Do they have a moral right to live in the United States? Probably not.
Should we let them stay? Depends on how we feel. It's not up to them anymore.
Yes, they do. Everyone has a moral right not to be deported to somewhere they've never known, especially if it tears up families in the process, extra especially if it's ultimately just for bureaucratic reasons.
That's the exact same argument people who live in any rapidly gentrifying neighborhood make. You do NOT have the moral right to live whereever you want, even if it's the only place you know.
Fundamentally you live where you can afford and it's legal for you to live. You don't have the rights to any piece of land unless you have a deed, and even then, eminent domain can trump your rights.
2. We're not talking about having to move across town. We're talking about being deported to a country you've never known. Being forcibly separated from your friends and family. Being unable to even visit them due to the mandatory 10-year ban on entering the United States after being deported.
And again, since you mention legality, it was illegal for Japanese-Americans to live in their homes during World War II. Yet they had a right to do so.
Hah. You're already confusing mass deportation as a moral problem, rather than a legal and policy problem. Should illegal immigrants be deported en masse? Should criminals be incarcerated en mass?
> We're talking about being deported to a country you've never known.
You're talking about children who were born in the states? They have a choice. Either stay in the states or go with their parents to another country. It's up to them, just like it's up to any other citizen. The children are not forced to leave.
That the law doesn't mandate an entitlement to permanent residency for undocumented immigrants brought here as children does not mean that we should be arbitrary about making these decisions.
We should not try to help clean up other peoples' mistakes. If you bring a newborn illegally into a country where they should not be, you're accepting the consequences not just for yourself, but the baby.
The point is not we're deporting the baby, we're deporting the whole family and trying to deter future illegal immigration.
And those babies born here have the same rights and protections. Either move to another country because your family is there or stay here without your family. Those are the rights that all citizens have.
If you have to get smuggled into a country without papers to live in this country and work for wages less than people who already live in the country, you sort of already have the expectation of being second class. Yet, people still come. It's a choice they make. It's not an easy choice, but still a choice.
> we are a nation of laws
and then
>To deport undocumented workers with children born here is to put young American citizens in the position of having to choose between losing their parents or their home country. Pointlessly.
The law is the point, as you said, we're a nation of laws.
> The due process concerns about deportation are overwhelming.
Due process is only a right guaranteed to citizens. Not quite sure what your point is.
And as for the children who never had a choice to make...?
Children never had choices to make when born into an alcoholic family, or in a country in a war torn third world country, and yet they still suffer. That's just sort of how life is. The children suffer based on the mistakes of their parents.
We have limited resources, and we have to decide how to partition these resources.
To enforce the law and to prevent these injustices to happen in the future. How are you causing more injustice? That's sort of like saying "Why spend money to evict squatters in houses they don't own? They have children, and it costs money to evict them."
Those that were born here are citizens, and get the choice like every other citizen - move to be with their families, or stay here alone. The fact that they're children is immaterial.
https://www.amazon.com/Three-Felonies-Day-Target-Innocent/dp...
That's absolutely incorrect. Cops will and can enforce laws arbitrarily. If you're an illegal immigrant, you just have less rope to play with.
If you get bored, do a search of police arrest records on how many people are charged with just "resisting arrest".
Or you can always apply that timeless advice, "only do one illegal thing at once. For instance, either drive without a license, or have a tail light out. Not both".
Immigrants already are driving metaphorically without a license.
At this point I'm wondering if we actually disagree, since you seem to be agreeing that deportation of families that include citizen children would qualify as ruthless.
Depends. There are several instances. Trump has gradually softened his stance on illegal immigration, basically saying now that if you keep your nose clean, you probably won't get deported.
If however the family contain family members who are violent criminals or have known gang ties? How is deporting them "ruthless"? It's self-preservation.
Whether or not Trump currently says he's going to do it is besides the point. That is a super common and easily disposed of objection from conservatives. If you don't think Trump is going to propose something, a pledge not to do it should be even less objectionable to Republicans.
But... but... think of their children and families! Aren't they human beings too?/s
But then it comes down to a value judgement, and all laws/rules have edge cases. Should you take a generally good law, point to the edge cases, and then abolish the law?
> If you don't think Trump is going to propose something, a pledge not to do it should be even less objectionable to Republicans.
Not from a negotiating perspective. By keeping options in your pocket you're able to wrangle concessions from people.
Have I not demonstrated that I'm willing to listen to you and address arguments you bring up respectfully? Is there something I said that made you feel like your best way forward was to play message board nerd games?
There are no strawman arguments here. San Francisco has a sanctuary city policy, blocking immigration attempts to deport people. Deporting people is not a horrible deplorable thing, as you're making it out to be. It's a fact of border enforcement.
You can make any number of arguments about families and suffering, but the fact of the matter is that people chose to immigrate illegally and raise families when they knew what the consequences could be, and now they're trying to weasel out of the consequences.
* For many Latino immigrants, the wait list for permanent residency is over 20 years long. The wait isn't that long because we want to restrict immigration; we broadly agree that if we drastically reduced the immigrant population in the US, the economy would suffer, because those people are staffing the meat packing plants, cleaning the hotels, working the line at practically every high-end restaurant, harvesting crops, laying bricks, and putting up tile. Rather: the 20 year wait list is simple bureaucratic cruelty: there are loud constituencies who are uneasy about formally allowing people to stay here while being totally content with allowing them to work here undocumented, so long as they're kept second-class.
* That's bad enough, but not dispositive. The real problem is that we've created the expectation that people can work here for years and years without obtaining permanent residency, and so people put down roots and then have children here. Children born in America are American citizens, full stop. We are idiosyncratic in having a Constitution that guarantees birthright citizenship, but we do, and we are a nation of laws. To deport undocumented workers with children born here is to put young American citizens in the position of having to choose between losing their parents or their home country. Pointlessly. We owe our fellow citizens better.
* A huge number (pretty much everyone agrees it's a plurality) of undocumented workers are undocumented not because they've done something wrong, but because they've somehow fallen off their visa track --- which the law makes incredibly easy to do! We put them on an untenable 20 year legal obstacle course that really requires professional representation to complete. They spend that time working and raising children. Then we punish their children for technicalities, while quietly replacing them with other Latino immigrants.
* The due process concerns about deportation are overwhelming. More than 70% of deportation cases in which the subject is represented by an immigration attorney fail --- the immigrant isn't deported. But the overwhelming majority of deportees aren't represented, because we don't guarantee counsel to people in immigration court. All we give them is a translator. If I sued you on some bogus libel charge for pissing me off on HN, how well do you think you'd do if you were denied a lawyer?
I am ultimately ambivalent about immigration enforcement. I recognize that we are in many ways more lenient than much of Europe. My objection to the big dumb wall isn't moral, it's just that it's a big dumb waste of money.
I am not ambivalent about pointlessly tearing up, or, worse, forcibly relocating families that include American citizens. There are hundreds of thousands of those. I would absolutely quit a job, refuse investment from a firm that supported, or sever ties with a client that participated in a mass deportation program that forced children to choose between their parents and their country.