I think we have a fundamentally different viewpoint. I expect that is due to our different perspectives and experiences. As far as punishment goes, although there is technically up to a 5K fine for illegal entry, the more likely penalty is deportation, and prohibition from entry into the US for a period related to the amount of time the person was in the US illegally, and the number of times the person had been already deported, at least according to the Deseret News.
My point is that deportation is a draconian penalty in proportion to the offense. Which makes it counterproductive to the intent and practice of the immigration laws.
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I have to say I disagree. That is like saying that it would be disproportionate if the penalty for stealing would be that you have to give the item back, or that asking a trespasser to leave would be excessively cruel. I think the intent of the immigration laws are to discourage people from trying to bypass normal immigration procedures.
Only if you want to use bad analogies between criminal law and immigration law. The two types of law are not alike in too many fundamental respects. People who discuss severe enforcement of immigration laws should really educate themselves more on the details of the laws themselves a lot better. Claiming an illegal alien is akin to a trespasser or thief is just not appropriate. Plus accused criminals have far greater rights than accused immigration violators.
In most cases the illegal alien has been working in this country and contributing to the economy. They produced a net benefit for the country. The threat of deportation only makes it more socially acceptable to keep them underground, where they are easily exploited. A fine however is a much more proportionate penalty. This way the law is upheld and punishment granted, but one more reasonable to the offense.
50 years of “catch and deport” have shown little to no tangible results. The reason being is that there are limits to how intrusive the government can be to the general public. Usually the measures used to roust the illegal aliens attack the interests of everyone else as well.
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Agreed.
Honestly, at the best of time, this insane system we have is hard to navigate… Imagine what it’s like for those who are ill or caring for an ill family member. We have an inhuman health care system in this country. It needs to change, yesterday.
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Focus as much as you can on preventative care that everyone can get access to. Take all that money we all pay to an insurance company and give that to the federal government to negotiation health care costs. It’s the insurance companies that help jack up prices. It’s really not rocket science, as most of western Europe works in this way. It’s not perfect, but it’s better than what we have. Sick people shouldn’t have to struggle to pay bills.
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No, but they’re fleeing what’s essentially a war-zone created by US drug and immigration policies, so I’m OK with them immigrating (they’re actually more like refugees).
“and elsewhere” you say…sounds pretty carefully worded!
No one’s banning words or phrases, or even remotely suggesting that. @Snowlark suggested using a different phrase and offered a substantive reason why – I’m not sure why you would frame those comments as 'banning" when @Snowlark clearly has no authority or power to ban any words or phrases, but it does demonstrate the purpose of such exercises:
Different descriptions of the same exact situation will evoke measurably different emotional and cognitive responses in human beings (i.e. “banning words and phrases” vs. “suggesting a more constructive vocabulary”). Therefore, it often makes to re-frame a description in different terms in order that your audience might receive it in a different frame of mind. It is very likely easier to empathize with the “undocumented immigrants” who are normal people escaping a horrific situation but on the wrong end of a bureaucratic process than with “illegal immigrants” who are obviously depraved criminals just waiting for an opportunity to prey on white women.
I would happily violate another country’s laws if it dramatically reduced the odds of my children being raped or murdered – you wouldn’t?!
Also, why is there an expectation that anyone would abide by US law until they actually reside in the US?
Also, if this argument makes any sense at all, why do undocumented immigrants tend to commit crimes at a lower rate than natural born US citizens?
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Does this just mean that you aren’t willing to be persuaded into a different point of view on this subject? Having a “fundamentally different viewpoint” is in most cases no bar to changing one’s mind.
These are interesting comparisons. For the most part, I don’t think undocumented immigrants come to the US with the intention to harm others, and that where this apparently fair comparison falls on its face – most people’s mental image of a thief or trespasser is someone who intends harm, but I believe very few undocumented immigrants come to the US to cause harm. Rather, they come to the US for two primary reasons: 1) escape dangerous living situations, 2) improve their children’s quality of life relative to their own.
So let’s reframe this same comparison in terms that are more accurate to the intentions of undocumented immigrants:
-Would it be a disproportionate penalty to force someone to give back the stolen item assuming they had stolen a loaf of bread to feed their starving children? Yes! Watching one’s children starve to death is obviously a penalty that is disproportionate to the crime of having stolen a loaf of bread.
-Would it be excessively cruel to ask a trespasser to leave had they trespassed in order to escape from a person who intended to murder them? Yes! Being murdered is obviously an excessively cruel punishment for trespassing.
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I was not trying to equate illegal immigration with theft. I was trying to think of a situation where the offense could be perfectly proportional to a theoretical punishment. Steal something, give it back. Trespass, leave. Break something, fix or replace it.
As for your second set of remarks, yes, I do think my position on Illegal immigration could be changed, if convincing facts were presented that my position is wrong. I have changed my position on several issues that I thought were pretty settled.
I actually know a family here where the parents are illegal, but the kids were born here. They are nice, hardworking people. My Dad even went to court as a witness for them, when they were in an accident that was not their fault, but their lack of insurance became the issue instead of the other driver’s negligence.
Stealing to eat is still stealing. If someone is truly starving, they should be given food. If I caught someone stealing food to feed their family, I would still make them give back the stolen bread, but I would make sure that the family had enough to eat.
There are a lot of terrible things happening in the world. My job has often taken me right in the middle of the worst of them. I guess there is one of our basic philosophical differences. My solution to famine in Africa or elsewhere is to get them some food, and to try to teach them better agricultural practices. Your solution is to bring them all here. Besides the issue of there being way too many persecuted or hungry people in the world to fit them all here, My feeling, which likely differs from yours, is that I really don’t want some of those people here at all, because of fundamental differences in their basic way of thinking and ours.
My Grandmother was a member of a Baptist church all of her life. The focus of her church was good works for others, which makes it an unusual place. It might be worth mentioning that she was a farmer, and lived in farm country all of her life, except when she built tanks for the war effort. But anyway, her church had a big focus on Haiti.They contributed to charities that worked there, and they sent packages. At one point, she was looking at some pictures of the countryside there, and came upon the solution for their problems. They needed seeds. It was a place with good soil, and lots of rain. If she sent them some seeds, they could grow crops, save seeds for next year, and continue to expand their agricultural program each year. Problem solved.
Now I have spent plenty of time in Haiti. I did not tell her what I predicted about her solution. She had a belief that all people were the same, but differed in circumstances and opportunity. I knew that seeds are not the solution to the problems there. I don’t bring this up to make any particular statement about Haitian culture, just that people can differ in some fundamental ways. Some cultures are different enough that, having experienced life there, I really do not think that bringing them all here would be a good idea at all. That does not mean that I do not value their humanity, or that I do not wish to offer them what aid that we can.
Relying on a poor analogy with criminal laws. Yes I get it. But an accused thief or trespasser is subject to a greater degree of rights, due process, and burdens of proof than an immigration violator. There is the burden on the state to prove a crime was committed. Plus there is the benefit of the 8th Amendment to criminals which is unavailable in immigration law.
Your whole argument is premised on a lack of knowledge as to how immigration laws actually work and pretending it has some criminal law analogue. It doesn’t in the slightest. Asking for laws to be upheld to a draconian degree without actually knowing how they work is not an argument that can be taken seriously. As I said before, deportation is disproportionate to the offense of illegal entry. A fine is much more reasonable and productive for everyone involved. Including the nation.
"Your solution is to bring them all here. "
No. You are just taking the most extreme ridiculous version of what I have been saying. Our country is built upon people coming here fleeing their old country for one reason or another. We are a nation of immigrants and refugees at our core.
Your notion that “there is not enough room” is nonsense. The economy and conditions of our nation is enough of a limiting factor in all immigration issues. People don’t come here in huge numbers to end up unemployed. It never works that way.
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Lets go one step further. The government has the burden of proof to convict a person accused of stealing bread or trespassing. The accused is entitled to an attorney. The accused has to be of an age and mental facilities to be able to appreciate they have broken the law. If convicted, the government is limited by the level of punishment which is supposed to be proportionate to the offense and subject to mitigation. NONE of that is true for immigration violators.
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I think you are mixing up @Mangochin and myself. Sorry to butt into your ongoing conversation!
So let’s translate this back into terms of illegal immigration.
Someone who is in the US as an undocumented immigrant should be deported back to their home country, but then we are morally obligated to do everything we can to improve the quality of life in that country such that there is no longer any incentive for the person to have immigrated to the US in the first place.
I wholeheartedly agree, as long as we are actually making the effort to make the countries of origin decently livable places. Here we need to consider two points:
- Are we personally doing everything we can to ensure such outcomes?
- Does current US foreign policy pursue such outcomes?
I think in both cases, the answer is clearly no – we are not willing to feed the starving thief after returning the loaf of bread. So again, the comparison falls flat. You are not really willing to feed the starving thief, you’re only willing to say that it would be the right thing to do to feed the starving thief. In that case, I would argue that it is more moral to let the thief keep the bread.
This is either a non sequitir or an excuse.
No, not at all! My preferred solution would be to increase the quality of life in Africa or central America such that there is no incentive for people to try to immigrate at all in the first place. The problem with this solution is that we are not really doing anything to implement it!
In fact, US law and foreign policy is directly responsible for many of the woes of people in other parts of the world.
Due to both these facts, I think that allowing undocumented immigrants into our country is a moral imperative until such a time as we are willing to do more than talk about making other parts of the world more livable.
(And “letting them in” is different from “bringing them here”.)
It’s not necessarily different from mine…
Look, there’s lots of people who are natural born citizens of the US who have “fundamental differences in their basic way of thinking” from mine – you even suggest that you are one of them! I do not regard this as a reason to try to remove them from the US or to exclude them from US society. Instead, I try to tolerate their perspectives and lifeways even though I disagree with them.
If this is the case for fellow USians, then it’s not clear to me why I should not adopt the same philosophy towards immigrants who are willing to undertake a difficult, expensive, and dangerous journey to the US to try to improve their quality of life. They are no less human than the other USians whose philosophies and cultures I find alien.
But the most important point I am making is this: are we actually offering these people whatever aid we can? And if we are not, does this not entirely hamstring the anti-immigration argument on moral grounds?
The argument is: “We should improve living conditions abroad rather than allowing immigration.” I feel this can only be a justification for disallowing immigration on the condition that we are actually doing everything we can to improve living conditions abroad. On what grounds do you disagree?
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First, I apologize for the “bringing them all here” remark. That should not have been addressed at you specifically, because I do not know your feelings on the issue. It should have been addressed at open borders advocates in general.
I know that the criminal law analogue is imperfect. But even when there is a small fine for theft or trespassing, once you pay the fine, you don’t get to keep the stolen property, or live in the house you broke into.
What do you think the fine for jumping the border should be?
Yet another problem with the analogy: theft is zero sum, and trespassing very clearly inconveniences the owner of the property.
But in the case of immigration, it is not so clear that the act of immigrating – even illegally! – causes any especially serious problems for the people of the country into which people are immigrating. There are some reasons to believe it is a net positive.
I believe there is some evidence that mass immigration can push down the wages for blue collar jobs. That is essentially why Trump has the support he does. But I suspect this is not the reason for your opposition to immigration.
Edit: I already used the analogy to point out yet another problem with this argument, but I’ll make it explicit here. If someone flees to the US from Honduras to escape the horrific murder rate (caused in no small part by US immigration and drug policies in the first place), then sending them back is immoral in a way that kicking a Pokemon Go player off your property is not. The better analogy would be someone hiding from an ax murderer in your garage. Sure, you’re legally justified to kick them out – they’re trespassing, after all. But are you morally justified in kicking them out?
Unless, again, you’re willing to do something about the horrific murder rate in Honduras. But are you? What’s your plan for that?
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Its a strawman argument anyway. Nobody is advocating open borders. They are advocating proportionate penalties for immigration violation.
A sliding scale depending on income. 2-3 months income? I am sure legislators can come up with something reasonable after some form of debate on the subject.
Luckily immigration violations are nothing like those crimes. Again, analogy with criminal laws are not only inappropriate but show a lack of willingness to understand the immigration laws you are asking to be upheld to a draconian degree. Our immigration law system is unlike our criminal law system in so many substantive ways.
People pay restitution and fines for violations of other forms of administrative law such as labor law, environmental law, and tax laws. Sure analogies could be made in all of those with criminal laws as well. But they would be inappropriate there too.
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I have to fall back on my own experiences a little. The amount of food and cooking oil we send to needy people worldwide, and Africa in particular, is staggering. There is a constant stream of ships, big ones, taking grains and cooking oil to various countries in Africa. The last time I went to Africa, we brought 75,000 square feet of food to Liberia, Benin, and Congo. It is not that those places are infertile or drought ridden, instead they are corrupt and disorganized. There are also people from various secular organizations on the ground there, trying to teach the people farming and sanitation.
I was in Somalia during the big crisis there. Famine was an issue, but bringing in food was not a solution, because of the politics of the place. Interfering with the politics was a mistake. When I was there, I definitely got the impression that most of the population were less concerned about hunger than they were about the opportunity to kill some westerners. But I am happy to help them if I can, I have even been back a couple of times since 1993. But I think it is a terrible idea to bring large numbers of them here.
Your comments are always so insightful and articulate (and thought provoking), I feel like a response to you should at least attempt to be nothing less. That one (my deleted comment) didn’t make the cut.
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Edit: my response was too windy. I’m going to put a little time into paring it back.
- If bringing in food is not a solution, then the amount of food and cooking oil we send abroad cannot possibly be a justification for an exclusionary immigration because we have already admitted that it cannot improve the quality of life of those abroad (which was our justification for the immigration policy).
- If you send food to needy group A who is not immigrating, but to do not do so for group B who is immigrating, then it is not clear why helping group A would justify excluding group B. Again, the justification has to be that we are improving quality of life for group B abroad, not that we are improving quality of life for someone somewhere.
You don’t justify the claim that "interfering with the politics was a mistake, but I’ll take it as true for the sake of argument.
So you argue that:
- Sending food abroad is not a solution because of the politics.
- Fixing the politics is not possible because “interfering with the politics was a mistake”.
So putting this together with your previous argument:
“We should focus on improving quality of life abroad instead of allowing more immigration. However, both of the obvious solutions to improving quality of life abroad empirically do not seem to work, therefore we cannot do so.”
The conclusion you seem to draw from this is: “Therefore, we are off the hook for allowing more open immigration as long as we continue to use methods for improving quality of life abroad that have been empirically demonstrated not to work.” I don’t think this follows. My conclusion would be more like: “Therefore, we are morally bound to allow more open immigration until such a time as we figure out a way to actually improve quality of life abroad.”
This is so imprecise, vague, and uninformative that I cannot draw any conclusions from it. It’s not that I’m assuming bad faith or that you’re lying – it’s that such a vague statement could refer to a great many states of affairs, some of which may justify your conclusions, but some of which might justify the exact opposite!
The only response I can definitely make given the vagueness is this: are these Somalians who are more concerned about killing westerners than feeding their children the same people as those immigrating to the US to try to improve quality of life for themselves and their children? If not, then I can’t see Somalians’ hatred of westerners as a justification for turning away immigrants who do not share this attitude. And if the Somalians who hate us seek to immigrate nonetheless, one must ask why, if they hate westerners, are they so eager to become westerners?
There’s also the question of why these Somalians might want to kill westerners. Is it because western governments contribute to the corruption and ineffectiveness of their governments? Is it because westerners enjoy such a high quality of life while theirs is so low? If so, these seem like even stronger arguments to have a more open immigration policy so that non-westerners can escape the problems inflicted on them by westerners.
I’ve mentioned this a few times now: PLEASE stop with the “bring them over here” nonsense. No one is suggesting we go out looking for foreigners to bring back here. We are talking about a situation in which people are already over here and we’re deciding about whether to send them back.
This is especially important because in most cases the journey to the USA is so dangerous and expensive. One must have some pretty strong incentive to undertake such a journey in the first place! Otherwise, why would one accept the risks of death, rape and imprisonment that are so high for anyone fleeing from Honduras to the US via Mexico?
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I talked about the impression I got about the motivations of the Somalis because I wanted to differentiate between my personal impressions and some sort of peer reviewed study on the subject. When we are there, delivering food aid and nothing else, we are always under sporadic sniper fire from every direction except the sea. I may be completely wrong, and sniper fire might be some sort of Somali greeting that we misinterpret as aggression.
I am not sure that the majority of those immigrating to the west, are eager to become westerners. Obviously, many are, and we are the better for their contribution. Some, however, come to the west because they would very much like to experience the western standard of living. I can’t blame them for that.
I suggest you spend some time there, and come to your own conclusions. If you want to believe that nobody wants to bring immigrants to the west, or that net migration through Mexico is zero or negative, you have my blessing to continue to believe it.
