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Okay, now if you're an American company and you hire illegal immigrants, everyone goes to jail. Within a year, the problem will disappear.
Nobody would actually suggest this though, let alone the right. It's politically advantageous to keep around cheap pseudo-slave labor while simultaneously espousing semi-fascist narratives about "an enemy inside" (spooky!)
Probably need to give the first person to report a company (that is then successfully prosecuted) some reward like citizenship.
I took a very quick look and stopped after a couple dozen and still had plenty to go. This is a problem not remotely unique to the US.
Furthermore, the disparity between the US and Mexico in GDP per capita is pretty stark--over a 3x difference, far more than any other pair of countries with such a long land border. The next largest difference is India-China, and that's not a pairing that's conducive to economic migration, unlike the US-Mexico border.
An onsite oil rig chemical engineer for https://www.slb.com/ starts at $17k/year in Mexico but $150k in USA for the same job doing one month on, two week off land rig rotations.
You make more money in the US working minimum wage than you do in most jobs in Mexico as a high skilled graduate of a good university like https://tec.mx.
The closest comparison, both in border length and economic gap is EU/non-EU, when you look at the size of the border along the Mediterranean and the Balkans.
Another close comparison is South Africa, 4,862 km border (compared to US-Mexico at 3,145 km). Huge economic gap and even larger migration numbers.
One timely example might be Ukraine, with the Belarus/Russia border, where Belarus is a proxy for Russia.
1. Contraband, espionage, aggression, anti-proliferation, proxy attacks, etc etc.
Is migration the number one problem that Americans struggle with? Or even in the top ten concerns, your average American holds?
I have not had a single issue with migration or an immigrant, ever. I've never met a single person, in the US, with a material issue related to migration or immigration. I have never felt worried about being near a migrant/immigrant based on who they are or their behavior.
Per recent polling [1], it's the sixth most important issue. It's consistently been raised as one of the top concerns in polling data going back as far as I have political consciousness, although a decent part of the existence of that concern is effectively a dog whistle for racism.
> Is the border an actual problem though?
The border itself isn't the problem; the actual problem lays in the extremely fucked-up nature of the US immigration system (and the actual problems are almost nothing like what people are complaining about). Even for as long as immigration has been a major political concern in the US, the border "solutions" have for as long been lampooned for the fact that they are doing absolutely nothing to actually fix the problem, even as politicians double down on proposing harsher solutions to fix the thing that isn't the problem.
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2024/09/09/issues-and-t...
Even if they DO pay taxes it is likely that on average illegal immigration would burden the social safety net.
And none of this gets into the second order effects of immigrants increasing the supply of labor.
I’m not saying that is happening but it doesn’t take much imagination to see it could happen.
Also if you actually have to interface with clearly illegal cheap labor (landscaping, construction, low quality catering) you’ll see the pattern: a kingpin immigrant who only hires other immigrants with little to no English and a preference for being paid in cash.
And you haven’t addressed the elephant in the room. Practically all the “low skill” manual labor is done by poorly integrated, cash-only immigrants. Is this acceptable?
You're getting labor for a cost well under minimum wage. It's a sweet deal if you ignore humanitarian concerns, which our politicians do. The right doesn't actually want to end immigration, they just want to put in minimal effort to virtue signal to their voter base.
There are extremely simple and effective ways to end immigration. You will find exactly 0 republicans who advocate any of them. It's all talk on a stage to appeal to latent American racism.
It may be advantageous to me for landscaping, but on the whole I am not sure. It certainly didn’t advantage any low skill American.
I mean, I guess this might be true but then again "low skill" Americans don't matter from a political perspective because they barely pay taxes. Again, politicians may appeal to them but in actuality they don't care about them.
And, I'm really doubting that being a white, native English-speaking American puts you at a disadvantage even for physical labor.