I can think of many uses for "surveillance state technology" that have nothing to do with immigration: It can be used against citizens and legal residents too.
But the sorts of ICE actions that are causing this controversy only have political support because the US immigration laws have been flouted for 30+ years. Regardless of what you or I think of it it’s the reality that lots of the electorate wants deportations and lots of them and that likely isn’t true in a world where the laws on the books were more strictly enforced in the past.
What political support? Is there evidence to back that claim? The most recent polls I've seen about this are Gallup's polls from July and they suggest that 62% of Americans disapprove of how Trump is handling immigration. This includes a majority of Dems and Independents. The trend is more and more people disapprove of Trump on this topic as time moves forward.
I don't have any data to back this up, but it is conceivable the people that want to deport en masse often understand that the perception of such policy is ugly, and simultaneously support it while not wanting to publicly broadcast it.
If I supported mass deportations, I would simply vote for it and never tell anyone so that I could get what I want without getting any of the flack from the associates of the people who are deported. There's not a lot to gain from telling others you want to harm a bunch of your neighbors, but there is a lot to gain if you can give them the boot and not being perceived as having anything to do with their misfortune.
I mean that is basically the entire basis of the shy Trump voter phenomenon. Even after 8 years of trying to correct for it it showed up last year enough to tip the election from one which the polls said was a dead heat in the Electoral College to a clear Trump and Republican popular vote victory.
You missed the point: they were referring to the sentiment that lead to Trump’s election. Many of those voters , I would guess, feel that the way Trump is doing it is cruel and chaotic.
This obviously doesn’t imply that those who voted for Trump on this basis want to go back to the open border Biden days.
They don't have majority political support. Even many Trump voters are against it. Also Trump has repeatedly violated immigration law, hell Trump tower wouldn't exist without the work of unauthorized Polish workers
No, there are many reasons people want deportations, but mainly people don't think others should get the benefits of being part of a country while flaunting its rules.
In short: "if you want to join our group, you should like our group and add to our group".
Stories like these are what turned people away:
- New York giving free debit cards to migrants to buy their ethnic food because they don't like free American food.
Hm, I’m not saying it is good for America, but it seems to me that there are plausible senses of “good for America” for which it is plausible that illegal immigration is “good for America” in those senses.
Now, I generally dislike laws being broken. If there’s a situation where breaking a law is the right thing to do, then typically that indicates some problem (perhaps with the law, perhaps with something else).
So, I would hope that if illegal immigration is or were acting as a good thing right now, that there is or would be a better long-term solution for whatever situation than “a long term pattern of illegal immigration”.
Oh, I somehow misinterpreted “In no way is” as “There is no way that”. Oops.
Ask JD Vance, who repeatedly said that people legally in this country are illegal immigrants - and those screaming the loudest about illegal immigration walk stridently behind his banner.
Implying democrats use of executive power is the problem in the current situation is laughable at best and genuinely bizarre given the current administration's actions across so many avenues.
Red herring. Political support is due to mass media narrative campaigns, in this day and age groundswell politics is simply infeasible with the power that narrative has in today's culture.
Hence the importance of controlling the narrative by spinning unchecked stories about immigrants eating cats, disproportionate rates of murder and crime, ignoring revenue from immigrants paying taxes, etc.
The fact that sufficient people will vote on immigration as an issue is orthogonal to the realities of laws and enforcement rates and entirely predicated upon perception of such issues.
Your comment was flagged by several members of the community who all have a solid track record for flagging things due to being in breach of the guidelines (rather than due to disagreement, spite etc). So I'm not out of step with community standards here.
> Leaving one sided statements up like the GP is not a discussion.
Other comments in the subthread have also been flagged and killed, and I may reply to them also. I replied to yours because I saw it before the others and because its's clearly a party-political, inflammatory comment, and you are a repeat offender when it comes to guidelines breaches. In just the past 18 months, dang or I have asked you five times now to improve your conduct on HN.
> It's a political discussion, either allow it fully or don't.
> Referencing the morals of the same justification for slavery is a valid point.
The validity of an argument is a separate matter to whether it is expressed in an inflammatory way. We want to be able to discuss difficult topics on HN, and that can only happen if people are going to respect the guidelines and make the effort to discuss things with sensitivity and curiosity, rather than combativeness.
If you are only able to discuss difficult political topics in a combative style, HN is not the right place for you to participate.
OK, I can accept that you didn't know, and that you don't intend to cross the line, but that just indicates you're not aware of what's expected here and you need to learn, and to make an ongoing effort to stay well inside the bounds.
A line like “Whether it's slaves or illegals, it's still wrong” will always be classed as an inflammatory statement on HN.
> I never attack a person directly
That style of rhetoric in the reply is hostile to the parent; we often don't know how hostile our words can seem to the person on the receiving end of them; they don't seem so bad when they're just thoughts in our own mind.
> even though I have witnessed it being done and others have done it to me.
You should flag things or report them to us at hn@ycombinator.com so we can investigate and act where needed.
on the books immigration law has been broken for decades. do you expect people across the border wait a decade to get their turn for an immigration interview only to be turned down, when they can just cross the border?
When laws become impractical, they create 11 million law breakers.
Hundreds of thousands to millions of people have come to the US legally each year for the last thirty years.[0] How is that impractical? In fact the share of immigrants in the US has increased significantly (by 3 times) in the last 50 years, and is above the level of the EU, and is at the highest level in the last 100 years in the US.[1][2] Even if legal immigration was set to zero, that shouldn't give people the right to come here illegally.
To be clear I am not making an argument that mass surveillance is needed to solve any problem.
US vs EU vs OECD: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SM.POP.TOTL.ZS?most_rec... - I'm pretty sure the values here include illegal immigration as well, so if you factor that in the US may be lower than the EU, but again still at historically very high levels.
The biggest illegal immigration source is the southern border. Yes, lots of people have immigrated, but they're a tiny fraction of those who wanted to immigrate. H-1B is a good example, it counts as immigration but it is really not, it is residency contingent on specific employment contracts. Those people with H-1B have no way to gain permanent residency without their employer sponsoring them, which would let them leave the company so employers don't tend to do that a lot.
The comparison with EU is not meaningful, especially since it isn't even a country. The population growth of the US and the world as a hole has also risen by more than that factor, even in the past two decades or so it has more than doubled.
>Yes, lots of people have immigrated, but they're a tiny fraction of those who wanted to immigrate
What point are you making here specifically? Are you saying the law is considered broken unless all or most people that want to come to the US can come? If so, the citizens (or at least the government) of the country are the ones that decide its laws, not people who want to immigrate to that country.
>H-1B is a good example, it counts as immigration but it is really not
The fist link I gave only includes green cards issued, it doesn't include H-1B visas to begin with. In any case, H-1B is not that significant a source of immigration, it seems to account for less than 1 million people in the US.[0] And it pays better than immigrating illegally in 99% of cases, most people would take that. Also by your own metric immigrating illegally isn't immigration either. I don't see what specific point you are making. Are you saying people come here illegally because they don't want to come via an H-1B visa, or are you just making a general point that immigration is not that high?
>The comparison with EU is not meaningful, especially since it isn't even a country
Then why does the worldbank include it? And why use OECD as a metric for anything if it isn't a country?
>population growth of the US and the world
The "highest in 100 years" statistic is in terms of percentage, so that shouldn't be relevant.
The entire point is that they legally in fact may not do so, and have only been doing so because of the lack of enforcement GP cites.
> When laws become impractical, they create 11 million law breakers.
We don't have nearly the same scale of problem in Canada. That probably has much more to do with only sharing an unsecured land border with a rich country.
> on the books immigration law has been broken for decades. do you expect people across the border wait a decade to get their turn for an immigration interview only to be turned down, when they can just cross the border?
No, I don't expect that at all. However the problem with your scenario isn't that they need to wait their turn, it's that they can "just cross the border". That fact that that has been allowed was an intentional policy decision.
It isn't. 2/3rds of illegal immigrants come to the US legally (and then overstay). Unless you make it illegal for non-citizens to visit the US, you can't stop most illegal immigration.
We can start with that 1/3rd. Then we remove as many economic incentives as possible to make overstaying visas that much less attractive to tackle the other 2/3rds.
It's weird to see people (perhaps not you specifically) who often support dramatic gun control measures to address a tiny percentage of crime among the first to trot out the old saw that only a relative fraction of illegal migrants got that way by an illegal border crossing. 1/3rd is a lot. 1/3rd is a great start.
Addressing that 1/3rd also would address the real edge cases (as in there are only a few of them) like terrorists and serial criminals.
employers hiring illegal migrants is also an option for them. those employers are not being targeted by ICE. It's the DEA arresting drug users but being buddies with drug lords all over again.
Employers are being targeted [0]. It also can be difficult to successfully prosecute, especially when one can maintain a clean separation between the labor and the enterprise (agriculture is like this with Farm Labor Contractors).
That said, I wish they would step up the prosecutions. It's critical to hammer away at economic incentives for illegal migration.
very rarely, you see even americans being abducted at their work place but the company owners are mostly left alone. If employing illegal immigrants was that risky, it would drop dramatically. This isn't about illegal immigration, it is about hatred and cruelty. Native born american citizens are rotting in prison without so much as seeing a judge or a lawyer, if you defend that, you are a traitor. If you can at least disavow that, I can consider that your argument is in good faith.
Your link shows the company was fined. what a joke. americans are rotting in prison and the company is fined? why the employers not in jail next to the illegal immigrants. Who was in a better position to obey the law? the wealthy employer who screwed over american workers by hiring illegal migrants, or the desperate migrant trying to earn an honest living?
I hope you reflect on your moral character before defending these people.
You seem very angry. Why don't you reread my post and reflect on the fact that we actually agree?
Hiring illegal labor can be difficult to prosecute, much like straw man gun purchases can be difficult to prosecute. In both cases I feel we should try much harder.
Removing the economic incentives for illegal migration is the only way to make a massive dent in it.
> do you expect people across the border wait a decade to get their turn for an immigration interview only to be turned down, when they can just cross the border?
Well yes, that's what following the law means. They can't complain about it, it's not their country, and they don't have a say on the rules.
In a similar vein by your logic, if you are in a hurry, why should you obey traffic laws when you can just run a red light or a stop sign right?
This is the problem with leaky analogies. The US immigration system is more like a train tunnel in a Wile-E Coyote cartoon that Roadrunner can run through but Wile-E slams into.
Hierarchy of needs. People want to follow the law, they need food,shelter, medicine,etc.. You can punish law breakers, but if you don't provide a way to lawfully do the thing, you're only breeding law breakers and nothing more.
A missing perspective here might be that even long term imprisonment isn't a deterrent for many migrants. The disparity in living conditions is just that steep.
There is a lawfully way to do the thing. The problem is that the lawfully way wants a very small set of people with specific skills. Canada does the same, most of their immigration are university graduates. The only reason Canada hasn't had an influx of immigration like the USA is because their southern border is the USA, not Mexico.
Most of the immigration to the USA is driven for economic reasons, not political asylum or persecution. There is no right to immigrate in the USA just because you want to, you have to convince the government somehow to let you in.
> even long term imprisonment isn't a deterrent for many migrants
But quick deportation is. Imagine doing the whole trek from south/central america to the USA just to be sent back the next day. That's what deterring a lot of people now, wasting months of travel and money just to have it be worthless seems to be very dissuasive.
A lot of the latest immigration woes would be solved if the Venezuelan government was taken down and some real democratic government stepped in.
> There is no right to immigrate in the USA just because you want to, you have to convince the government somehow to let you in.
Agreed. But it is only human to want to improve your living conditions. Illegal immigrants are not claiming their migration was lawful, no one is, so the argument about their right to migrate is meaningless. The law requires them to convince the government to let them in, but a law you cannot enforce is also meaningless. if your family was in poverty, would you care what the american government thought about you trying to cross the border and work to earn a living? I mean, I wouldn't blame them if they stole, I think you're not appreciating the adversity of poverty.
Let's say working after illegally migrating is equivalent to theft. It is hypocritical, and therefore invalid, to expect a person in poverty to obey the law of a land they're not even in simply out of the goodness of their hearts. Deporting them makes sense, punishing them does not, since every single american would do the same or worse if the situation was reversed. you cannot punish people for doing the same thing you yourself would do.
You solve the root causes, punish employers for hiring them, subsidize mexico's economic development,etc... but what's happening now is sociopaths being let loose on the american people.
> But quick deportation is. Imagine doing the whole trek from south/central america to the USA just to be sent back the next day. That's what deterring a lot of people now, wasting months of travel and money just to have it be worthless seems to be very dissuasive.
I think less people will migrate in the near term, until work arounds to avoid ICE are developed. People will still attempt this. Have you read about migration to euorope? a lot of them literally die on the trip, a good chunk just get scammed before they even reach the mediterranean. people will still risk all of this. for them, their former situation is equivalent to death. For some, it is worse, because it isn't them that is suffering, it is their parents,kids,etc.. so the risks are all worth it, even it costs them their lives.
> A lot of the latest immigration woes would be solved if the Venezuelan government was taken down and some real democratic government stepped in.
No, it would be solved if employers were targeted instead. a lot of modern woes would be solved by putting business owners in prison. It just isn't politically palatable. off the books employees don't pay income tax, you can nail the employers for tax fraud conspiracy among other charges. They're screwing over not just the government, but americans looking for work. they're artificially deflating wages by abusing illegal migrants. The worst they get is a fine. But concentration camps for the migrants is tolerable?
Justice should be blind and punish all criminals equally, stop romanticizing poverty and crime. If you commit a crime, go to jail, and if you are a non citizen, get deported. Victims of society mentality only creates more victims, as the victims of the crime are ignored.
> Have you read about migration to euorope
Yes, and people die trying to get to the USA anyway, that doesn’t mean the government shouldn’t enforce borders. African immigration is a worse situation as there are several civil wars ongoing, and its poorer than South America. European countries should also enforce borders.
For your last point, I mentioned latest surge, which is mostly from Venezuela, but I agree, they should enforce i9 registration for all employment and deal out harsh punishment.
How? As a migrant to the US I have generally found the rules quite reasonable, the UX of the websites is poorer than say the UK but the rules seem fine.
Excessive speeders in the absence of speed-limit enforcement just creates neighbors that don't mind their neighborhood being consumed by speed bumps/dips, I think there's an analogy here in residential areas. And if you have a lot of children in your neighborhood, there IS a 'xx-phobia' for speeders. But speed bumps and dips are an absolute nuisance and sometimes dangerous, so just having cameras identify and a system willing to punish speeders would absolutely be the preference.
"Data Show Trump Would’ve Released as Many Border Crossers as Biden" from the right-wing Cato Institute
> As I previously demonstrated, President Biden removed a higher percentage of border crossers in his first two years than Trump did during his last two years (51 percent versus 47 percent), despite Trump having to deal with many fewer total crossings (Table 1). Congress right now is in a bipartisan state of denial about these three central facts:
> 1) The reason people are being released is because of operational capacity to detain and deport them, not policy.
> 2) Biden has deported vastly greater numbers and a higher share of crossers, but it has not deterred people from crossing.
> 3) The logistics are such that once arrivals exceed the deportation machine’s capacity, people will find out and even more will come.
Yes, breaking asylum and due process laws will be a deterrent. The question was always how to deter immigration legally, which prior POTUSes thought they had to care about.
Re the funding increase:
People to put handcuffs on wasn’t the bottleneck, so no it doesn’t. Immigration courts are the bottleneck, and actually jamming more low-level or non-offenders into the system exacerbates that problem.
Which is not related to the closure of borders to asylum seekers nor the withholding of due process rights for people who are suspected of breaking immigration laws — neither of which is at the Executive’s discretion.
I'm pretty sure the executive has power over border policy, the INA is very broad and gives a lot of power to the executive, also it would be crazy if the executive can't decide on border policy, congress is too slow/deadlocked to do anything meaningful.
It’s not “iffy.” POTUS has absolutely no ability to curtail due process rights. It is a blatant violation of a right that undergirds every single other right in the Constitution. Without due process right, there are no property rights, no gun rights, no speech rights, no religious rights — all of them can be taken away by the state simply declaring that you have been found guilty of such an offense that those rights are stripped from you.
The solution to Congressional deadlock is called “electing new representatives.” The executive in fact does not have the ability to “shut off” asylum processing, no matter how dysfunctional Congress is. And even under the INA. Read INA § 1158(a)(1).
We could have a clause in the Constitution that says something like, “if Congress is deadlocked, POTUS can do whatever they want.” Alas we do not have such a clause, and so he cannot, even if you feel there is deadlock.
Illegal immigration can best be thought of as a slow-moving constitutional crisis. An increasingly large portion of the electorate wants decisive solutions to illegal immigration and will vote for the person who gives them that, regardless of the constitutionality.
It's not acceptable to post in this inflammatory style on HN. The guidelines make it clear we're here for curious conversation, not battle. It's also not acceptable on HN to scour through someone's past activity (whether on HN or elsewhere) in order to attack them, and that kind of belittling language is never OK here. Please take a moment to read the guidelines and make an effort to observe them in future.
It's strange to me that you chose to not cite the guidelines to elsewhere such as:
> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle.
Are anti-immigrant sentiments acceptable if they are simply well-articulated?
And if not, then why do you feel it necessary to be more critical of the language I or lalaithion use for explicit dismissals of racists and xenophobes than the actual racism or xenophobia itself?
People continually try on this “gotcha” that we moderate more for tone than substance and that HN freely allows hateful rhetoric as long as it is smuggled in a Trojan Horse of “civility”.
This is of course a non-starter and nothing in the guidelines allows it. The first words in the “In Comments“ section of the guidelines are Be kind, and there is nothing “kind” about xenophobia or other hateful ideas, by definition.
But as longtime forum moderators we can't be so naïve as to succumb to an attempt to characterize any discussion about immigration laws and their enforcement as “anti-immigration” and ”hateful”. From what I can see this is discussion is not one of “pro” or “anti” immigration but about how laws should be interpreted and enforced, which is always something that should be able to be discussed in a spirit of curiosity. The guidelines cover this too:
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
Nailer is a user who has crossed the line before and we've appealed to him multiple times to observe the guidelines, and will certainly do so again if and when it is warranted. In this case I don't see how he is the one who has crossed the line, but even if he was, that doesn't excuse you from doing so.
If you see guidelines-breaking comments on HN, just flag them or if they're especially egregious, email us (hn@ycombinator.com). If you escalate, then you become the one in the wrong, by making a bad situation even worse.
