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Comment by stefap2 | Hacker News Reader

Good question. I still think it's unfair for these people to stay here, when legal refugees spent waiting years or decades for permission to enter often in bad conditions in refugee camps. The issue here is officials keep rounding up students on legal visas and parents who’ve lived here for years—exactly the people the article labels “families who had lived in the United States for years and had deep ties to their communities.” Where are the fresh arrivals?

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So basically you came to the same conclusion as everyone else who is against this (and who I assume you would consider to be your political opponents): that even though it sounds good and reasonable on paper (as a populist concept), in practice it is invariably used for arbitrary exercise of power.

Here is the thing: hard and complex problems require hard and complex solutions, but you chose to put in power the people who like easy solutions. I hope it’s never late to learn a lesson.

> hard and complex problems require hard and complex solutions

There's actually a simple solution to illegal immigration: go after the employers. We don't because we want to have our cake and eat it too. (Same reason these raids aren't happening on farms in red states.)

That one is also hard and complex in the sense that it will force the country to come to terms with how much of its economy is based on ignoring its own laws and an incoherent concept of fairness. In a democracy, getting people to accept pain (in this case, higher prices) to write a moral error that they generally experience only in the abstract is known hard; it's one of the reasons America clung to slavery so long, because in addition to unpaid labor propping up the corner of the Southern economy, the northern economy benefited from cheap raw materials.

> That one is also hard and complex

It’s hard. Not complex. Simple and difficult.

"Complex" because we'll discover things the under-protected labor are enabling that we have come to rely upon.

Infrastructure becoming unreliable makes complexity, and undocumented immigrant labor is American infrastructure. Has been for decades.

Completely agree! Did we not learn from the pandemic? Countries run and rely on underpaid essential workers; they shouldn't underpay them, but capitalism pits workers across the globe into a race to the bottom for salary and safety.

So, real story, I work in a university in Europe, and we’ve been told by the immigration explicitly that we need to increase at least 50% of rejections to applications from Pakistani students. Apparently they come with a student Visa to take a Master’s degree but after a month or two they get a job and disappear from the university. And this is not desirable.

The fun part is that they are allowed to work with their student Visa, and they pay the tuition fees normally, which is spicy.

So basically we have a huge gang problem right now, but instead of deporting gang criminals, we’re deporting honest Pakistani young people who are actually working legally for the country’s companies. But guess how many companies ever got in trouble for this?

I think people often forget that even though these people came here illegally, a majority of them submit themselves immediately to authorities to enter into the immigration court. Nine out of ten times, they are just given a future court date and released on their on recognizance legally into the United States (typically with some restrictions on movement).

Why? Because that's how the system was legally designed to work. You want them to stay here, because some % cases are valid (a lot surrender at ports of entry). So then you must ask yourself, what went wrong? Cartels figured out they could break the system by overwhelming it, yet we had a clear cut way to solve it.

The parties politicized the topic by not doing anything about it... and now here we are.

Question: When Obama/Biden supported legislation to hire more immigration judges to work through the backlog of cases, did you support the legislation as well?

There are for more just ways to handle this. These people are tyrant oligarchs, and need to be treated as such. Today's it's "those people", tomorrow it will be "your people".

https://immigrationimpact.com/2015/05/21/bi-partisan-house-b...

https://www.axios.com/2024/12/31/biden-immigration-courts-de...

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