- “Recent stats showed 40% have no criminal record yet we were told only the worse of the worsts were targeted, rapist, murderers etc, why the deception and lies, time for ICE to be defunded.” Me: Aw, afraid of losing elections because these “good” non-citizens won’t be able to vote by mail?
- “Trump’s actions are administrative fraud. The administration is wasting billions on a self-created problem with adverse economic and social impacts. It’s like the equivalent of the Trump’s ‘fix’ for the reflecting pool in D.C. Lots of crony contracts, incompetent work and lots of taxpayer dollars.” Me: The commenter is in Seattle. The whole city is cognitively impaired, apparently.
- “So much hatred in these comments for desperate people fleeing desperate circumstances. If those circumstances happen to you and your family in their place, you would do the same. This is the story of the ancestors of every American. The only true Americans are the Natives whose lands were stolen from the ancestors of the whites from 1620 onwards. How does someone who came here illegally but works and contributes ruin your daily life? And yet, Trump welcomes white Afrikanners from South Africa as refugees. This is all about racism and xenophobia of Trump and those who voted for him.” Me: I know of at least one periodic EA commenter and longtime friend who might have authored that delusional nonsense. For that matter, I know of a brother of a former GOP President who might have written this comment.
- “There’s a simple reason arrests are soaring: It’s so much easier to meet quotas when any pretense of arresting only “the worst of the worst” is dropped and the one and only criterion becomes, “Looks foreign.” Plus, even ICE goons fear Reichsführer Miller’s wrath.” Me: Right. ICE is deporting people because of their color. When the facts don’t support your knee-jerk position, lie.
- “Someone living in Canada here. Even if I wanted to travel as a tourist to your country, to spend my dollars even for a day trip (I live very close to the border): why wd I want to do that? I hope that American people, American business people, American VOTERS, living from Canadian tourism take note that we do not feel safe travelling to visit our friends and family there. It is not worth it. This is pure destruction of healthy social tissue and bonds and this is sick.” Me: You know: Canada.
- “ICE attacks on farm workers are hurting farmers. Due to his stupid war with Iran, farmers can’t afford diesel for their tractors. Due to his stupid war with Canada, Canadians aren’t buying US produce. Other countries are joining the boycott Due to his stupid war with Canada, farmers can’t afford to buy potash He wants to buy foreign beef that may be more contaminated than American beef Harming the farmers doesn’t make sense And they arrested all of the harmless farm workers who picked the crops.” Me: Oh yeah, the classic “We need illegal immigrants to do jobs Americans won’t do (so we don’t have to pay fair wages). I’ve been hearing and reading that unethical argument for fifty years.
Finally, here’s this epic screed from an anti-white, anti-male wacko called Geo:
“All this really is is an attempt by WHITE MEN to keep the non white population down so that WHITE MEN can maintain their majority status. But this is the problem. We are a classist society cloaked with racism. If you removed every race of people from this country and only white people remained there would still be division. Because in order for the minority wealthy to keep the working class to poor majority from turning against them because of status gap there must be division between the majority working class and poor because they clearly outnumber the wealthy. There always has to be an “other” to give the working class poor someone to blame for their status. So it would just be the white democrats vs the white republicans, Or the white evangelicals vs the other religious group of Christians, Or the blondes vs the brunettes, or the blue eyed whites vs the brown eyed whites. But there has to be an “other” to keep the majority peasants from turning against the minority aristocrats. Classism 1st, then use race to distract from the classism. Remember the settlers came from Europe where they were mostly all what we refer to in the US as white. In fact America invented the whole concept of dividing us based on color. Color was not even a concept before that.”
Me: People who break our laws to come here deserve being designated as “others.” They are other than citizens, other than legitimate residents, other than people who taxpayers should have to pay for their children’s schooling, other than the immigrants who “built this country,” other than people who can be trusted to be law-abiding citizens when they felt they didn’t have to abide by our laws in the first place.
I can’t read all of the nearly 800 comments (does anyone?) but I’ve read a lot, and I haven’t read an honest, factual, persuasive pro-illegal immigrant argument yet that isn’t an appeal to emotion, Trump Derangement or progressive cant. Is there one?
Ethics Alarms 
There isn’t one. There is only obfuscation and denial that those in our country illegally haven’t committed a crime by doing so.
That’s my impression, but who knows? Maybe the elusive truth is out there….
When you look at the research, the ‘good’ illegal immigrants benefit upper-middle to upper class families, especially in suburban and urban environments.
The ‘good’ illegal immigrants provide less expensive nanny services that you can get from American citizens. In fact, ‘good’ illegal immigrants have been so successful in this that there are few American citizens even available for these jobs. It seems that at least 94% of nannies are legal or illegal immigrants. Illegal immigrants are cheaper and allow ‘lower’ income couples to afford nannies.
Over 50% of house cleaners seem to be legal or illegal immigrants. Same argument as above, illegal immigrants allow for cheaper house cleaning for affluent families.
Over 70,000 H2B visas are issued for landscaping workers. The number working illegally is probably similar or more. Without the illegal immigrants, the lawncare industry couldn’t find workers for what they pay.
In all three of these industries, hiring American workers would require drastically higher pay. This would have a detrimental affect on the businesses and people who rely on that low-cost labor they get from illegal immigrants.
Agriculture has the same argument.
That is the best honest argument that I can find. Of course, you could substitute slave for illegal immigrant and get the same argument from 1860. Slave labor drives out free labor.
In other words, they are exploiting illegal workers in order to pay them less. Since they are illegal, their wages are not being reported and they don’t pay into social security, either.
The Leftists who oppose removing illegal immigrants from our country, make a campaign issue out of affordability while at the same time maintaining that Americans can pay “a little more” for their pet projects, defend this how?
Canada can have some really hyperbolic viewpoints on what they refer to as America. Like it is a single thing. What they don’t understand is that we are 50 very nearly sovereign states. No, America doesn’t really care much about Canada. American’s can hardly afford extra eggs with which to care for a neighbor let alone another country that wants the benefits that a state has without being one. Upset that we don’t congratulate them for how great they are like they do for each other. Can you tell my sarcasm co es from aggravated experience? I really have never met a Canadian I did not like though I have been baited into an attempt to prove that I fit some derogatory American stereotype.
When Canadians throw dirt like the comment you referenced they both believe and don’t believe what they are saying.
I have been convinced that comments such as that represent hurt they feel for derogative views of Canada they perceive Americans think of them. Though there is the sincerely held lunatic view that America has plans to steal all of Canada’s fresh water due to climat change.
I personally know multiple people that believe that they may not be let back into Canada if they cross the border or will not be allowed back into the US if they are on a green card.
I am convinced these people have massive unhealed emotional trauma and the medias portrayal of Trump feeds that hurt and it blossoms into mental terror.
Their comments are as unhinged as drowning victim frantically trying to climb on top of a rescuer, drowning them and ultimately their self. Is this unethical?
Now the part about being let back into the US is based on a kernel of truth. My brother was in a class in college with 5 Saudi students. One Monday, only one of the students showed up. He asked where the other 4 were and he was told “they got deported”. He thought the guy was kidding. Apparently, when you apply for a student visa, there is a checkbox to make the visa a ‘reentry visa’. All 5 had gone to the strip clubs in Windsor that Saturday night and when they got to the tunnel to come back, he was the only one who had checked the ‘reentry visa’ box on the application. He was allowed back into the US, the other 4 were held and then deported back to Saudi Arabia.
I can’t give a reason to oppose deporting anyone who isn’t lawfully present, but I will say that our country required the support and grew at a pace that was incompatible with current / existing legal immigration quotas. At some point when the enforcement machine is well-oiled and people realize that there isn’t an excuse that will stave-off deportation, we, as a country, need to really show that the legal avenues are working and that outcomes for people in those pathways are much better.
I’m obviously not an economist by trade or competence, but my impression is that our economy is hiding a crash – people are carrying on, hoping to work through it and avert crisis. Part of it I would attribute to Mamdani’s pied-a-terre tax which showed that many rich NYers had bought cheap FL homes to claim FL residency to pay no income tax while they actually/secretly lived in NY. His tax flipped that dynamic because now people are getting hit with a “You own a residence in NY that you say you don’t live in”….but now all of a sudden they’re like…”Wait! I DO live here!”…..ok….where’s your income taxes?
So, now they’re all selling their cheap Florida homes…but there’s a missing class of people because there were quite a few people who didn’t have legal status. Which is fine…but we still probably need to backfill these gaps. New citizen ceremonies should be, in my opinion, running at full speed. We need to show “the good illegals” that there is a process, it works, and they should accept the offers to self-deport and cash a check* for an opportunity to come back the correct way and be welcomed with open arms.
*There are current efforts for people to accept voluntary self-deportation which comes with a one-way airfare and a $2,600 check. (From Gov’t perspective, cheaper, faster, and less man-power required than forced-removal proceedings.)
We can’t have a rational immigration system that lets in the legal immigrants we need when we have to ‘allow’ for the uncontrolled influx of illegal immigrants. We have to clear up the system so we can allow the immigrants we need in with a rational system.
I have had friends with Ph.D.s in physics and chemistry forced to leave the US despite need. We can’t keep them because we have to allow for the illegal immigrants in the number of people entering the US. One of the Ph.D. physicists wanted to stay because he was going to return to Iran and forcibly enrolled in their nuclear weapons project. We sent him back to work on the project that we are now spending taxpayer dollars and lives on to dismantle. But on the upside, some ‘good’ people got to enter and not commit too many crimes.
I’m sorry, I am still not over the fact that the nearby city has a foreigner who has raped a different woman each week for the last 3 weeks (that we know of) in the same park, has been arrested each time, and had been released to rape another woman each time because the judges don’t want him to get deported. The judges are afraid that if they hold him in jail, that ICE might come for him.
What about all the people who legally went through the process and were denied because we ‘didn’t have enough spaces’? They get the option first. The people that jump the line must go to the back of the line.
I had a coworker from Brazil who was a world-class soccer coach. He had to go back because he couldn’t get his green card when his work authorization expired. It takes an Indian professor over 10 years on average to get a green card in this country all the while trying to keep their work authorization from expiring. There needs to be fairness for the people doing it right.
I was reading a book by Victor Davis Hansen, “The Soul of Battle”, which examined the careers of Epaminondas, who crushed the Spartans; William Tecumseh Sherman, who crushed the South; and George Patton, who struck terror into the heart of the Germans and probably could have crushed them had he been given the material he needed.
One particular thesis that Davis kept returning to was the problem of slavery. And the issue he addressed was less the problem of treating human beings as chattel, and more the general stagnation that slavery built. The Spartans and the South were stagnating under their slave-driven economies. Freeman labor was more expensive, and that encouraged businesses to innovate better ways of conducting business; slaves were cheap, so one didn’t need to innovate, just acquire more slaves. Moreover, freemen were able to choose where to place their economic output as befit their talents and inspiration. Slaves were kept to manual labor and were largely uneducated. Thus the North became an industrial powerhouse while the South languished behind in both technological and economic development.
All of this is to say that arguments regarding the economic pitfalls of removing illegals from farm work and other low-wage sectors are myopic. Yes, there will be short term spikes in the cost of produce and nannies. But it is quite likely that this surplus of low-wage labor has caused a stagnation in these fields. We don’t need better means of picking strawberries, because we have so many illegals that will accept peanuts for payment. In sense, the minimum wage experiments in California and New York prove the point: making the worker more expensive leads to innovations in doing business in order to cut costs.
Moving away from VDH’s thesis, I would like to briefly offer a thought of my own about the differences between the present and the era where the United States was expanding. If we look at the Homestead Act of 1862, we had a lot of federal land that was unoccupied, and individuals could get the title to chunks of that land if they moved to it, built something on it, and lived there for at least five years. (This helped draw enough people to Wyoming that statehood became a possibility.) However, this Act was eventually discontinued because, to a large extent, all the really good land had been snapped up. Today, we have the whole of the country effectively allocated, and one has to pry federal land from the government’s cold, dead hands in order to develop on it. (Or so it feels out here…)
The upshot is, when there is plenty of open, good land to occupy and develop, limiting immigration is a moot point. There’s plenty for everyone. But once everything is locked up, now we have to manage inflow. There’s plenty of development going on, but that development isn’t as expansive as it was in the past. It can be overwhelmed, especially in today’s economic environment where new construction is so expensive. So now tightly regulating immigration is necessary to ensure we don’t over-pressure the system. This is especially true out here in the West, where we’ve been in drought conditions for the past 25+ years, and now we’re looking needing to take drastic measures to ensure we don’t drain the Colorado River dry.
Thus all those comments looking at the unhindered immigration in the past are really missing the point that situations change, and with changing situations come changing policies.