"Anyone who is in the United States illegally is subject to deportation."
Out of interest, does anyone here disagree with this?
It seems like common sense to me. Otherwise, what's the point of having a distinction between legal and illegal entry of the country in the first place?
The function of the law is, and always is, selective in enforcement. The state is not a computer you run law software on, it's still an organization made up of human beings and thus subject to a constant level of practical scrutiny.
Marijuana is still federally illegal in the United States and therefore technically illegal even when states abolish their laws against it. This doesn't change the reality that whenever a state legalizes it the DAs throw out all their possession and usage cases and tell the DEA that it's their expensive problem now. You even see incidents in states where it's still illegal where enforcement is spotty at best. I can't find it because it was so long ago, but I once saw a video with a University of Connecticut police officer answering a very upset man that they weren't going to be enforcing marijuana laws at the university's protest against them because it was far too dangerous to rile up a crowd of people over a nonviolent offense.
And it's nonviolent offenses where enforcement discretion thrives in both the legal and policing arenas. Very few issues of this nature have united public opinion, unlike say, "everybody who commits a murder should be imprisoned". So not only do you have lawmakers and cops who don't want to deal with it because it's a waste, but you also have lawmakers and cops who feel the urge to subvert penalizing people they don't think are doing anything wrong. That's not even getting into things that stand before juries. Going back to the previous example, if support for ending the drug war gets much stronger it doesn't matter how hard the state tries to keep the laws on the books and how many times you warn the jurors against nullification, they're not going to play along. And if the jurors aren't likely to play along, why would the DA bother? And if the DA doesn't bother, why do the cops bother? And if the cops don't bother, why would you follow the laws most people don't give a shit about?
Thus bringing us to illegal immigration. Almost everybody who lives in the southern half of the United States knows illegal immigrants, and way, way more people know people they don't know are illegal immigrants *coughcanadianscough*. Now that adds an even further dimension. Because once you have people like that in the circles you know it stops being an abstract issue and takes on a very real and very human certainty. Because at that point you aren't deporting the lawbreakers, you're deporting your neighbors. Not only that, but you're deporting them based on the failures of the state, because even the most fervent far-right Trump-voting shit-kicking Texan believes in legal immigration. Wanting everybody out is a step too far for almost all Americans. We get more immigrants than anywhere else on the planet, and if USCIS wasn't fucked this would be a non-issue.
Getting on to Trump for a moment, he says he's going to funding starve the sanctuary cities until they allow him to deport their illegal immigrants.
And this is where the plan breaks down. He's suggesting that he's going to cut all, ALL federal funding to that list of cities? That's like 100 million people, if you count their metropolitan areas (and you should). Allow me to laugh even harder.
So yes, I do not support deportation of illegal immigrants. I support deportation of criminal immigrants, by which I mean people who actually committed a violent crime instead of violating state regulations, but everybody supports that so it's barely worth mentioning and does not describe the reality of almost all immigrants. Because even aside from all that, they're not even unwanted people. If USCIS could process at lightspeed and wasn't constrained by nonsense HomeSec paranoia and having no funding, they'd almost all be legal immigrants. If that isn't enough for you, again, you have to pull some borderline-Nazi shit to get those millions and millions out of the country by force even if you actually keep to that and don't start mass killings.
Amnesty is the way to go. Patching USCIS is almost more important, but amnesty is both the right thing to do and the practical solution, which every high-level contender besides Trump realizes even if they won't say it. Hell, maybe even Trump realizes it, with how hard he's refused to describe what mechanism will be used for mass deportation.
Author
Topic: Doc Helgoland's Asylum for the Politically American: T+0 (Read 1390053 times)