don't and they have no workers at all.

UK was never part of Schengen. Freedom of movement is for all EU citizens not just the Schengen countries

And net migration hit record levels post Brexit.

Boris Jonathon stated that the migration was essential to keep a lid on inflation by suppressing wages.

borders are simply meant to indicate the demarcation of a process : they are dynamic and permeable : to make them literally concrete is folly of the highest order.

Archive: https://archive.is/NDHD9

To have an honest debate about immigration, we need to admit two things: First, that the issue is global and is affecting most developed nations. Second, that the primary concern is demographic change, not the economics of immigration.

This demographic change is the primary reasons for the "populist uprising" of Brexit, Trump and the recent victories of right-wing parties in Europe and, in my opinion, will likely provoke a civil war in at least one Western country in the near future.

Demographics arguably determine the future of nations, and we have been under this bizarre delusion the last few decades that it was no big deal that mass migration was causing demographics of many nations to radically change.

I can't speak for those other countries, but here in the US wringing our hands about "demographic change" is as old as the country itself.

"Few of their children in the country learn English... The signs in our streets have inscriptions in both languages ... Unless the stream of their importation could be turned they will soon so outnumber us that all the advantages we have will not be able to preserve our language, and even our government will become precarious" ~ Benjamin Franklin on the topic of German immigrants, 1753

As the descendant of German immigrants, I'm not too bothered about demographic change. Transmitting the values of liberty are all that matters, regardless of demographics.

Yes, and the most stable and prosperous time for this nation was during the period when we mostly halted immigration. That was also coincidentally the period when our social cohesion was the highest.

A nation can't just be based on an idea (liberty). There have to be common bonds between people to make it work.

Also, I would add that there is no reason to believe that your values are somehow universal to all of humanity.

Assuming you're in the US, the problem is that no party takes this viewpoint anymore, even though this was a common sense position shared by both at one time. "As long as they have our values!" they cry. But they refuse to admit that values are downstream of culture, and culture is not shared between different peoples.

Another joke: the only thing the passengers on the Niña agreed with the people who arrived on the Pinta about was that the people on the Santa Maria needed to go back to where they came from.

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