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Comment by ern | Hacker News Reader

I know this is going to. be contentious, but US mainstream discourse seems to have completely eliminated the distinction between illegal and legal immigration, in the last 10 years. Everyone seems to be a "migrant".

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US policy has also nearly completely eliminated the distinction, by making legal immigration close to impossible and ~arresting~ kidnapping people at courthouses who are there for their immigration hearings, then shipping them off to foreign torture camps.

It is so nearly impossible, that somewhere between a half million and a million people have done it every year for the past few decades (including last year).

correct. that number is a small fraction of the backlog. it's a big country.

I don't think that is true at all. For example, it was considered a big deal when ICE was rounding up US citizens. It caused a big drop in public trust for ICE.

Nearly half of the workforce of crop farmworkers in the US is made up of "illegal" immigrants. The US food-supply relying on those people has meant that, in practice, immigration law enforcement is deliberately selective and self-serving.

So, the idea of illegal immigration as a vice worth cracking down on and punishing has not been consistently applied by the people publicly condemning it (like this current administration), meaning there is a very real sense in which the distinction between illegal and legal immigration is not real.

"The people"? Are you sure you're not committing the common sin of conflating vocal people with most people? For example, I publicly condemn illegal immigration, regardless of which industry said immigrants are propping up, while at the same time recognizing that such industries need to be carefully extricated from reliance on illegal immigrants and also that the management of immigration and the definition of illegal immigration needs to be fixed.

As another disconnect, farmers overwhelmingly voted for Trump. I really don't understand how people are using their brains any more.

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