Actually no, ICE's job of racist murder and terrorizing does not need to be done.
What are the benefits of having an open border to the average American?
As far as rhetorical devices go, your insistence upon "just asking questions" could do with some variance. Have I ever bothered to play along with this? Hell, has anybody in this thread?
Posts like that one strike me as combative and as much as I want to respond I know that will only get me b& for causing trouble. Asking you to justify your pronouncements allows for an actual discussion rather than me just calling you names or you accusing me of putting words in your mouth/acting in bad faith.
lmao okay, arresting people for committing crimes means that you must be literally Hitler. As to enough, the country still has as "little" as 12 million and as many as 22 million illegal aliens living here. 4-7% of the total population aren't even supposed to be here. I should say that no, it is not enough.
But, to address your broader mockery, yes, there are crimes where arrests aren't warranted. Nobody's calling for homeowners to be raided at night over zoning violations, for example. The only thing that simplistic "all crime must be punished" reasoning does is provide a rhetorical shield for racism and class warfare. Immigration laws are, in the final analysis, malum prohibitum. They're there because they have to be for the legal system to work, not because failing to navigate our byzantine immigration system is somehow inherently immoral, and in light of that, yes, arrests aren't really warranted in many cases.
It doesn't make anybody comfortable, but in a legal system administered by fallible humans using laws written by other fallible humans, there's a certain amount of crime, particularly technical crime, that it's probably better to let slide. You don't want to pay enough cops to catch every speeder there ever will be and issue every concievable parking ticket. You don't want everyone's home raided all the time just in case there might be drugs there. You don't want compliance with every single applicable regulation to be constantly checked and re-checked for every bit of activity anyone ever does. That would be not only an inefficient use of public money but massively invasive. Immigration laws are kind of like that, I think; beyond a certain point, we do more harm ripping communities apart than we do just admitting our immigration system sucks and letting people work.
I don't think you can really call sneaking across the border, or overstaying a temporary visa because you would simply prefer to stay in the United States a "technical crime" that really anyone could make the mistake of committing. The reason we have immigration laws isn't just for procedural convenience, it's to control immigration for the benefit of the host country. Immigration has powerful economic, political, and sociological effects, and it can do (and I would argue is doing) serious harm if it's poorly controlled. As an American I have serious doubts about the benefits to the nation to admitting these people, or even the position of just focusing on securing the border and letting them be if they manage to make it in and don't cause too much trouble that many center-right people seem to be coming around to. If I were a Democratic politician, a Southern Republican politician, a businessman who employs a lot of low-skill workers maybe I could see some personal benefit, but I have yet to hear a convincing argument that the average person is helped out by this at all, let alone to a degree that outweighs the negatives. The immigrants themselves benefit I guess, but that just makes the question "why does the government of the USA care more about the citizens of other countries' wellbeing than its own?"
It's also true that there is a limit to what constitutes a reasonable effort to enforce a law, but leaving the realm of the theoretical and considering our practical position, we are
nowhere near that point when it comes to immigration. The situation is so out of control that portions of the country are essentially being colonized by foreigners, and portions of the legal system are engaging in """""civil disobedience""""" to hamper the enforcement of even the gimped rules we have now. We have a serious problem, and we won't help ourselves by getting
less serious about solving it.
While they would agree with you with you as far as being hardcore draconian on regulations etc, they don't see the harm in ripping communities apart, which is the whole problem since they see the hardcore draconian methods as not only acceptable, but neccesary.
What? No, these sorts have been caught out repeatedly saying they understand quite well the harm involved and it's part of what they're explicitly trying to do. Cruelty is literally the point of a lot of what modern anti-immigration hawks are peddling. "Deterrent", as if that somehow reduces the moral culpability in heaping unethical bullshit on the vulnerable.
You're not wrong. Really what we should be trying to do is restructure the system so being here illegally is as inconvenient and carries as few benefits as possible. Punishing employers who hire them is one thing, though it's been tried many times and rarely succeeds. Changing to a restricted
lex soli like Australia and most European countries have that requires at least one of your parents be a citizen would be another. Maybe making transfers of money outside the country harder is an avenue to examine as well.
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