The conversation is not about about benefits and services to non-citizens, but about whether enforcement is being targeted at specific immigrant populations based on white supremacist ideologies. It is about the false, widely circulated talking-point that this administration simply seeks to push people toward legal pathways.
>If the guest worker program wasn't being horribly abused it would be worthwhile.
This is a claim that requires justification. Any tiered labor system that does not guarantee a level legal playing field for all workers is abusable.
Wanting to avoid a demographic shift is an invalid reason to constraint immigration in my eyes, I find arguments like that to be heavily based in strongly bigoted opinions.
You're the only one saying that, though.
The state does not create people out of whole cloth.
You can only see immigration as anti-democratic when you see new immigrants as somehow inherently different than the inhabitants. When you discard any notion that they could be equal partners in building better lives here.
They are from another country and bring with them their own views, traditions and culture... They don't get mind-wiped when they land on US soil.
In 1882, when the first immigration law specifically called out Chinese people for exclusion?
Or today, when the internationally agreed upon framework for asylum is actively undermined by the current administration?
And what makes these sales just, fair, or even productive?
https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=539139...
They are slow walking all immigrants, focusing the brunt of their enforcement activity on black and brown folks, up to and including turning people away from self-deportation processes if they present as white.
It is a coordinated effort to delay demographic shifts.