How long can it take to become a US citizen?

It's more rethorical but I seriously don't know how that's telling.

> Europe is facing this right now.

What exactly? War in Syria was ten years ago.

> What are you suggesting? All of India moves to the US?

I find it clear that the suggestion is: Provide a clear and feasible path for people who wish to migrate and will benefit the society. We lack that in Europe/Germany as well and ironically are missing the laws to deal with criminal immigration effectively.

It's sad many people don't even know or think about the difference of regular migration and coming as a refugee. Migration of skilled workers must become much easier in Europe, while refugees are a very different topic.

For example, I'm a white non-religious straight liberal US man with a hippy upbringing that I value dearly, and I think the opportunity to immigrate should be as available as possible to all good people. But I also recognize that it must be responsibly controlled, and the native culture and quality of life must be prioritized (for all nations, not just the West), and one piece of that is stopping illegal immigration. And it's not unreasonable to have an opinion that we are, to some degree, failing at all the pieces.

What we really ought to be ridiculing if not punishing and marginalizing is inconsistency and cognitive dissonance.

There are so many issues possible in a nation of 300+mil that we cannot form opinions on policy based on vibes and emotions, we must have principals and let them inform our opinions.

If states, and cities aren’t bound to help the federal government enforce every law, unless congress writes a law to say they must.

CBP and ICE always had the general authority to be more effective, but did not use it. As we can see from actions in this era, enforcing immigration law at all costs has draconian side effects on civil liberties, and general happiness and wellbeing.

While it’s true, the immigration issue has been marinating for a while, the current policy is not a good solution.

In fact, the Supreme Court actually said states had no standing to sue the federal government to enforce the law.

Many people’s rights are being violated recently while enforcing immigration law

It’s good advice, but a big hill to climb. The Dem politicians walk a fine line here. The influx of illegal immigrants is truly unpopular, not just with folks on the right, but also many in the moderate left and independents. They dems realize it’s a hot potato which is why you get a lot of immigration rhetoric to try and satisfy the anger, but don’t really get any effort to change any laws even when they held both branches and the presidency through 2021-2022.

Prior to 2016, both parties were pretty aligned on it, only when Trump made it a core issue did the parties start to diverge on the topic.

US law enshrined both refugees and asylum seekers as separate categories of immigration specifically to deal with human rights issues observed in the 20th century. While that doesn’t mean any person anywhere has a right to be a citizen in the US, it is closer to true than your statement suggests.

“Sanctuary policies” are about enforcing the 10th Amendment. The Federal government alone is responsible for immigration policy. The states should not have to participate, and sanctuary policies are a public declaration that they won’t (usually because local law enforcement knows that it makes their primary job of enforcing the criminal code harder if residents won’t testify).

The reason we haven’t reformed US immigration laws is that everyone agrees it is broken, but nowhere close to a supermajority agree on _how_ it is broken or the steps needed to fix it. See “gang of 8” negotiations circa 2013. This is the inevitable outcome of the founders making Congress slow/stagnant by default. Also damn near half of the voters being propagandized with immigration ragebait for decades.

When my family came over to what is now the USA, immigration was as simple as paying for your own boat trip and passing a health inspection. It was hundreds of years of very “open borders” before Congress decided to go hyper racist and xenophobic in the 1870s.

It’s worth poiting out that Republicans have long insisted that “we can’t reform immigration laws without _first_ kicking out all illegal immigrants. It’s neither a reasonable expectation that we can do that, nor is it a reasonable precondition for reform negotiations. It’s also hilariously false that all recent immigrants vote for Democrats — that demographic is FAR more likely to be Evangelical Christian or Roman Catholic Christian, which heavily vote towards Republicans (not to mention all of the Socialism/Communism haters from Cuba, Vietnam, Venezuela who think Democrats are somehow equivalent to “far left”).

Nullification doesn’t harm US law. It is the escape valve people in the US use judiciously when US law becomes unruly and malicious.

And if not, is it true of your neighborhood? Of your town? What level of grouping of people is big enough that they are required to help Washington with whatever thing they have asked for? Keeping in mind that our constitutional system is designed around a federal government that is supposed to be responsive to the desires of the people from the various states, not the other way around.

If we’re gonna apply your definitionally racist argument then whites (ie Europeans) (or Asians or Africans) shouldn’t be in the country.

Also, apparently you’re ok with America’s population doubling with immigration as long as those immigrants are white Europeans?

The share of immigrants as a percentage of population is about where it was between the mid 1800s and early 1900s, but you’re fine with that because it was primarily Europeans? (Although, ironically, a lot of those Europeans were also not considered white contemporaneously and it’s only now that their descendants consider themselves white and rail about all the non white immigeants).

On a personal moral/philosophical level, I think lines on a map which we call "nations" are a foolish way to decide who is allowed to go where and do what.

So from first principles, I don't accept the framing. I don't think "national" right to self-determination is a meaningful or valid term. It exists in practice but it is not valuable except in terms of pragmatism/realpolitik.

Therefore, I advocate for immigration policies which are much more focused on helping people and bettering society around me than on any nation-based concept of identity. That doesn't mean I want to bring more people who would hurt others into my society. But it does mean I don't care about whether the people who come in are "like me" in some meaningful way.

(That doesn't mean I don't act like nations exist or agree that they do, just that my ideal world probably would not include them in that way. Nor does it mean I don't think national lines ever echo the lines of societies or that I'm an anarchist who doesn't believe in governments. I just don't accept the idea that "this person lives on this side of the border" is a meaningful way to decide if they get to live in a place or not.)

Also, it sounds like what you consider "national" framing is actually racial framing. Given that you spend a lot of time talking about white people in a nation that has never been just white people, is that not correct?

I do not think most illegal immigration should be considered a crime. That's my position. Moralizing about it by saying "well these people are CRIMINALS" because they crossed an imaginary line on a map is odious to me.

The “let’s all step back and consider my side’s view of this” isn’t really relevant after our side loses elections. If the will of the people is to start enforcing jay-walking, for better or worse, we’re going to see a lot of jay-walking enforcement.

For most of America's history it wasn't even illegal to enter the US without prior authorization. The law that made it a crime to enter the US without authorization (8 U.S.C. § 1325) was specifically created in the 20's to restrict immigration by race. And the violent enforcement of this law has really only ramped up in the last few decades.

It is very strange to see many people in the US (and in this thread) accept the current enforcement framework as simply a set of static rules that just happen to be here, and not a relatively recent phenomenon that was enacted and enforced for a project of racial prejudice.

No it doesn't. What if I want more foreigners? What if I want people to come here? Somehow, these arguments only ever seem to rachet in favor of people who want less immigration, not more.

I'd say the federal government of the United States is currently overriding my preferences about who to allow into the country and how many, actually, by aggressively enforcing immigration laws in ways they likely were not intended to be enforced, and in ways which are repeatedly being found to be illegal, actually.

> And it’s equally clear that certain parts of the country are culturally better than other parts of the country. America would be much more orderly and well governed if more of it was like Minnesota and Utah and less like West Virginia or New Jersey.

You need to add a "to my preference" here when you talk about which parts of the country are "culturally better" than others. You clearly have strong ideas about what you'd like US culture to be, many of which I suspect I deeply disagree with.

Is your argument that West Virginia is "disorderly" or "culturally inferior" because of immigrants? Which groups, and from when?

There were an enormous number of deportations under previous administrations without much pushback.

What distinguishes this situation is that the deportations are proceeding with a complete disregard for US law and human rights. People are being deported without getting a chance to fight it in court, a violation of the constitutional right to due process. People are being rounded up as suspected illegal immigrants solely based on their skin color or the language they are speaking, a violation of the constitutional right to be secure from unreasonable search and seizure. People are being deported while it is still being determined whether they are eligible for asylum or refugee status, a violation of US statute.

The US is supposed to be a nation of laws where everyone can be certain that their legal rights will be respected. That is being grossly violated with the current deportation push.

Staying and working beyond the initial authorization of a visa is a civil violation, not a criminal one in the US.

Laws are created by men with a specific intent not handed down as truth from god. In the case of the US, immigration law has largely been shaped by a racist quota system formed as a reaction of previous immigrants towards the next flight of immigrants. A "fuck you, I've got mine" mentality.

That is how successful the Overton windows has been shifted same in europe.

You'll find it's a lot more difficult to immigrate to those other developed countries

That tells you something.

I too believe that contrails are mind control.

Fiscally: immigrants have above-average entrepreneurial tendencies. It doesn't take a lot of enterprise creations and resulting tax payment and job creation to offset a _lot_ of social service consumption. Inbound migration also is what keeps the US from having a net-shrinking population, which until we can get away from late-stage capitalism is a death knell for the economy.

Morally and ethically: this is a nation of immigrants. If you claim to be a native, do you speak Navajo? Ute?

"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she

With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

The national-origins formula was explicitly designed to maintain the existing ethnic composition of the U.S.--in other words, preserve what policymakers at the time considered the “traditional” American demographic makeup.

Like the real long run, try to use your imagination.

Our cleaning women is just about to finish her three year training program. However she failed the final exam because of the complicated wording of the test. Her German is good enough but formal German is a different beast. She is allowed to redo the test a single time next week. If she passes, she will have an official German degree but has to leave the country because her visa is based on the training program. She then has to reapply for another visa to be allowed to reenter Germany.

Completely dysfunctional in my opinion. The system should bring people in that will be a net positive for the country while filtering out criminals.

I assume it's intentional. And/or profitable.

Evidence for this, or even that the majority of the American people understand the system of caps, whether or not they support it?

> That immigration policy should support diversity over other considerations.

The people most supportive of the caps are the people most openly hostile to the concept of diversity having value, generally.

There's an unspoken assumption there that India and China are monocultures, containing no diversity within themselves. Or that diversity is neatly defined by a border on a map.

Mexico faces long wait times in all of the quota-limited family-based immigrant visa categories.

The Phillipines faces a few months longer wait time in one severelly globally backlogged family based category (F4; where there is a 17 year backlog for most countries and its 3 months longer for the Phillipines), but not otherwise.

India and China have long backlogs in most employment-based immigrant visa categories (but generally much less than Mexico has in family-based categories), India also has an longer-than-usual backlog (more than Phillipines, less than Mexico) in the F4 family based category.

I swear, it needs to amended so that natural born citizens should also have to pass citizenship questions like immigrants to retain their citizenship. How can you not know this? Have you never read or heard a recital of the bill of rights?