Luz shares her apartment with her husband, also from Mexico and also undocumented. They met in America. He works in a bar. They have a young daughter who was born in America and is therefore a US citizen.
Ok. I’m not from the US and thought this was obvious. Is anyone in favor of undocumented or illegal immigrants? I thought the actual problem was deportations with no trials. It seems obvious no one should support illegal immigration. I think instead you should support allowing more people to inmigrate
No, illegal not so much - but the system is fucking broken and it leaves a lot of situations ambiguous. Also the current regime is racial profiling so it doesn’t even matter if you’re a citizen.
I can simultaneously support a better immigration process and system - and also say that illegality is illegality - BUT ALSO say that people should be treated like people and given the circumstances be afforded certain rights and procedures that are civil.
But we’re getting none of that and we need billionaires and corporations and current leadership to fear us.
The problem is that system changes arbitrarily from one administration to the next, and people who thought they were protected suddenly find themselves unprotected, and then some clown comes along, and just starts throwing out people who thought they were safe for YEARS.
Even Ronald Reagan was able to come up with a fairly reasonable program to deal with the issue at the time, but the current MAGA Nazis literally take pleasure in oppressing people, and undocumented people are easy, low hanging fruit.
While you’re right, there’s still a big difference from legal immigrants who were granted temporary residence and illegal immigrants. The former were allowed into the country for a limited duration of time, but the latter weren’t allowed in the first place.
I agree with you that the country’s migration system needs an overhaul, however being impatient or dissatisfied with the current system is not an excuse to cross into the country illegally.
The process gets longer or shorter depending on the administration, but the general immigration rules have been more less the same. The only thing that I can think of that can apply to what you’re saying is the temporary protection program, but that’s a whole different subject.
Look at all the times things have changed. What do you think happens to the people that are established that no longer qualify and are part way through the process?
I mean the criticism you’re providing is fair imo, and I don’t necessarily disagree with wanting more clarity and consistency, however, I’m not referring to people who end up being illegal immigrants due to things out of their control like a change of legislation. I’m talking about people who intentionally chose to come illegally, especially those who do so because they’re not satisfied with the system.
I had an argument, you don’t. The reason for that is simple, you’re incapable of defending your views on their own merits so you results to these low level insults. In the end, it means nothing because you’re showing that you have nothing of value to say.
There have been all sorts of asylum programs, DACA, pathways to citizenship, etc. Trump recently cancelled a program that was protecting 200,000 people from countries like Venezuela. Many people were recruited into the military with the false promise that serving in the military would protect them. Many, many people have legitimately thought they were here under the protection of one program or another, only to have it end, and replaced by a new one.
Now, even people with Green Cards, or even CITIZENSHIP, are being scrutinized. Even Birthright Citizenship is being questioned. Rubio today announced that they will remove passports of AMERICAN citizens who criticize the administration. It seems even actual American citizens aren’t even safe.
Just because the Conservative Propaganda Machine doesn’t tell you about it, and you are too ignorant to look into it, doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.
Stop thinking like a MAGA Nazi Traitor, and start thinking like an American.
There have been all sorts of asylum programs, DACA, pathways to citizenship, etc. Trump recently cancelled a program that was protecting 200,000 people from countries like Venezuela. Many people were recruited into the military with the false promise that serving in the military would protect them. Many, many people have legitimately thought they were here under the protection of one program or another, only to have it end, and replaced by a new one.
Also Afghans who previously were fighting off the Taliban alongside US troops, had to get out and try getting asylum, but now seen as unwanted, to be cuffed by ICE and thrown back to Kabul to be possibly imprisoned or executed.
It ia more nuanced than that. What makes immigration “illegal” is incredibly arbitrary and inconsistent as a matter of both practice AND law in the USA. Moreover, there are many who believe, as I do, that people have a right to try making a home wherever they are. Where immigration is a problem, it isn’t an immigration problem but rather a collapse of existing broken aspects of the society–the immigration pressure just brings these failings to light.
Complete nonsense. Countries have borders and if you cross into another country without the proper legal channels then you’re an illegal immigrant. It’s simple as that. Trying to circumnavigate immigration laws is very much a problem.
What constitutes a legal channel is not “simple” and you’re either being disingenuous or are wildly ignorant of the practical reality of immigration. Regardless, it also is totally reasonable to believe that “circumnavigating immigration laws” is very much a non-issue and by and large it is totally unimportant whether an immigrant is documented or not, as far as the state is concerned–if anything, the state, such that it is a unitary entity with its own interests, benefits from undocumented immigrants as they pay into the system and minimally draw out of it (this is also a bad thing, imo, but I suspect we disagree on why).
It doesn’t matter whether the immigration system is simple or convulsed. It is still the immigration system of the country, and you have to respect it. Feeling dissatisfied or impatient with it is not a valid excuse to actually smuggle yourself into the country illegally. With the sole exception of genuine asylum seekers, nobody has a moral argument, let alone, a legal one to be in any country illegally. Nobody is entitled to being an immigrant to any country. Immigration is a privilege, always has been and always will be, and you have to respect the customs of the country you want to immigrate to. If they’re reviewing your case then you have to be patient, and if they rejected you then you have to accept that decision.
Also, it’s completely asinine to try passing off illegal immigration as some sort of non issue. That’s just an out of touch take. It is an absolutely MASSIVE issue. Here’s just a few ways where it’s a problem:
Security: You have random people inside the country that are not known, tracked, and vetted. That’s a major national security threat as it leaves your society vulnerable to smugglers, foreign adversaries’ agents, human traffickers, terrorists, and a whole host of other criminals that could wander in and out of the country with no supervision, approval or consequence.
Legal: Countries have laws for a reason, they’re there to reflect the public interest and will. Having people blatantly violate them is a serious challenge to the country’s institutions. If these institutions, like immigration, border, and customs agencies can’t enforce the laws they’re tasked to enforce, then their authority and legitimacy have been undermined. If you read any history book, you would know that a country with weak institutions that cannot carry out their basic duties, like enforcing the laws they were created to enforce, is a country that’s headed to towards instability and collapse because it is no longer able to govern properly. The consequences of illegal immigrants breaking immigration laws are very serious.
Economic: While illegal immigrants technically do contribute more in taxes than they take out, I would argue that it’s a bad thing because their undocumented status makes them vulnerable to exploitation by employers who pay low wages and offer poor conditions, thus creating a shadow labor market that undercuts American workers and erodes labor standards. This two tiered system isn’t just unjust, it incentivizes lawbreaking and devalues citizenship. Prosecuting employers alone won’t fix it, and simply granting undocumented immigrants full rights sidesteps the core issue which is that we’re normalizing illegal entry and undermining the rule of law.
Moral: Let’s zoom out of the technical aspects and think about morals. Our immigration system, while flawed, is still functional. There are millions of people all around the world from all backgrounds, who are waiting their turn to get into the country legally. Why should these people get shafted in favor of people who chose to cut in line? How is that fair? By illegally migrating, not only have they disrespected this country, but they also insulted all these people who are trying into the country legally as well as all legal immigrants in the country who sacrificed so much to be here. There’s no good argument for illegal immigration, the most common excuse that I hear is that these people come from a place of hardship and they just want a better life, but that’s not good enough. If empathy is the standard, it should be extended first to those who respect the process, not those who disregard it.
All these points are just common sense. It’s absolutely crazy that I even have to argue why basic immigration laws are necessary. I understand Lemmy is off the rails politically, but even then, has the state of our education system degraded so much that people genuinely cannot comprehend the importance of immigration laws? Seeing people unironically defend open borders without understand why that wouldn’t work makes me feel like I’m taking crazy pills.
The only point you’ve made that has any real practical weight is the issue of labor exploitation of undocumented immigrants, which I agree is terrible, but even then you seem to not care as much about the inequity of it as much as that it “devalues citizenship,” whatever the fuck that is. None of your other points are more than baseless handwringing. Your argument about the legal ramifications is circular and based on nothing more than post hoc mental gymnastics to reach the unsupported conclusion you started with. Your economic argument is hollow and literally concludes that it isn’t important because your circular legal argument is what is important. The moral argument assumes a zero sum game and, again, is not based on anything factual. Finally, your security threat argument is evidenced by effectively nothing–the things you raise are threats regardless of immigration and are most actively guarded against at other points throughout their respective threat trajectory.
I think before you flap about complaining about education quality, you should reflect on your own reasoning as presented. You have applied zero logical process and effectively thrown a heap of conclusory axioms in the air and sputtered with indignation. You have effectively argued nothing and only shown your own severe lack of self-reflection.
The only point you’ve made that has any real practical weight is the issue of labor exploitation of undocumented immigrants
All of my points are both true and perfectly valid. You not liking them doesn’t invalidate them nor does it make them any less significant.
even then you seem to not care as much about the inequity of it as much as that it “devalues citizenship,”
I’m against the exploitation because it’s exploitation, but the solution people like you come up with is not even remotely practical. Your solution to make illegal immigrants have the same benefits of citizens without them actually being citizens. f anybody, anywhere can come into this country without approval or documentation, and start working and getting benefits from the state… then it doesn’t take genius to see how this opens up other types of exploitation.
Not only that, but since there are no controls to regulate the flow of people, then what’s there from stopping the billions of people out there who have live in places with worse economic conditions from just packing up and moving here? The answer is nothing, and with any massive influx of people, you start heavily over burdening the nation’s already stressed systems and start losing social cohesiveness. In other words this is a textbook recipe that leads to collapse.
This type of thinking sounds just and moral on the surface level, but it’s in reality surface level is all it is. The idea falls apart the moment you start looking into the consequences, there’s a reason why unchecked borders haven’t worked well throughout history. The one and only real, practical solution is to overhaul the immigration system to make it more consistent, efficient, quick, and have it work to the benefit of the nation. Once you have that in place, then you make sure that it’s strictly enforced. The only people who are allowed to come here are the people we want to be here. This is common sense.
Your argument about the legal ramifications is circular and based on nothing more than post hoc mental gymnastics to reach the unsupported conclusion you started with.
Your economic argument is hollow and literally concludes that it isn’t important because your circular legal argument is what is important.
The moral argument assumes a zero sum game and, again, is not based on anything factual.
Finally, your security threat argument is evidenced by effectively nothing–the things you raise are threats regardless of immigration and are most actively guarded against at other points throughout their respective threat trajectory.
These are all meaningless buzzword salads. It’s fine if you disagree, but you actually have to put in the effort to explain both your disagreement and your position, otherwise your words hold no weight. Simply saying things like “hollow” and “mental gymnastics” means nothing, and the same goes for insisting that my points are ciruclar and not factual. You saying they are doesn’t make them so, if you aren’t capable of explaining yourself or aren’t able to critique my points on their own merits, then perhaps this conversation isn’t for you.
The only semi-argument you made here is that you think there’s no need to do anything about immigration, because the security threats that I brought up also happen outside of immigration and these issues are being countered elsewhere, but the problem with this argument is that it ignores the fact that the way our immigration is handled a big part of why these issues are much bigger threats than they should be. These threats need to be countered within and outside of immigration.
I think before you flap about complaining about education quality, you should reflect on your own reasoning as presented. You have applied zero logical process and effectively thrown a heap of conclusory axioms in the air and sputtered with indignation. You have effectively argued nothing and only shown your own severe lack of self-reflection.
Look, you’re demanding I present counter arguments to statements that literally aren’t argued. Your entire position is effectively “this is bad because I say it is” so of course I’m not going to spend time and energy to counter that. Explain the actual mechanism of harm without resorting to “it’s clear from history” or “it’s a textbook recipe that leads to collapse.” I mean, if you are making your statements disingenuously as I suspect, that’s fine, but I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt that you’re in fact sincerely not understanding how you are in no way making logical arguments but just rattling off conclusions.
So, here are some actual facts. Immigration of all stripes has been pretty thoroughly shown to only improve economies in terms of productivity and diversity. Immigrants, no matter what, pay substantially into the system, and thus enable scaling of the resources only some of them end up benefiting from. Immigrants, again of all varieties, are significantly less likely to engage in crime than their native-born counterparts. These are all well established in the literature, so I will take them as axiom.
Given the above, your hypothesized concerns simply don’t track as population flows scale. Crime rates don’t increase (actually go down), economies don’t implode (actually improve), and social systems don’t collapse because they inherently scale in resource allocation proportionally to population (in a competently structured system–i.e., where this fails, it is not due to immigration but to extant deficiencies already in play).
Now, let’s address another deficiency in the “reasoning” you presented. People don’t just magically immigrate between countries, regardless of Immigration laws. Even if we had no borders and lived in a space age utopia, most people would nevertheless stay where they are unless that place was inhospitable to their survival–this isn’t to say there aren’t many economic migrants, but they are still inevitably a fraction of the population of their country of origin and so the naive assumption that “billions” would flow across an open border is just absurd and completely unreasonable.
Ultimately, understand that I am not expecting erasure of borders to happen anytime soon. However, yes, it is patently clear that the current “crackdown” on immigration is a solution looking for a problem so that it can justify totalitarian authoritarianism and immigration is not and has never really been a significant threat to the US, documented or no.
You keep putting words into my mouth and then dismissing my points. I’m not “demanding” anything from you, if you don’t want to discuss then just don’t. What I am asking for is a little good faith engagement from you. You keep saying that I made no arguments, but that’s not true. I made claims and I explained why I think they’re true. That’s what arguments are. You could disagree, ask for sources, ask for clarification, explain your case, and so on. That’s all a part of the discussion. However, all of my arguments are valid. Simply saying they’re not because I’m x, y, and z is not a rebuttal, especially when you don’t elaborate on any the claims you make, that just makes them accusations. Dismissing my arguments as being invalid because you said so doesn’t make them so.
To be fair to you, you did actually provide a little more substance here than in your previous comment… but you didn’t actually respond to what I said. If you actually scroll back up and read my points from earlier, you’ll see that I was specifically arguing about illegal immigration. You lumped in legal and illegal immigration, and then tried to argue why immigration is good… but I’m literally a legal immigrant myself, I don’t need you to trying to sell me on the pros and cons of immigration, that’s not the debate. I’m not against immigration, I’m against unchecked illegal immigration. You are arguing against the straw man you’ve made from my actual argument, and this is, ironically, disingenuous.
But I do find it fascinating how you directly contradicted yourself in your first two paragraphs. You literally wrote a whole paragraph berating me about how my entire position is supposedly me saying “this is bad because I say it is” and then demanded that I explain my positions without resorting to saying things like “it’s clear from history” or “it’s a textbook recipe that leads to collapse"… but then you follow this up by ending your second paragraph, the “facts” paragraph, with “these are all well established in the literature, so I will take them as axiom.” You started this whole debacle about how arguments like this aren’t worth your time only for you to end up using them in the same damn comment. The irony palpable.
There’s one more piece of irony to address, and that’s the “deficiency” in the reasoning that you presented. See, you said that my reasoning is deficient, never explain how or why, but unlike you, I can actually explain why your reasoning is inadequate. Let’s start with immigration as a concept. Why do people move? Well, people move for all sorts of reasons. People move for work, family, safety, education, nice whether, and the list goes on and on. The push and pull factors of migration are so vast and complex that there’s specialized fields in academia dedicated to studying them.
However, according to you, you seem to think that most people would only move for survival, and the reason you think this is because you assume that people would naturally prefer to stay where they are unless their environment became inhospitable… but this just an assumption based on another assumption. Sure people, migrate for survival or inhospitable environments, but these are a fraction of migrants. Only about 1.9% of immigrants in the US say safety is the reason they migrated, as opposed to 41.8% saying work and another 32.2% saying education (source). So the vast majority of migrants are economic migrants, so your assumption here is just wrong.
Now I understand, that your goal here was trying to disprove my assumption that billions would move here if we had no borders… but that wasn’t assumption, and it’s silly that you even tried to address that. I was clearly trying to use hyperbole to drive a point. Obviously it won’t literally be billions who would move here, but the rate of immigration would sky rocket as the demand to move to the US is very high, and without restrictions, there won’t be anything to control the flow of people into the country.
But enough snark, let’s be serious for a second. Your central argument here is that immigration is beneficial overall and therefore massive influxes of immigrants, legal or illegal, are a good thing that we should embrace. However, this ignores a few important facts. For example, illegal immigration at a large scale means that we’re absorbing way more people than our systems can handle. These illegal immigrants want houses, healthcare, education, and so on… however, our infrastructure is not being expanded to take in all these people. The end result is something like Canada or Australia where they took on way more immigrants than they could handle every year, and now they’re left with massive crises in things like housing and healthcare… and that’s just with legal immigration. We shouldn’t head down this path, especially since our systems are already struggling. There’s also a social factor to it. Countries like Sweden and France took in large influxes of immigrants both legal and illegal over the past couple of decades, and the end result is they are dealing with surges in crime, erosion in social cohesion, and attacks on the country’s founding principles. We’re seeing this ourselves with MAGA, and the thing that fuels MAGA is anti-immigration sentiment.
We have to be rational with our immigration policies. It is perfectly reasonable to oppose Trump and MAGA and their policies of cracking down on both legal and illegal immigration in the cruelest, most tyrannical ways possible. These policies are unreasonable, uneducated, immoral, and not in the best interests of this country. However, by the same token, the other extreme of wanting open borders where there no restrictions or consequences for immigration legal or illegal is just as unreasonable, uneducated, immoral, and not in the best interests of this country. We can’t be stupid as a country and delude ourselves into thinking that this false dichotomy is all we have. There’s such a thing as reasonable immigration reform where we change the immigration system to be more efficient, secure, principled, and humane while at the same time allows us to control the flow of people into this country so we can get the immigrants that this country needs at the rates we want. At the same time we can crack down illegal immigration and deport violent criminals, while also having a pathway for citizenship for illegal immigrants that have been here for a long time with a clean record. This is not something crazy, this was literally Obama’s platform in 2014 (source). This is the best course of action for this country.
Yes actually, i dont really give a crap who comes to our country as long as they aren’t violent (which is a moot point since most violent crime is perpetrated by citizens of said country). In the U.S. it’s extra ironic we dont want immigrants since we literally showed up here as immigrants and took the land from the Native Americans. We are all descendents of immigrants in this country.
Now, obviously, I cant get what I want, so I’d settle for reasonable immigration laws. But last time I checked getting citizenship in the U.S. can take as long as 20 years. In this administration, im sure its even harder to get citizenship if you aren’t a rich white racist fuckhead.
This is such a Lemmy take. Even a child can comprehend why borders are a necessity. The world is an unequal place that’s filled with scarcity and malice. In order to protect your society’s social coherency, economic prosperity, and values, you have to enforce borders
The EU did stop to enforce internal borders. It lower inequality within the EU and made the rich members better off, by providign cheaper workers. There is a reason Brexit causes so many problems for the UK.
That is not to say that opening all borders overnight would not cause problems. It clearly would, but in the end the world would be a better place.
Even you understand you’re being disingenuous with this one. The EU very much enforces it’s external borders, and freedom of movement is exclusively granted to other member states. The EU is after all a political union between very similar countries culturally, historically, legally, and economically. The member states democratically consented to remove barriers (not borders) to allow for freedom of movement among each other.
It clearly would, but in the end the world would be a better place.
If this was the case then this would’ve already happened, but it didn’t and it won’t for a reason. The concept of borders isn’t a product of some ideology, it’s a product of circumstance that was created out of necessity. Sure, there are plenty of modern borders that are nonsensical, but these countries all serve to show case why more proper borders are necessary as all the country with nonsensical borders are all very unstable and plagued with conflict.
I noticed over the years that many, if not all, of these collapse enthusiasts are terminally online larpers confined to echo chambers. They’re so detached from reality that they unironically think that the moment society collapses it’ll be replaced with whatever ideology they subscribe to, and this will cause all their personal problems to go away. They never seem to consider any other possibility.
Yeah. They have 14 million undocumented immigrants currently. Like 4% of the population. A country like USA can sort of cope with that because they don’t have a heavy social security system like we tend to in Europe, but 4% is still quite a lot.
Ok. I’m not from the US and thought this was obvious. Is anyone in favor of undocumented or illegal immigrants? I thought the actual problem was deportations with no trials. It seems obvious no one should support illegal immigration. I think instead you should support allowing more people to inmigrate
I’ll take the bait.
No, illegal not so much - but the system is fucking broken and it leaves a lot of situations ambiguous. Also the current regime is racial profiling so it doesn’t even matter if you’re a citizen.
I can simultaneously support a better immigration process and system - and also say that illegality is illegality - BUT ALSO say that people should be treated like people and given the circumstances be afforded certain rights and procedures that are civil.
But we’re getting none of that and we need billionaires and corporations and current leadership to fear us.
There is no bait. 100% agree
Spot on
The problem is that system changes arbitrarily from one administration to the next, and people who thought they were protected suddenly find themselves unprotected, and then some clown comes along, and just starts throwing out people who thought they were safe for YEARS.
Even Ronald Reagan was able to come up with a fairly reasonable program to deal with the issue at the time, but the current MAGA Nazis literally take pleasure in oppressing people, and undocumented people are easy, low hanging fruit.
While you’re right, there’s still a big difference from legal immigrants who were granted temporary residence and illegal immigrants. The former were allowed into the country for a limited duration of time, but the latter weren’t allowed in the first place.
There’s people that qualified for a process, then that process was suspended/ eligibility is changed etc etc etc.
“Illegal immigrants” basically all start as legal migrants working through the paperwork.
I agree with you that the country’s migration system needs an overhaul, however being impatient or dissatisfied with the current system is not an excuse to cross into the country illegally.
But you can’t tell if you will be here illegally, because the rules are obtuse or change.
The process gets longer or shorter depending on the administration, but the general immigration rules have been more less the same. The only thing that I can think of that can apply to what you’re saying is the temporary protection program, but that’s a whole different subject.
No. Immigration programs change.
https://www.cfr.org/timeline/us-postwar-immigration-policy
Look at all the times things have changed. What do you think happens to the people that are established that no longer qualify and are part way through the process?
I mean the criticism you’re providing is fair imo, and I don’t necessarily disagree with wanting more clarity and consistency, however, I’m not referring to people who end up being illegal immigrants due to things out of their control like a change of legislation. I’m talking about people who intentionally chose to come illegally, especially those who do so because they’re not satisfied with the system.
I see you took your idiot pills this morning.
What a riveting argument
Yours wasn’t very good, and everyone else already told you what was wrong with it. Figured I’d keep it simple in case you had trouble following.
I had an argument, you don’t. The reason for that is simple, you’re incapable of defending your views on their own merits so you results to these low level insults. In the end, it means nothing because you’re showing that you have nothing of value to say.
If thats what you have to tell yourself to feel better.
Looks like I’m right after all
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There have been all sorts of asylum programs, DACA, pathways to citizenship, etc. Trump recently cancelled a program that was protecting 200,000 people from countries like Venezuela. Many people were recruited into the military with the false promise that serving in the military would protect them. Many, many people have legitimately thought they were here under the protection of one program or another, only to have it end, and replaced by a new one.
Now, even people with Green Cards, or even CITIZENSHIP, are being scrutinized. Even Birthright Citizenship is being questioned. Rubio today announced that they will remove passports of AMERICAN citizens who criticize the administration. It seems even actual American citizens aren’t even safe.
Just because the Conservative Propaganda Machine doesn’t tell you about it, and you are too ignorant to look into it, doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.
Stop thinking like a MAGA Nazi Traitor, and start thinking like an American.
Also Afghans who previously were fighting off the Taliban alongside US troops, had to get out and try getting asylum, but now seen as unwanted, to be cuffed by ICE and thrown back to Kabul to be possibly imprisoned or executed.
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It ia more nuanced than that. What makes immigration “illegal” is incredibly arbitrary and inconsistent as a matter of both practice AND law in the USA. Moreover, there are many who believe, as I do, that people have a right to try making a home wherever they are. Where immigration is a problem, it isn’t an immigration problem but rather a collapse of existing broken aspects of the society–the immigration pressure just brings these failings to light.
Complete nonsense. Countries have borders and if you cross into another country without the proper legal channels then you’re an illegal immigrant. It’s simple as that. Trying to circumnavigate immigration laws is very much a problem.
What constitutes a legal channel is not “simple” and you’re either being disingenuous or are wildly ignorant of the practical reality of immigration. Regardless, it also is totally reasonable to believe that “circumnavigating immigration laws” is very much a non-issue and by and large it is totally unimportant whether an immigrant is documented or not, as far as the state is concerned–if anything, the state, such that it is a unitary entity with its own interests, benefits from undocumented immigrants as they pay into the system and minimally draw out of it (this is also a bad thing, imo, but I suspect we disagree on why).
It doesn’t matter whether the immigration system is simple or convulsed. It is still the immigration system of the country, and you have to respect it. Feeling dissatisfied or impatient with it is not a valid excuse to actually smuggle yourself into the country illegally. With the sole exception of genuine asylum seekers, nobody has a moral argument, let alone, a legal one to be in any country illegally. Nobody is entitled to being an immigrant to any country. Immigration is a privilege, always has been and always will be, and you have to respect the customs of the country you want to immigrate to. If they’re reviewing your case then you have to be patient, and if they rejected you then you have to accept that decision.
Also, it’s completely asinine to try passing off illegal immigration as some sort of non issue. That’s just an out of touch take. It is an absolutely MASSIVE issue. Here’s just a few ways where it’s a problem:
Security: You have random people inside the country that are not known, tracked, and vetted. That’s a major national security threat as it leaves your society vulnerable to smugglers, foreign adversaries’ agents, human traffickers, terrorists, and a whole host of other criminals that could wander in and out of the country with no supervision, approval or consequence.
Legal: Countries have laws for a reason, they’re there to reflect the public interest and will. Having people blatantly violate them is a serious challenge to the country’s institutions. If these institutions, like immigration, border, and customs agencies can’t enforce the laws they’re tasked to enforce, then their authority and legitimacy have been undermined. If you read any history book, you would know that a country with weak institutions that cannot carry out their basic duties, like enforcing the laws they were created to enforce, is a country that’s headed to towards instability and collapse because it is no longer able to govern properly. The consequences of illegal immigrants breaking immigration laws are very serious.
Economic: While illegal immigrants technically do contribute more in taxes than they take out, I would argue that it’s a bad thing because their undocumented status makes them vulnerable to exploitation by employers who pay low wages and offer poor conditions, thus creating a shadow labor market that undercuts American workers and erodes labor standards. This two tiered system isn’t just unjust, it incentivizes lawbreaking and devalues citizenship. Prosecuting employers alone won’t fix it, and simply granting undocumented immigrants full rights sidesteps the core issue which is that we’re normalizing illegal entry and undermining the rule of law.
Moral: Let’s zoom out of the technical aspects and think about morals. Our immigration system, while flawed, is still functional. There are millions of people all around the world from all backgrounds, who are waiting their turn to get into the country legally. Why should these people get shafted in favor of people who chose to cut in line? How is that fair? By illegally migrating, not only have they disrespected this country, but they also insulted all these people who are trying into the country legally as well as all legal immigrants in the country who sacrificed so much to be here. There’s no good argument for illegal immigration, the most common excuse that I hear is that these people come from a place of hardship and they just want a better life, but that’s not good enough. If empathy is the standard, it should be extended first to those who respect the process, not those who disregard it.
All these points are just common sense. It’s absolutely crazy that I even have to argue why basic immigration laws are necessary. I understand Lemmy is off the rails politically, but even then, has the state of our education system degraded so much that people genuinely cannot comprehend the importance of immigration laws? Seeing people unironically defend open borders without understand why that wouldn’t work makes me feel like I’m taking crazy pills.
The only point you’ve made that has any real practical weight is the issue of labor exploitation of undocumented immigrants, which I agree is terrible, but even then you seem to not care as much about the inequity of it as much as that it “devalues citizenship,” whatever the fuck that is. None of your other points are more than baseless handwringing. Your argument about the legal ramifications is circular and based on nothing more than post hoc mental gymnastics to reach the unsupported conclusion you started with. Your economic argument is hollow and literally concludes that it isn’t important because your circular legal argument is what is important. The moral argument assumes a zero sum game and, again, is not based on anything factual. Finally, your security threat argument is evidenced by effectively nothing–the things you raise are threats regardless of immigration and are most actively guarded against at other points throughout their respective threat trajectory.
I think before you flap about complaining about education quality, you should reflect on your own reasoning as presented. You have applied zero logical process and effectively thrown a heap of conclusory axioms in the air and sputtered with indignation. You have effectively argued nothing and only shown your own severe lack of self-reflection.
All of my points are both true and perfectly valid. You not liking them doesn’t invalidate them nor does it make them any less significant.
I’m against the exploitation because it’s exploitation, but the solution people like you come up with is not even remotely practical. Your solution to make illegal immigrants have the same benefits of citizens without them actually being citizens. f anybody, anywhere can come into this country without approval or documentation, and start working and getting benefits from the state… then it doesn’t take genius to see how this opens up other types of exploitation.
Not only that, but since there are no controls to regulate the flow of people, then what’s there from stopping the billions of people out there who have live in places with worse economic conditions from just packing up and moving here? The answer is nothing, and with any massive influx of people, you start heavily over burdening the nation’s already stressed systems and start losing social cohesiveness. In other words this is a textbook recipe that leads to collapse.
This type of thinking sounds just and moral on the surface level, but it’s in reality surface level is all it is. The idea falls apart the moment you start looking into the consequences, there’s a reason why unchecked borders haven’t worked well throughout history. The one and only real, practical solution is to overhaul the immigration system to make it more consistent, efficient, quick, and have it work to the benefit of the nation. Once you have that in place, then you make sure that it’s strictly enforced. The only people who are allowed to come here are the people we want to be here. This is common sense.
These are all meaningless buzzword salads. It’s fine if you disagree, but you actually have to put in the effort to explain both your disagreement and your position, otherwise your words hold no weight. Simply saying things like “hollow” and “mental gymnastics” means nothing, and the same goes for insisting that my points are ciruclar and not factual. You saying they are doesn’t make them so, if you aren’t capable of explaining yourself or aren’t able to critique my points on their own merits, then perhaps this conversation isn’t for you.
The only semi-argument you made here is that you think there’s no need to do anything about immigration, because the security threats that I brought up also happen outside of immigration and these issues are being countered elsewhere, but the problem with this argument is that it ignores the fact that the way our immigration is handled a big part of why these issues are much bigger threats than they should be. These threats need to be countered within and outside of immigration.
This honestly proves my point more than anything.
Look, you’re demanding I present counter arguments to statements that literally aren’t argued. Your entire position is effectively “this is bad because I say it is” so of course I’m not going to spend time and energy to counter that. Explain the actual mechanism of harm without resorting to “it’s clear from history” or “it’s a textbook recipe that leads to collapse.” I mean, if you are making your statements disingenuously as I suspect, that’s fine, but I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt that you’re in fact sincerely not understanding how you are in no way making logical arguments but just rattling off conclusions.
So, here are some actual facts. Immigration of all stripes has been pretty thoroughly shown to only improve economies in terms of productivity and diversity. Immigrants, no matter what, pay substantially into the system, and thus enable scaling of the resources only some of them end up benefiting from. Immigrants, again of all varieties, are significantly less likely to engage in crime than their native-born counterparts. These are all well established in the literature, so I will take them as axiom.
Given the above, your hypothesized concerns simply don’t track as population flows scale. Crime rates don’t increase (actually go down), economies don’t implode (actually improve), and social systems don’t collapse because they inherently scale in resource allocation proportionally to population (in a competently structured system–i.e., where this fails, it is not due to immigration but to extant deficiencies already in play).
Now, let’s address another deficiency in the “reasoning” you presented. People don’t just magically immigrate between countries, regardless of Immigration laws. Even if we had no borders and lived in a space age utopia, most people would nevertheless stay where they are unless that place was inhospitable to their survival–this isn’t to say there aren’t many economic migrants, but they are still inevitably a fraction of the population of their country of origin and so the naive assumption that “billions” would flow across an open border is just absurd and completely unreasonable.
Ultimately, understand that I am not expecting erasure of borders to happen anytime soon. However, yes, it is patently clear that the current “crackdown” on immigration is a solution looking for a problem so that it can justify totalitarian authoritarianism and immigration is not and has never really been a significant threat to the US, documented or no.
You keep putting words into my mouth and then dismissing my points. I’m not “demanding” anything from you, if you don’t want to discuss then just don’t. What I am asking for is a little good faith engagement from you. You keep saying that I made no arguments, but that’s not true. I made claims and I explained why I think they’re true. That’s what arguments are. You could disagree, ask for sources, ask for clarification, explain your case, and so on. That’s all a part of the discussion. However, all of my arguments are valid. Simply saying they’re not because I’m x, y, and z is not a rebuttal, especially when you don’t elaborate on any the claims you make, that just makes them accusations. Dismissing my arguments as being invalid because you said so doesn’t make them so.
To be fair to you, you did actually provide a little more substance here than in your previous comment… but you didn’t actually respond to what I said. If you actually scroll back up and read my points from earlier, you’ll see that I was specifically arguing about illegal immigration. You lumped in legal and illegal immigration, and then tried to argue why immigration is good… but I’m literally a legal immigrant myself, I don’t need you to trying to sell me on the pros and cons of immigration, that’s not the debate. I’m not against immigration, I’m against unchecked illegal immigration. You are arguing against the straw man you’ve made from my actual argument, and this is, ironically, disingenuous.
But I do find it fascinating how you directly contradicted yourself in your first two paragraphs. You literally wrote a whole paragraph berating me about how my entire position is supposedly me saying “this is bad because I say it is” and then demanded that I explain my positions without resorting to saying things like “it’s clear from history” or “it’s a textbook recipe that leads to collapse"… but then you follow this up by ending your second paragraph, the “facts” paragraph, with “these are all well established in the literature, so I will take them as axiom.” You started this whole debacle about how arguments like this aren’t worth your time only for you to end up using them in the same damn comment. The irony palpable.
There’s one more piece of irony to address, and that’s the “deficiency” in the reasoning that you presented. See, you said that my reasoning is deficient, never explain how or why, but unlike you, I can actually explain why your reasoning is inadequate. Let’s start with immigration as a concept. Why do people move? Well, people move for all sorts of reasons. People move for work, family, safety, education, nice whether, and the list goes on and on. The push and pull factors of migration are so vast and complex that there’s specialized fields in academia dedicated to studying them.
However, according to you, you seem to think that most people would only move for survival, and the reason you think this is because you assume that people would naturally prefer to stay where they are unless their environment became inhospitable… but this just an assumption based on another assumption. Sure people, migrate for survival or inhospitable environments, but these are a fraction of migrants. Only about 1.9% of immigrants in the US say safety is the reason they migrated, as opposed to 41.8% saying work and another 32.2% saying education (source). So the vast majority of migrants are economic migrants, so your assumption here is just wrong.
Now I understand, that your goal here was trying to disprove my assumption that billions would move here if we had no borders… but that wasn’t assumption, and it’s silly that you even tried to address that. I was clearly trying to use hyperbole to drive a point. Obviously it won’t literally be billions who would move here, but the rate of immigration would sky rocket as the demand to move to the US is very high, and without restrictions, there won’t be anything to control the flow of people into the country.
But enough snark, let’s be serious for a second. Your central argument here is that immigration is beneficial overall and therefore massive influxes of immigrants, legal or illegal, are a good thing that we should embrace. However, this ignores a few important facts. For example, illegal immigration at a large scale means that we’re absorbing way more people than our systems can handle. These illegal immigrants want houses, healthcare, education, and so on… however, our infrastructure is not being expanded to take in all these people. The end result is something like Canada or Australia where they took on way more immigrants than they could handle every year, and now they’re left with massive crises in things like housing and healthcare… and that’s just with legal immigration. We shouldn’t head down this path, especially since our systems are already struggling. There’s also a social factor to it. Countries like Sweden and France took in large influxes of immigrants both legal and illegal over the past couple of decades, and the end result is they are dealing with surges in crime, erosion in social cohesion, and attacks on the country’s founding principles. We’re seeing this ourselves with MAGA, and the thing that fuels MAGA is anti-immigration sentiment.
We have to be rational with our immigration policies. It is perfectly reasonable to oppose Trump and MAGA and their policies of cracking down on both legal and illegal immigration in the cruelest, most tyrannical ways possible. These policies are unreasonable, uneducated, immoral, and not in the best interests of this country. However, by the same token, the other extreme of wanting open borders where there no restrictions or consequences for immigration legal or illegal is just as unreasonable, uneducated, immoral, and not in the best interests of this country. We can’t be stupid as a country and delude ourselves into thinking that this false dichotomy is all we have. There’s such a thing as reasonable immigration reform where we change the immigration system to be more efficient, secure, principled, and humane while at the same time allows us to control the flow of people into this country so we can get the immigrants that this country needs at the rates we want. At the same time we can crack down illegal immigration and deport violent criminals, while also having a pathway for citizenship for illegal immigrants that have been here for a long time with a clean record. This is not something crazy, this was literally Obama’s platform in 2014 (source). This is the best course of action for this country.
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You know, you could be both against Trump and his moronic politics AND support reasonable immigration laws. Shocking, I know.
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Yes actually, i dont really give a crap who comes to our country as long as they aren’t violent (which is a moot point since most violent crime is perpetrated by citizens of said country). In the U.S. it’s extra ironic we dont want immigrants since we literally showed up here as immigrants and took the land from the Native Americans. We are all descendents of immigrants in this country.
Now, obviously, I cant get what I want, so I’d settle for reasonable immigration laws. But last time I checked getting citizenship in the U.S. can take as long as 20 years. In this administration, im sure its even harder to get citizenship if you aren’t a rich white racist fuckhead.
I’m in favor of fuck all borders.
This is such a Lemmy take. Even a child can comprehend why borders are a necessity. The world is an unequal place that’s filled with scarcity and malice. In order to protect your society’s social coherency, economic prosperity, and values, you have to enforce borders
The EU did stop to enforce internal borders. It lower inequality within the EU and made the rich members better off, by providign cheaper workers. There is a reason Brexit causes so many problems for the UK.
That is not to say that opening all borders overnight would not cause problems. It clearly would, but in the end the world would be a better place.
Even you understand you’re being disingenuous with this one. The EU very much enforces it’s external borders, and freedom of movement is exclusively granted to other member states. The EU is after all a political union between very similar countries culturally, historically, legally, and economically. The member states democratically consented to remove barriers (not borders) to allow for freedom of movement among each other.
If this was the case then this would’ve already happened, but it didn’t and it won’t for a reason. The concept of borders isn’t a product of some ideology, it’s a product of circumstance that was created out of necessity. Sure, there are plenty of modern borders that are nonsensical, but these countries all serve to show case why more proper borders are necessary as all the country with nonsensical borders are all very unstable and plagued with conflict.
A lot of people in Lemmy want everything to burn down. They seem to think that bringing everything down to their level means victory.
I noticed over the years that many, if not all, of these collapse enthusiasts are terminally online larpers confined to echo chambers. They’re so detached from reality that they unironically think that the moment society collapses it’ll be replaced with whatever ideology they subscribe to, and this will cause all their personal problems to go away. They never seem to consider any other possibility.
Apparently that “innocent until proven guilty” was also a lie.
I need to stop reading. The fascists can’t allow rights that they can’t even read. The Constitution should have been written below a 6th grade level…
I had someone tell me “well. Innocent until proven guilty only applies for citizens. So proving that is on you”
I had someone say that too. That person is a former cop. But the 14th amendment very intentionally says “person”, not “citizen”.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/amendmentxiv
Yeah. They have 14 million undocumented immigrants currently. Like 4% of the population. A country like USA can sort of cope with that because they don’t have a heavy social security system like we tend to in Europe, but 4% is still quite a lot.