Hacker News Reader

Comment by palmotea | Hacker News Reader

> 1) You don't deport them, you don't ignore them, you document them. Then you let them live their lives. They're people, not a mold outgrowth that needs culling.

I don't think that's a policy that would get majoritarian support in the US. The only people who can and should get deported are those who are not already not authorized to be here. If you don't deport them, it's functionally equivalent to an open-borders policy. Do you want more MAGA? Because open-borders is how you get more MAGA.

What you're proposing is also roughly analogous to a policy of not evicting squatters. If someone breaks into your house and decides to start living in one of your bedrooms, are you going to want them out or give them a key? The squatter is a person too, not a mold outgrowth that needs culling.

View on HN

> Because open-borders is how you get more MAGA.

Pretending that immigrants are the underlying cause of every societal failure is how you get MAGA. Enabling that big lie bolsters it.

And I don't think I can enumerate the ways in which an occupied house are different from a country and unsuitable for the metaphor you're trying.

> Pretending that immigrants are the underlying cause of every societal failure is how you get MAGA. Enabling that big lie bolsters it.

What are you going to do, win elections by lecturing everyone about how they're wrong and they need to think just like you? People thought the Biden administration's immigration policy was too lax, and that was a major contributing cause to the second Trump term.

Deporting people who are in the country illegally is a no brainer. If you don't want that, get the law changed. Until then, it's not wrong to deport them.

Now, that doesn't mean deportation should be the only or even the main method of immigration enforcement (personally, I like the idea of putting more burden on employers).

> And I don't think I can enumerate the ways in which an occupied house are different from a country and unsuitable for the metaphor you're trying.

Oh of course, it's always too different if you want it to be. That way, you can continue to feel righteous.

> What are you going to do, win elections by lecturing everyone about how they're wrong and they need to think just like you?

I'm partial to the strategy of selling voters on a set of policies that will improve their lives and address their problems. Unfortunately neither party in my country is keen on that idea.

> People thought the Biden administration's immigration policy was too lax, and that was a major contributing cause to the second Trump term.

People thought that once they were told to think that. It's an easy sell to blame everything wrong on the scary dirty foreigners. When people are dissatisfied populism wins, regardless of whether the talking points are rooted in reality. The responsible thing to do is try to get people on board with populist ideas that help rather than hurt.

> I'm partial to the strategy of selling voters on a set of policies that will improve their lives and address their problems.

It's a seductive idea, but it's the attitude of an authoritarian technocrat. However, the US is supposed to be a representative democracy, which requires being sensitive to the problems voters have, as voters see them. And that's probably a big part of Trump's actual appeal. My understanding is at his rallies and in his rhetoric, he gave the appearance of being responsive to many concerns that had been willfully ignored or denied for a long time (for instance: free trade dogma, which destroyed a lot of things and insisted people be satisfied with the easily-quantified cheap junk they were being given).

> People thought that once they were told to think that.

Don't pretend your thoughts are any more independent than those of the people you're othering.

> Deporting people who are in the country illegally is a no brainer. If you don't want that, get the law changed. Until then, it's not wrong to deport them.

Enjoy this little cognitive dissonance:

You could also change the law make them legals eg. after X years of work, no criminal record and citizenship tests.

This would completely disable the current ICE gestapo and would have prevent soo much suffering. But i can imagine what you must be thinking now: But they came here illegally, this is harm to our society enough.

There is broad support for Dreamers. It's not as simple as deport everyone here illegally and the public seems to understand that.

> There is broad support for Dreamers. It's not as simple as deport everyone here illegally and the public seems to understand that.

What the GGP was advocating was much broader than that. What's sympathetic about the Dreamers is the non-consensual nature of their position (their parents took them here) and many of them have little to no connection to the country they'd be deported to.

That logic doesn't apply to, say, the 3.5 million illegal immigrants that arrived between 2021 and 2023 (https://www.pewresearch.org/race-and-ethnicity/2025/08/21/u-...), but those are people the GGP would "document not deport."

Reply on news.ycombinator.com