It's criminal the way we treat immigrants. It's also harmful to us. The reason many jobs are unfilled and service is so bad in some sectors is that we won't let people come here to work.
It would be great to reframe the question as simply how to manage the wholly human and laudable desire to make a living that has always attracted people across the border to the South.
If we did that, we'd be discussing ways to direct the traffic, the kind of ID that would be needed, access to government services, how to connect migrants with work other than a free-for-all that leads to exploitation, and how to classify employment in jobs that would likely fall outside of US norms. Even gainfully-employed US citizens make an impact on the infrastructure wherever they live, and are still subject to US regulation. We'd need a way to square this with local governments.
But I don't hear much of that. We make like the only alternative to the Great Wall approach is a maximalist de facto permanent citizenship -- not just retroactively for people who came here under the many decades of winking and turning a blind eye, but largely for anyone else who shows up and asks from now on.
Receiving the dispossessed of the world -- and it's not too long until hundreds of millions from the Sahel would show up -- would be a major project that calls for the total commitment, not just the sympathy, of the US population. Existing US society, everything from land use patterns to the way we run schools and ERs, would have to change a lot to make this possible at a time when we're still trying to adapt to the changes of the 1980s.
"Other people might rely on their political affiliations when they think about abolishing ICE. The abolitionist call may seem more appealing to Democrats when Republicans are in power. They assume that a Democratic President, such as Joe Biden, will be better on the issue."
This is not the only human rights issue that those on the left only care about when the other team has the ball. The eight year lunch break the antiwar movement took during the Obama administration is another glaring example.
Whatever the abstract philosophical merits of immigration restriction – and your arguments about it here are really not remotely serious since on the positive side you simply handwave and on the critical side you confine yourself to addressing solely the worst arguments against your position – the functional effect of delusional rants about it like this is just to distract, delay, and sabotage the actual hard political work necessary to make changes in the world. Hang your head and be silent you ivory-tower intellectual fool.
It's criminal the way we treat immigrants. It's also harmful to us. The reason many jobs are unfilled and service is so bad in some sectors is that we won't let people come here to work.
Also, abolish the tough/strong border paradox
It would be great to reframe the question as simply how to manage the wholly human and laudable desire to make a living that has always attracted people across the border to the South.
If we did that, we'd be discussing ways to direct the traffic, the kind of ID that would be needed, access to government services, how to connect migrants with work other than a free-for-all that leads to exploitation, and how to classify employment in jobs that would likely fall outside of US norms. Even gainfully-employed US citizens make an impact on the infrastructure wherever they live, and are still subject to US regulation. We'd need a way to square this with local governments.
But I don't hear much of that. We make like the only alternative to the Great Wall approach is a maximalist de facto permanent citizenship -- not just retroactively for people who came here under the many decades of winking and turning a blind eye, but largely for anyone else who shows up and asks from now on.
Receiving the dispossessed of the world -- and it's not too long until hundreds of millions from the Sahel would show up -- would be a major project that calls for the total commitment, not just the sympathy, of the US population. Existing US society, everything from land use patterns to the way we run schools and ERs, would have to change a lot to make this possible at a time when we're still trying to adapt to the changes of the 1980s.
"Other people might rely on their political affiliations when they think about abolishing ICE. The abolitionist call may seem more appealing to Democrats when Republicans are in power. They assume that a Democratic President, such as Joe Biden, will be better on the issue."
This is not the only human rights issue that those on the left only care about when the other team has the ball. The eight year lunch break the antiwar movement took during the Obama administration is another glaring example.
Whatever the abstract philosophical merits of immigration restriction – and your arguments about it here are really not remotely serious since on the positive side you simply handwave and on the critical side you confine yourself to addressing solely the worst arguments against your position – the functional effect of delusional rants about it like this is just to distract, delay, and sabotage the actual hard political work necessary to make changes in the world. Hang your head and be silent you ivory-tower intellectual fool.