Root cause it. The USA does not have an illegal immigration problem. It has a "huge, slow immigration bureaucracy" problem that makes the legal path so slow and difficult that people are incentivized to gamble on illegal paths.
A long time ago, the southwestern part of the USA was Mexico, but a certain destiny manifested itself and changed that. It seems like this didn't affect day-to-day life due to a generous treaty for a while until some Americans decided they deserved the land there more than the people who were there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexican_Repatriation#Cession_o... -- see the part about 1930 removals.
Obviously, the people who were kicked out were performing some useful economic function, so the USA decided to have it both ways: The Bracero program. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bracero_Program
This program of importing cheap labor had an expiration date, and it was allowed to expire in the 60s. Guess what happened then?
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9017686/
> Despite the forced removal of Mexicans during the 1930s, as soon as the United States entered the Second World War, authorities approached Mexico to negotiate a binational treaty that arranged for the annual entry of legal workers for seasonal labor in U.S. agriculture (Galarza 1964; Calavita 1992). The resulting Bracero Program lasted from 1942 through 1964, and its effect on the likelihood of migration is readily apparent in Figure 3. Between 1940 and 1945 the probability of U.S. migration rose nearly seven times, going from 0.003 to 0.020 before leveling off briefly and then rising to new plateau of 0.029 from 1956 to 1959. In 1960 Congress began to phase out the Bracero Program, finally letting it expire at the end of 1964, bringing the probability of migration down to 0.017.
Why did they let it expire? presumably to increase demand for American labor. A laudable goal to be sure, but is that really what happened? Surely people stopped crossing the border to do labor here and Americans started getting hired more.
This whole thing is beyond messed up and the fact that this history is essentially erased (I wasn't taught this in school) absolutely boils my blood.
But a big part of the problem is that many people do not have a legal pathway available to them, and either don't believe that or don't wish to accept it. So they spend years carefully pursuing every bit of due process they're entitled to, and those stories become part of the "slow immigration bureaucracy", regardless of whether the result was ever really in question. This is where immigration reform proposals have generally gotten bogged down; some people strongly feel we should resolve this by creating a general legal pathway, others feel we should resolve it by expediting removals, and both groups are very hesitant to agree to a proposal that doesn't resolve it at all.
I have no legal pathway to own the moon. That does not mean I get to just take it. Just cause you want something does not mean there must exist a way for you to get it...
> But a big part of the problem is that many people do not have a legal pathway available to them, and either don't believe that or don't wish to accept it.
Even worse, there exist illegal to legal pathways, that come with risk but appeal: I came here on a K-1 fiance visa. A few years later, with my immigration attorney, as we compiled some documentation, I lamented the amount of money it had taken and she noted that it would have been both quicker, and cheaper, for me to come here on the VWP (Visa Waiver Program), which requires you to attest that you will not get married, get married anyway, and then work with an attorney to say "Oops, my bad, can I stay anyway".
That's just one example, just for my visa class. But there are absolutely many perverse incentives throughout the INS/USCIS/DHS quagmire.
Worth noting that the economic literature also shows that this is firmly in our best interests, and immigrants and their children more than pay their way in future taxes and future entrepreneurship.
The US didn't even have a particularly selective immigration process for the first century. It was only after a big influx of Chinese immigrants (and a corresponding backlash) that we enacted our first immigration controls, limiting how many immigrants could come from a given country each year. The aptly-named "Chinese Exclusion Act" of 1882.
It may be your personal opinion that we should have the open borders policy you describe, and you are perfectly entitled to that, but here is mine. Your idea is borderline insane. Putting bleeding hearts in charge, who will allow things like this out of some compulsion that fairness demands we have the same immigration policy now as we did in the 1800s, is national suicide. I will continue to vote for anyone besides your side, even right wingers that I find repulsive, because I fear that someone on the left who lacks fundamental self preservation instincts will put in place policies like the ones you support.
Why do you think that? The same thing was said about the Chinese, Italians, Polish, etc... when they all came here. Instead they helped make the country what it is today.
I also don't see anyone arguing for open borders, but straight forward paths for people to legally immigrate.
I don't really have a strong opinion either way on it, but I think your question was addressed by the natural rate limiter mentioned in the comment you were replying to.
Just like I was happy to have a free blog without a robots.txt 5 years ago, but now with the AI crawler and other traffic I'm looking at using Cloudflare "are you a human" blocks or whatever.
> Your idea is borderline insane. ... someone on the left who lacks fundamental self preservation instincts ...
Huh. Well, checking, checking... I don't feel insane. I'm feeling pretty calm, rational, and evidence-driven.
The two big risks I see from large-scale immigration is this: - people who don't agree with liberal secular democracy. E.g., religious fanatics who want to enact a theocracy. That's all good; I'm fine with screening those out. - economic damage. But here, again, the economic data shows that immigration distinctly benefits the US, mostly through economies of scale, but also partly through higher-than-average rates of college attendance and entrepreneurship in 1st- and 2nd-generation immigrants, leading to higher earnings and innovation.
There definitely are also localized *negative* impacts from immigration, particularly for overwhelmed healthcare and education systems. These do not outweigh the national net benefits - meaning, the US still benefits as a whole - but I can understand that people living in those areas or culturally affiliated with them would be anti-immigration. But these are problems we could very much tackle if we wanted to: the federal government has more than enough resources to help these locales, while still getting the long-term and nation-wide benefits from increased immigration.
So: no, I flatly deny that I'm not concerned with self-preservation. Yes, I care about compassion and fairness, but it's quite reasonable to ask that fairness and compassion be balanced with self-preservation. And yet - even after considering self-preservation, we still benefit from increased immigration.
Farmers at the time were super-worried about the shift, since they already relied heavily on immigrant labor. Their concerns didn't manifest as major problems for them mostly because until very-recently enforcement was (pretty much intentionally) half-assed, such that the border remained de facto kinda open for immigrant farm labor (even, and especially, the illegal kind).
Now that situation's arguably not good for a bunch of reasons, but we've never had a strongly-enforced border, and in fact didn't regulate Western hemisphere immigration to any meaningful degree within living memory. Changing that to a highly-selective system with strong enforcement of immigration laws to keep out a large majority of prospective illegal immigrants would be a totally novel approach to US immigration. (Good or bad, either way, you can't really appeal to US history in its defense, and "without it the country will be destroyed by immigration!" demands an answer for why that didn't already happen, to remain a viable point)
>and immigrants and their children more than pay their way in future taxes and future entrepreneurship.
As someone who is involved in local politics, and encourages more people to be, this is true in long run BUT not in short term. This causes a ton of friction since localities which don't have unlimited debt power ends up eating the cost of this immigration.
Here is CBO source on this: https://www.cbo.gov/publication/61464
Against an invading army, sure. Against the cartel and drug-running, ok, I can see some reasoning there, although I'm not sure we're ever going to win the War on Drugs. But with regards to immigration, I don't see a solid argument that we need strong border control in order to "keep Americans safe". Studies show that immigrants commit crime at a lower rate, right? So how would stronger border control keep us safe? Economically, immigration helps us, enriches us. Culturally, also.
People joke "yep, gotta protect us from that Mexican grandma selling tamales out of her car", and I didn't want to throw that at you. But I don't think it's entirely that far from the truth.
There is a long and storied history of humans being afraid of foreigners. "They speak different, they have different values, they worship a different god. How can I know they're safe?"
But we humans often have more in common than differences, and cultural differences usually soften after a few decades in this big Melting Pot.
There are people who have interest in selling fear and distrust, even if that fear and distrust ends up hurting us as a society. When I hang out with people from other countries, I don't see this fear justified. Usually, I just see other people, who want to work and live and create art and fall in love and have a family, just like the rest of us. And if you've got legitimate fears, please bring 'em.. just do try to be careful that the fear is solidly based in reality, not just something sold by Fox News.
So if it's the main goal to keep people safe, we need to ban unhealthy foods and massively restrict the operation of automobiles. We need to massively increase regulations on air and water pollution. These things will do far more to save American lives than any number of foreigners we lock up in prisons.