We won't fix anything without accountability, and there are two sides to supply and demand. What we're doing now is theater.
I’m not a member of the GOP. Extremely far from it.
>We won't fix anything without accountability, and there are two sides to supply and demand.
Yes, of course. Punish those who exploit undocumented workers. Of course, it’s much harder to exploit an undocumented workforce when it doesn’t exist or is reduced in size. Many ways to achieve this (paths to citizenship, etc.); Anduril is just one piece of the solution, as I suggest in my original comment.
I didn't mean to imply you were or were not a member of the GOP. I included the observation about their hypocrisy simply because they are the largest group making the most noise about border security while clearly not actually giving a shit about Americans' jobs being "taken" by undocumented laborers.
> Yes, of course. Punish those who exploit undocumented workers. Of course, it’s much harder to exploit an undocumented workforce when it doesn’t exist or is reduced in size. Many ways to achieve this (paths to citizenship, etc.); Anduril is just one piece of the solution, as I suggest in my original comment.
If hiring them gets you thrown in prison, they will suddenly have a much harder time getting hired, and after some time employment will cease to be a reason to cross the border illegally. We don't have to fuck around with "virtual border technology" to accomplish this; all we have to do is recognize that (relatively) wealthy business owners are not above the law, but in America we have an astonishingly hard time with this. It's like the Brock Turner judge's mindset is baked into half the population from birth.
What you're talking about is called law enforcement and it has existed in this country for a long time. Until you clarify your point (what are "massive levels of internal surveillance"?) and justify it (why isn't the current investigative toolbox enough?), this is nothing but FUD, and ridiculous FUD at that.
> it doesn't do much for goods or people who cross the border without wanting to get a job, like gang members, dealers etc.
To the extent that this is actually a real problem, why do you think these people are crossing the border? Are they just coming up here because they feel like it, or are they responding to some kind of demand?
Are they just coming up here because they feel like it, or are they responding to some kind of demand?
That's incoherent. They're moving because they can earn more money in America. The fact that there are people who 'demand' lower wage workers is irrelevant: there will always be market demand to get more for less. The issues with immigration aren't on the employer's side.
It scales to far more than the handful we go after now (seriously, it's a handful, look it up) and guess what: business owners don't want to lose what they have, and they don't want to go to prison.
It's called a "deterrent", and it's the reason e.g. bars and restaurants don't sell liquor to kids despite the fact that the overwhelmingly vast majority of kid-looking people who would try to buy it if these laws weren't enforced are not actually undercover cops. (it's a bit of a chicken and egg thing, but I'm sure you understand)
> That's incoherent. They're moving because they can earn more money in America. The fact that there are people who 'demand' lower wage workers is irrelevant: there will always be market demand to get more for less. The issues with immigration aren't on the employer's side.
I think you're confused. Are you talking about undocumented workers, or "gang members and dealers"? I addressed the former in the comment you originally replied to; the bit of my last comment that you quoted refers to the latter, and my question stands. Why (do you think) "gang members and dealers" are coming to America?
Why (do you think) "gang members and dealers" are coming to America?
Ah sorry. I interpreted "they" as "all people crossing a border".
My point is raids on employers only catch cases where people are working for legitimate employers. If that's all you rely on, you can't try to filter out people who have alternative illegal income streams before they enter the country and become much harder to find and deal with.
I would be interested in a system whereby an internal border is so effective no external border is needed. But it's not clear to me it'd actually be better: there'd have to be constant checking of identity documents all the time, hugely ramped up law enforcement, and without a border it's unclear deportation would mean anything at all. People could just turn around and come right back in. It'd be sort of like trying to solve theft by just spending lots of money on police but not having door locks anywhere. There's a fundamental mismatch of costs.
"Unsecured" is being asked to do an awful lot of work in that sentence. Smugglers aren't driving trucks full of contraband over the open desert through areas where Trump's (or Palmer's) "wall," whether real or virtual, would stop them. They're smuggling them through established checkpoints. If you want to reduce the drug trade, better techniques for catching smugglers at the checkpoints will help, and reducing demand -- which is being driven by customers in the United States -- will help even more. "Build the wall!" will not.
I'm sorry about your dairy-farming family in New England, but if we go by statistics rather than anecdotes, there's been a lot of studies on the modern industrial farming economy which conclude that trying to chase out all the undocumented immigrants is attacking the wrong side of the problem. If farmers weren't hiring them, they wouldn't come here to work. Most farmers will tell you that Americans won't work for the low wages that they feel they have to pay farm hands, so they have to hire those undocumented workers. They feel they have to pay the farm hands that low because the prices they can charge are largely set by their huge agribusiness customers. Going after the infamously exploited undocumented workers at the end of this whole chain isn't going to solve the problem.
In any case, there aren't actually many people in power in the US who are calling for "wholesale open border policies," the person you're responding to notwithstanding. The intense fight in the Trump era over this stems from the uncomfortable fact that the people we're seeing in camps and cages on the borders of the US, the people we keep trying to punish for coming here in ever more brutal fashion, are not trying to make illegal border crossings. They are coming here to legally apply for asylum.
If the world is serious about solving "the migrant crisis," then perhaps we should stop trying to desperately fight against people being displaced and driven out of their homelands and start trying to address the issues that are displacing them and driving them out.
If cheap labor was unavailable, would American farms shut down? I don’t think so. I think they’d raise wages until Americans were willing to work for them, and pass the price along to consumers. I think the status quo (undocumented laborers working for low wages in terrible conditions with no healthcare, all to subsidize $0.50 oranges at Safeway) is a humanitarian tragedy equivalent to the worst Nike sweatshops.
>the people we're seeing in camps and cages on the borders of the US, the people we keep trying to punish for coming here in ever more brutal fashion, are not trying to make illegal border crossings.
Right. Anduril’s work would not affect these people, so why all these comments calling them literally evil?
If you increase cost it's going to have an effect. Some farms will shut down, some will automate, some will "move" (by way of imports) to other countries where the working conditions are worse.
I'm not saying you're wrong, but how do you know the specific means by which fentanyl is getting into the US?
> The intense fight in the Trump era over this stems from the uncomfortable fact that the people we're seeing in camps and cages on the borders of the US, the people we keep trying to punish for coming here in ever more brutal fashion, are not trying to make illegal border crossings.
I'm also curious about this, how you know the actual motivations behind people's concerns about the border?
Fully agree with your final point though, fixing the problem at the source should at least be seriously attempted, and I don't see any sign of that happening.
1. The process by which drugs are generally smuggled into the US from Mexico has been covered by a multitude of news sources for decades. The vast majority are smuggled through border checkpoints; a small minority are smuggled around border walls using tunnels, speedboats, aircraft, etc. It's hard to believe that you've had no exposure to any of this news in the past yourself if you're concerned about border security at all, but even if you hadn't, you could literally have looked this up by typing "HOW ARE DRUGS SMUGGLED INTO THE US" into the search engine of your choice.
2. The more I thought about "how do you know people's motivations for border concerns" question the more I was at a loss to answer it. I didn't say anything about people's motivations; I pointed out that to the extent there is a real migrant crisis on the US-Mexico border, it is a crisis caused by refugees seeking legal asylum, a problem which is entirely orthogonal to any problems that could be solved by a border all, real or virtual. The belief that the United States is treating those refugees inhumanely is also entirely orthogonal to any beliefs about border security, immigration quotas, etc. The "Trump era fight" that I refer to is the fight over the ethics not only of treating refugees this way, but over the honesty -- or, bluntly, lack thereof -- in the way the Trump administration and its supporters have been framing the debate in a way that conflates a refugee crisis with illegal immigration.
Pretend you are a border control officer and your sole objective is to stop illegal drugs from entering our borders. What situation would you rather have:
a) Thousands of peaceful people jumping the border in pickup trucks intermixed with a handful of drug smugglers and gang members.
or
b) Thousands of peaceful people lining up at a border checkpoint or consulate, with a handful of drug smugglers and gang members jumping the border in pickup trucks.
You should try legalizing more immigration. It gives us more control over the process and more selectivity and enforcement capability, not less.
You make it sound like there was an actual negative impacts. I haven't seen much "horrible" data on that front. It certainly gives ammo to fearmongers, but how does this make it a less good goal to strive for?
What really gets me is headlines like “German far-right capitalizes on migrant crimes,” as if those politicians were happy the crimes had been committed or consented to the policy decisions that led to them occurring.
[0] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-europe-migrants-germany-c...
[1] https://www.thelocal.de/20190415/german-far-right-capitalize...
[2] https://www.irishtimes.com/news/world/europe/germans-shaken-...
Here's a thought: make those who employ illegals liable for back taxes and back wages at US minimum wage. That will hurt.
Or is that already the case? If it is the law is not being enforced at all.
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/adolfoflores/ice-raids-...
I meant no particular offense to you, I see this sentiment regularly in online forums and repeated throughout comments here, your comment was just the one I happened to reply to.
My wife and I have both been hit by illegal immigrants. One of them driving drunk and drinking in the car while he hit me, and had no insurance or license, and had a prior DUI that he missed court for. The other (one that hit my wife’s car) simply didn’t have insurance, but wasn’t drinking.
My wife’s car had to be repaired heavily (over $5,000), which was paid for by our insurance, and the $500 adoptable was paid for by us. When my car was hit in the back, both of us were in the car, both of us had serious concussions because this accident was much worse. This is the one where the guy was driving with a beer in his hand, and he tried to leave the scene of the accident but one of his engine’s Peripherals was hanging out Of his hood and he couldn’t get his car to start.
The fact that the people in question were immigrants (one from Honduras, the other I’m not sure) Is not the problem. The problem is that they are here illegally and in a sanctuary county, which means that the law-enforcement is in a Weird position where they cannot really do anything about petty crimes like driving under the influence, because it’s an expensive process of dealing with the county. So, in both cases, these people are still roaming around probably hitting other people, meanwhile both of us have had to pay to fix our own vehicles and had at least medium level injuries (concussion symptoms last for a lot longer than I realized, and we were both Having serious issues a month later).
So, while immigrants don’t necessarily Harm people, illegal immigration certainly does.
Some general problems your situation unintentionally alludes to (not perhaps in your state, but common in the south) are criminalizing the issuance of drivers licenses to undocumented people (which literally prevents them from obtaining insurance), and the fact that these people are working in the shadows and thus being underpaid (and thus not being able to pay for insurance).
The problem of under-insured drivers (estimated about 13% of all drivers) is real. Many folks have proposed ways to quantify and address the problem (e.g., [1]).
[1] https://www.naic.org/cipr_topics/topic_uninsured_motorists.h...
So the reason he was drinking and driving isn’t because he’s an illegal immigrant or because he was from Honduras. It’s because there is no rule of law when you are letting people break your laws to get into the country to begin with. And if there is no law there is no accountability. If I didn’t have to worry about getting in trouble myself, I might be out drinking rum runners on the highway 24 hours a day.
We all like to think of ourselves as virtuous, but, without accountability to the rest of society, we are just wild animals on this rock floating through space.
Police keep finding bodies [0] of MS-13 victims [1] buried in parks [2] in my area, so pardon me if I disagree.
[0] https://beta.washingtonpost.com/local/public-safety/ms-13-me...
[1] https://patch.com/virginia/greateralexandria/teen-pleads-gui...
[2] https://beta.washingtonpost.com/local/public-safety/fairfax-...
Risk is relative. What’s your standard for being secure? The rifle homicide rate in the US is 0.18/100k people [0], which includes hunting and "traditional" rifles in addition to assault-style weapons. Is your standard for security measured by this metric? If so, you should feel quite good. Or is it that you’re allowing the emotion aroused by splashy headlines to color your judgement?
To answer you directly: I wouldn't make my home more dangerous if I can avoid it, barring some counterbalancing upside. The counterargument that, "it's still way better than living in a favela!" doesn't work for me.
Economically, mass low-skill migration has significant downsides for low-skill American workers. The "upside" is an increase in the total economic pie for U.S. citizens, but only because capitalists can exploit migrant workers even harder, and non-citizen workers' shares of the pie don't count.
[0] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/08/16/what-the-da...
[1] https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/09/trump-clinto...
Sure, and neither am I bothered by your statistics.
My standard is feeling safe when I walk late at night. I don’t feel safe when gang members dig shallow graves in the park up the road, or tag buildings in my neighborhood with gang signs, or recruit in increasing numbers from local high schools. I don’t feel safe when the police chief describes gang murders as “out of control.” [0]
Nor am I comforted when Internet strangers patronize me, and deny the validity of my own thoughts and experiences. I don’t have anything left to say to you within the HN community guidelines.
[0] https://www.fairfaxcounty.gov/springfield/sites/springfield/...
As first generation American this is dangerously misguided and follows the debunked lump of labor fallacy. It reminds me of the "rootless cosmopolitan" slur.
You have no idea how offensive and ridiculous that statement is to me.
It’s the reality that if you earn more than a certain amount of money, and posses an advanced degree plus a certain amount of capital, your relocation options are vastly greater than someone with fewer credentials, less capital, and a smaller salary.
And you sound like someone with the same privilege speaking from a place of paternalism. Restrictive borders disproportionately harm the poor.
> I have family in New England who ran an all-organic dairy farm. They had to shut down a few years ago, in part because they couldn't compete with the farms who paid undocumented workers under the table.
Others have already debunked your trafficking claim, but your anecdote about an all-organic dairy farm is particularly laughable. 'Dey took ar jerbs' has been debunked for decades now.[1]
My mom grew up on a dairy farm in New England (I'm visiting my Grandma there in a month), and I can tell you that there's plenty of reasons that most of them are closing/consolidating, and undocumented labor isn't even top-5.
> In Germany, the 2015 migrant crisis nearly brought the far-right "Alternativ für Deutschland" into power. That crisis only abated once the Balkan states took it upon themselves to secure the E.U.'s southern border.
Wait, the migrants and open borders are to blame for xenophobia?
You do well to point out that Bush supported the DREAM act and take about as wrong a lesson from that as you possibly could. The lesson is not 'give the xenophobes a compromise to get slightly-more-sane immigration policies', it's that the rise in ultra-right wing nationalism/xenophobia around the world in the last decade should be the real thing keeping people up at night, not some imagined migrant 'invasion'.
[1]https://contexts.org/articles/the-economics-of-migration/
"Illegal immigration to the United States in recent decades has tended to depress both wages and employment rates for low-skilled American citizens, a disproportionate number of whom are black men."
This would seem to contradict your statement that, "Restrictive borders disproportionately harm the poor."
https://www.usccr.gov/pubs/docs/IllegImmig_10-14-10_430pm.pd...
"Both low- and high-skilled natives are affected by the influx of immigrants. But because a disproportionate percentage of immigrants have few skills, it is low-skilled American workers, including many blacks and Hispanics, who have suffered most from this wage dip. The monetary loss is sizable. The typical high school dropout earns about $25,000 annually. According to census data, immigrants admitted in the past two decades lacking a high school diploma have increased the size of the low-skilled workforce by roughly 25 percent. As a result, the earnings of this particularly vulnerable group dropped by between $800 and $1,500 each year."
"But that’s only one side of the story. Somebody’s lower wage is always somebody else’s higher profit. In this case, immigration redistributes wealth from those who compete with immigrants to those who use immigrants—from the employee to the employer. And the additional profits are so large that the economic pie accruing to all natives actually grows. I estimate the current “immigration surplus”—the net increase in the total wealth of the native population—to be about$50 billion annually. But behind that calculation is a much larger shift from one group of Americans to another: The total wealth redistribution from the native losers to the native winners is enormous, roughly a half-trillion dollars a year."
tl;dr Low-skilled citizens are still hurt, and the "bigger economic pie" from illegal immigration turns out to mainly be due to wealth concentration and bad statistics.
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/09/trump-clinto...
>Wait, the migrants and open borders are to blame for xenophobia?
No, lots of people in Germany are worried about mass-migration because... you know, just read my other comment:
Btw, since you are so pro open national borders. I am a Mexican based in Mexico City, I know a lot of people who would like to live in the US, would you be interested in sponsoring them, maybe hosting them at your place? That way they wouldn't have to risk their lives trying to just get to the US border Feel free to reach out.
You sound like someone with the ability to live anywhere, who consequently has little stake in their current "somewhere." Lots of Americans (and people in other countries) don't have this flexibility. They are directly and inescapably effected by the de facto U.S. open border policy for low-skilled workers. For example:
I have family in New England who ran an all-organic dairy farm. They had to shut down a few years ago, in part because they couldn't compete with the farms who paid undocumented workers under the table. At the same time, their rural community has been decimated by the opioid crisis. Most fentanyl in the U.S. comes in via the unsecured border with Mexico [0].
We've seen what happens when other countries adopt wholesale open borders policies. In Germany, the 2015 migrant crisis nearly brought the far-right "Alternativ für Deutschland" into power. That crisis only abated once the Balkan states took it upon themselves to secure the E.U.'s southern border.
Finally, I also think it's likely that any compromise to solve the border crises will involve additional border security measure. We've come close enough before to know what such a bill might look like - remember when George W. Bush strongly supported the DREAM Act, amnesty, and a path to citizenship? [1]. Why not develop the necessary technology now?
[0] https://www.latimes.com/world/mexico-americas/la-fg-mexico-d... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comprehensive_Immigration_Refo...