I don’t care what seems likely. I care about what is right.
As defined by whom? How do you differentiate between a person hiring a landscaping crew that includes some undocumented immigrants, a family farm that uses seasonal workers that include some undocumented immigrants, and a huge multinational corporation that pays thousands of undocumented immigrants? Because in our current justice system, with what you propose, Party A gets all their property seized and the max jail time, Party B gets their farm seized but they are set up as an LLC and lose no personal property and face no jail time, and Party C can afford a fleet of lawyers to keep the damage down to a fine of less than an hour’s worth of profit.
When it comes down to it, the problem is making legal immigration such an expensive and nearly impossible task to begin with. If you give a shit about the immigrants themselves, you start with an amnesty for all current undocumented immigrants and you open up a guest worker visa system with an inexpensive path to citizenship.
Punishing the people who hire undocumented workers doesn’t do jack for the workers themselves.
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I would differentiate based on the evidence, the facts, and the circumstances. You know, like a system of laws is supposed to.
And yes, if you’re living in America and you’ve been paid money to do work by an American citizen, you should be offered amnesty.
Legal immigration should be tough, which means we also have to deincentivize every form of illegal immigration on the part of every participant. we should demand better documents for employment, we should punish those who knowingly or unknowingly hire undocumented persons, and we should also take a serious look at systems of renting, banking, drivers licensing and insurance that, by allowing non-documented persons to take part in them, enable undocumented workers and the people who benefit from them. No person is illegal, but a person can also do things which are illegal. That is what we should be talking about.
Edit: You say that punishing people who hire undocumented workers won’t do a thing to help the undocumented people. but maybe that’s not my goal. Maybe I just want to make it as hard unpleasant and legally dangerous as possible to hire undocumented people for purposes of exploiting them, and also think that if an American knows that if they’re found to have hired an undocumented employee they will lose everything they have worked for then that will be a natural deterrent to hiring those persons. And I propose this specifically because what we have right now is not working at all, and at the end of the day a nation has a right to maintain its own borders.
Making the penalties “absolute” for employers will put them into more mafia-situations where they kill undocumented employees to prevent them from testifying against them, to avoid your “dangerous” penalties.
You can see something similar in sex work legislation. Threatening to give all johns capital punishment for discovery, for instance, would only ramp up the frequency of violence and murder.
Judge Dredd-style solutions may make people feel tough, but they are more likely to hurt than help.
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Yes, the CEO of Tyson foods is going to go out and dig some shallow graves because of his undocumented workers; he can personally kill every single one of them without a victim, witness, or accomplice raising the alarm, reaching out to the law, or otherwise alerting people to this crime which isn’t really going to happen in the real world.
If you honestly think that people would kill workers because of a plan like this, then I can’t see any more point in our continued discussion, since your parameters of reality have such a high variance as not to resemble anything I know.
You don’t think undocumented workers go missing now?
I don’t think I’m the one having trouble with reality here.
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We really need to make immigration easier. And legalize people already living here.
It’s a net positive for society and the economy.
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We need to make legal immigration easier. Which means making illegal immigration harder.
No. We need to make it easier for immigrants- that includes both.
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Why? Open borders seems to work well enough for other countries, our northern border doesn’t seem to “necessitate” the scrutiny the southern one does if not the difference in skin color/cultural difference for most of the people on the other side, and studies have shown that immigration improves the overall welfare of the economy.
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Why? Seriously, in a nation with a very low or net negative population growth, why keep people out who want to join Team USA?
I’m not sure why anyone would base actual public policy on what you essentially state is your own vindictive attitude towards other human beings.
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Not sure which thread this belongs in, but holy fucking shit.
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they’re actually detaining plenty of dudes indefinitely, just not “resident aliens”
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“Of course Border Patrol is not going to let a group of radical political activists show up and start injecting people with drugs,” the Press Secretary for DHS said.
This says volumes about how the agency sees immigrants. 
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Court rules that birthright citizenship exists and that Americans are Americans.
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A federal judge actually said “the law is the law?” Trumpian tweet storm coming, push for impeachment of this judge, insane racist reactions for right-wing pundits. Sigh. Stupid timeline.
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