Another method of stopping the flow would be for our culture to stop fostering an adversarial approach to trade and global business, quit trying to destabilize other governments (see Iraq, Venezuela, etc. and our desire for petroleum instead of working toward greener energy) and start to foster an attitude of cooperation to benefit all.
We’re like the arsonist who’s flabbergasted as to why our neighbor whose farm we burnt down has the nerve to ask to sleep in our barn.
I’ve read your comments in this thread and I guess there is some kind of fundamental disconnect between the way we think about land and ownership of land. One of the phrases I’ve seen pro-immigration people use is “No one is illegal.” That is phrased specifically to counter the dehumanizing use of the word “illegal” to refer to people like it’s a noun, but to me it also speaks to something a lot deeper. It makes me think of Trevor Noah’s memoir entitled, “Born a Crime”. In South Africa under apartheid it was illegal for black and white people to have children, he was an illegal entity.
There’s something deeply wrong about that to me. And I get that it probably seems like a bad analogy. It would be illegal for a person to enter my home without my permission. “It is illegal for you to be here” is different than “It is illegal for you to be you.”
But the analogy to a private residence is broken too. Private spaces are different than public ones. The idea that you only have a right to be in public if you have particular papers seems like a deeply oppressive one to me. The right to just be in public is more fundamental than the right to speech or the right to vote or any other right, in my mind (try using your other rights if you aren’t allowed to walk down the street). I feel that’s a deep right we should respect as universal, not a conditional right we should give or take away as nations.
Anyway, I’m not really trying to argue with anything you said. It just strikes me that there is a divide here. I feel like the divide is so deep on this issue that there is something that’s being missed. There are points of view that need to be synthesized to make something coherent that everyone can live with. In that way, I don’t feel like there can really be an answer in current policy options. People talk about “comprehensive immigration reform” but somehow first there has to be some common understanding of what it is to be a person, what it is to be a nation, and how those two things interact.
Of course right now there are kids in concentration camps and ICE are jackbooted thugs coming to take parents away from their families in the middle of the night. Philosophy is going to have to wait.
If we referred to people who did illegal lane changes as illegals, a lot more people would get shot at traffic stops.
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