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Comment by AlexandrB | Hacker News Reader

This sounds like an awful experience and I feel bad for the little girl that had to go through that.

Having said that, what should the penalty for overstaying a visa by ~7 years[1] be? Nothing? I'd love to see the Democrats propose an alternative approach here, but all I seem to hear is thought terminating cliches like "no one is illegal". Is the proposed alternative just open borders?

[1] > She lived in Colombia with her grandmother and regularly traveled back and forth to the United States to visit her mother, who had been in the U.S. since 2018. (Maria Alejandra had overstayed a visa but since married a U.S. citizen and was applying for a green card.)

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Maybe there shouldn't be a fucking penalty.

Maybe if someone can live somewhere peacefully then they should be allowed to just live there. Maybe making laws that lead to horrors is the crime.

Maybe the real nihilists are the people who'd rather see unjust laws followed than to look at something evil and re-evaluate the legitimacy of giving power to the people doing the evil thing.

I’ve lived in several countries. When you get a visa, it’s always very clear that overstaying is a crime and if you do it you’ll never be allowed again in the country, or at least not for many years. But normally they just deport you immediately if you get caught. Going to an airport is the easiest way to get caught, but in countries like Australia they frequently check cafes and restaurant staff for illegals. I don’t know why they need detention centers though, just put them on the first airplane back home like they used to do.

I'd like to see an amnesty, immigration reform to make the entire system possible to navigate and humane treatment of all involved.

The current administration approach is to unleash a masked, unaccountable paramilitary to hold people in warehouses converted into concentration camps.

I’m in favor of amnesty only because we have allowed employers and households to hire people without immigration status for decades. It’s absurd to punish the supply of labor and not the demand of it. At this point entire key sectors of our economy cannot function without illegal immigrants. Randomly punishing a small percentage of illegal immigrants does nothing to change that reality - and so it’s just performative pain rather than a solution.

We also as a democracy simply cannot allow the status quo of a permanent underclass of non-voting residents to be a large percentage of our population. It’s corrosive to have different classes of people with different labor protection rules, wages, etc. There simply is not a clean path forward that doesn’t involve some kind of amnesty simply because seeking justice would be a humanitarian and economic crisis.

Amnesty might not be justice, but as a nation it’s our penance for decades of destabilizing our neighbors and allowing this situation to continue. Let’s get a reasonable immigration system in place and move forward.

Regardless of if there ought to be some sort of consequences for a civil (not criminal) infraction, the consequences shouldn’t fall on a 9 yo girl. I have no idea how the operators of the for profit detention center sleep at night.

Usually receiving a green card forgives any visa overstays. Because she married a US Citizen she would almost assuredly have received the green card. The months of suffering of a little girl are just due to a delay in a bureaucracy approving some paperwork.

Asking the wrong question, friend. What should the penalty be for failing to process an immigrant through your system for ~7 years? Where does the fucking buck stop? The US immigration system is broken, and has been, so where are the penalties for this mismanagement? I'd love to see Republicans propose a punitive approach here, but all I seem to hear is though terminating cliches like "should we just have open borders?"

But, absolutely - after we fix the broken system and start processing immigration in a reasonable and timely manner, then we can start asking what the penalties should be for people who abuse our immigration system. But I don't have an ounce of energy to spare on that deflection until the former is done.

There are lots of options between the extremes of open borders and putting children in internment camps in inhumane and dangerous conditions.

> Having said that, what should the penalty for overstaying a visa by ~7 years[1] be? Nothing? I'd love to see the Democrats propose an alternative approach here, but all I seem to hear is thought terminating cliches like "no one is illegal"

How about something like the plan from the "Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act of 2013" developed by 4 Democrat and 4 Republican senators (the Republicans were Jeff Flake, Lindsey Graham, John MacCain, and Marco Rubio), which passed the Senate 68-32?

It provided a pathway to citizenship for people who had been here long enough with no problems, after they paid some fines.

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