Someone always makes this comment every time illegal immigration is mentioned as if the law is the final word on what is just. And then they’ll complain about someone going to prison for being a whistleblower or pirating movies or cheer on the protestors in Hong Kong.

I didn't see anything in OP's comment about whistleblowers, pirating or HK.

Saying that people should go to prison because they happen to illegally be in a country that’s not theirs is in the same realm of bad things as what the mainland Chinese are trying to do now in HK.

Illegal immigrants are not sent to prison unless they committed additional crimes, usually they are deported and sent back to their respective countries.

Right. Not prison ... "detention centers". In which they will be held against their will sometimes for months or years and at times with even fewer rights than a traditional prisoner might get.

With their infant children.

Perhaps existing law isn’t perfect, but ignoring it isn’t an answer to it; otherwise there’d be no point in having any laws at all. Our laws are supposed to codify what we collectively believe are the boundaries of individual and collective action for the common good. And we have constitutional means to change them when we conclude we need to do so.

If you want to practice civil disobedience, it can sometimes effectuate change, but it doesn’t always work — especially not immediately — and you have to be willing to be punished in the meantime.

The proposal here is to make a new law.

When people argue both that laws are bad, and we need a new law to improve society, I wonder if they're really thought things through.

You are absolutly right

Where I live, work permits are so easy (or automatic through the virtue of being in Schengen area) to get that illegal immigration basically does not exist, so the whole idea is vague at best to me.

If you are in Europe, how can you not be aware of undocumented refugees from North Africa and Syria? What you are saying is completely delusional.

Where in Europe are you talking about? The majority of immigrants in any EU country come from other EU countries. Of the remainder, less than 10% arrived as refugees. The vast majority of refugees (over 90% I’d guess) are documented and those from Syria or North Africa constitute only a fraction of all refugees.

The average European is highly highly unlikely to have ever encountered an undocumented refugee from Syria or North Africa.

Sorry, but you have no clue how many undocumented immigrants are all around you. Just because most of them are white you don't notice them in streets and they work shitty and hard jobs so you don't meet them either... I personally know like a dozen guys from Serbia and Bosnia who live in Austria and Germany illegally, and that's a dime a dozen. Us, Albanians and Turks are for EU what Mexicans are for US...

Sorry but an anecdote about your personal experience isn't very convincing.

What would be convincing would be a reference to a source with numbers/data to back up your claim.

The most recent Europe-wide figures are pretty out-of-date but indicate estimates of between 0.3% and 0.7% of people living in Eureope being irregular/undocumented (http://irregular-migration.net). This is much less than the comparable estimates for the US, for example.

I never claimed there's more illegal immigrants in the EU than in US. I said that there's more immigrants than it is maybe perceived by most, especially tourists. For instance in Austria more than 20% of population are legal immigrants. In Switzerland it's more than 30%. About half of them come from other EU countries, and most of them are concentrated in big cities. [1]

Regarding the illegal immigration situation in EU is very different from US because the laws are different. In EU state helps immigrants so they're incentivized to register, and also it's easier to get permits. According to the official DHS report [2]: "Of the total illegal alien population in 2015, nearly 80 percent had resided within the United States for more than 10 years", which is super uncommon in EU, they'd be legalized by that time.

So just comparing the numbers doesn't tell the true story, but according to the official report from Austria [3]: "Irregular residents account for between 2.9% and 1.1% of the total population.", so 10x more what you suggested. They also note in this report: "As there are strong incentives for immigrants to register in Austria (e.g. certificate of registration as a prerequisite for application for state benefits), the majority of immigrants are on record at the registration offices. In contrast, very little information is available about irregular immigration." And Austria is one of the stricter countries in this regard.

[1] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/pdfscache...

[2] https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/18_1214...

[3] https://bmi.gv.at/Downloads/files/Bericht_des_Migrationsrats...

There are not as many as for example southern US but there are illegal immigrants. Usually people who smuggle themselves here but fail to get asylum but goes underground and works shitty jobs for very shitty pay. Or keep away to try to seek asylum again after some time.

You also have those that are in limbo as for example there are several countries that are not taking back their citizens if they are forced there. Afghanistan used to be one of those countries for Sweden so even if someone got a no on their asylum application they could still just say no and stay. However now Sweden has a deal with Afghanistan so people who are not leaving willingly are put on chartered planes down there.

Then there are those internally within EU like beggars who are officially not allowed to stay as long as they do but no one is checking of course.

Don’t understand the downvotes. If anyone has any references to there being a large number of undocumented immigrants in Europe, I’d be glad to be corrected.

Most of Europe is very different to the US in this regard. Without being legal/registered, you’ve no chance of getting the equivalent of an SSN, drivers license, opening a bank account, leasing an apartment or in some cases even buy a mobile phone. Consequently, the number of undocumented immigrants is minuscule.

I get the impression that in the US it mightn’t be unusual for the average citizen to encounter undocumented immigrant gardeners, nannies, etc. - this almost never happens in Europe.

Well based on media discussion of a current major UK story - that 39 immigrants died in a refrigerated lorry, it's spawned a lot of stories into illegal immigration and why 39 people were trying to get to the UK. Police are currently investigating the lorry having been one of a convoy of three - so potentially around 100. One of the reports, that I can't find again, I think someone at Rotterdam port discussing that some unbelievably low percentage of trucks are checked properly in the major EU ports, and few even have capability to check for presence of people. Just a check that seals are intact, papers are right, and a camera to see passing vehicles.

So it's probable that many Europeans could have encountered illegal immigrants without realising.

The common point is there a selection of low pay service jobs that attract illegal immigrants, who then become trapped. Some by debt and threats to family, and other more direct slavery. Anti-trafficking and similar groups have been warning of issues for years, and mostly ignored.

It remains a truth that the vast majority of immigration in Europe is legal, but there is a significant level of illegal migration. Thanks to the free movement of peoples within the EU, it is far harder to detect than before those border checks were pulled down.

Here is just one of a selection of pieces that have come up this week across all the press:

https://www.theguardian.com/law/2019/oct/25/trafficked-vietn...

Well I know from personal experience that Sweden and Germany have lots of migrants from there, as well as France and Italy of course. They tend to be official refugees in the northern countries, but there are many undocumented, and also from the East. It is also notorious that countries will shuffle undesirables to another country, e.g. sending Africans back to Italy, sending Roma anywhere else.

And how would those be identified by a facial recognition system? I don't see your point here.

Well, it would be technically challenging, but it's where people surveillance is going. There are several versions of the problem:

1- For face f, is f a member of F_known? (From national ID cards etc.) Assume this gives an answer [0.0 - 1.0].

2- Is f a member of F_suspect? Where F_suspect is a database of face imagery associated with potentially illegal activity or refugee migration. Not that these faces could be from video surveillance (from a border region, train station, migrant camp) or scraped from war zone images e.g. jihadi propaganda, YouTube video of regime critics, talking politics on HN, video of protests in other countries, etc.

3- Not matching anything, and hence also requiring investigation.

All of these have errors, which generally go up as more people are added to the training database. Apparently some ethnicities (okay, black people) are often trained for poorly. This will likely result in 'over-servicing' of some ethnicities.

If local police get a hit for someone going through festival security and detain them on the basis of face recognition software, what is the legal basis for that? Police would say that they had 'intelligence' but can they explain the basis for it? Is this not essentially maintaining dossiers on people who have not committed any crime? They have no evidence a crime has been committed but instead they are essentially running a police checkpoint and saying "Papers!". These are the mechanisms of the Stasi.

One can argue that police should be able to detain those with outstanding warrants. I have no problem with that, except that when police take photos of citizens it is hard to know what is done with those photos. Ironclad legislation requiring they not leave the device or be stored on anything except ephemeral storage would be a good start, along with civil and criminal penalties for non compliance and direct individual responsibility and penalties for the chain of command.

Without a rigorous push back, America will become like China and the UK, where your face must be shown, and it will be recorded and tracked 24/7. Of course in America it will probably be via a company, and police forces will have a subscription, which lowers their fees the more faces the capture.

Where in the Schengen area does illegal immigration basically not exist?

Vatican for example

Are they in the Schengen? A quick Google says no, but maybe it is somehow inherited from Italy?

They aren’t in the Schengen area but they have open borders with Italy, which itself is in the Schengen area. Schengen or not, it doesn’t really make sense to talk about immigration in the Vatican since there’s no nationality and the Vatican can’t even issue visas.

Czech Republic

That is not the case in the us, and moreover there are people who have lived in the us since they were babies or small children, and have families and careers or even served in the military who are still at risk of deportation to country they don’t remember and where they don’t even speak the language well or at all.

Because it’s the cause celebre today. The causes are often cultivated by different loose organizations like influential people, moneyed people, media and eventually elementary schools. Sometimes the issues are leftist, sometimes rightist. Today leftist ideas are in ascension, ten years from now, who knows.

Ten years ago it wouldn’t have been a thing. There were other issues. These things come and go like fashion. Twenty thirty years ago it was self determination of nations, today its “there should be no borders” which is the opposite of self determination of nations.

> today its “there should be no borders” which is the opposite of self determination of nations.

It is not. To quote Zach Weinersmith

"Every time I talk about immigration, someone says 'but the US has the right to control borders.' Sure! Yes!

The US also has the right to create a branch of the military containing only monkeys wearing tiny hats. That has no bearing on whether it's good policy or not!"

The people mentioning deportation probably believe that the rules determining who is or is not allowed in a country are unfair and should be circumvented in at least some cases.

You might disagree, but perhaps you can think of some other law that you wouldn't want festivals to assist in enforcing. If you can't, do you trust that the government will never pass such a law? If not, you might not want to normalize having facial recognition tech everywhere.

On the topic of deportation, has anyone seen anyone arrested for deportation at a music festival? Do we have any data that this is actually happening? I'm a crime analyst in Chicago and I can't imagine officers doing event management would ever spend time on nonviolent undocumented residents.

It should be a human right to exist at a public place/event anywhere on Earth, regardless of which country you were born in.

It's insane that people will go on about how important it is to treat people equally regardless of their race, gender, skin colour or sexuality, but also argue it's perfectly fine and moral to discriminate based on place of birth. Because people clearly have a lot more control over where they're born than they do over their skin color or gender..

Of course it's not "perfectly fine", but having some semblance of border control is the best system we have in the imperfect international environment we're in. Opening borders is not fixing the system morally, it's admitting modern civilization is a total joke (which it may be, the first world being partly the product of centuries of arguably immoral empires) and deciding to burn everything down.

You can't do away with borders in an environment where governments are at each other's throats and there's massive wealth and cultural inequality. At best — at best — the 1st world would rapidly equalize economically and politically with the rest of the world. And what would that accomplish? The refugees (small percentage of 3rd world residents who could/would migrate) come from cultures that are unable to fix their own countries' problems from within, granted often due to initial conditions outside their control. So how would they fix our problems — and we have a lot of them — which are equally out of our control to solve? And after such a grand experiment, the refugees would be hardly any better off than they are now.

Opening borders to absolve our guilty conscience about ill-gotten gains of empires past and present doesn't solve anything. It just makes us feel better. It's like shooting heroin on the titanic.

"Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

America was built on immigration from undesirables (an Irish or Italian Catholic ~100 years ago was treated as suspiciously as a Muslim is now), and it seemed to turn out okay. The key difference back then was there was minimal welfare, so immigrants had to find something productive to do or else they'd starve.

>At best — at best — the 1st world would rapidly equalize economically and politically with the rest of the world. And what would that accomplish?

This is already happening via outsourcing: see for instance the rise of China, hundreds of millions of people lifted out of poverty while working-class Americans get poorer, and China's rising political influence on other countries. Open immigration would encourage more competition between countries: a hellhole like North Korea would have to clean up its act if its citizens were free to get up and leave.

>And after such a grand experiment, the refugees would be hardly any better off than they are now.

Do you think current (legal) refugees would agree that they're hardly any better off than they were back in their original country? Why would illegal refugees be any different? (Often the only difference between an illegal and a legal refugee/immigrant is that the legal one is at the front of some queue, the illegal one is at the back).

What does that quote have to do with anything? Try quoting an actually important document not a piece of art in New York City.

>the key difference back then was minimal welfare

And an expectation of assimilation. Regardless immigration in the absence of a welfare state is a completely different beast than immigration into a welfare state.

>Do you think current legal refugees would agree.

Current refugees benefit from unequal access to our labor market. If you eliminated that advantage by letting anyone in, not just risk takers, they almost certainly wouldn’t find it so attractive. How is a race to the bottom a good thing?

>outsourcing

Yes Americans get poorer, and the world gets tons more plastic in its oceans every minute. So we all get poorer too. In my estimation it’s far more important that 1st world countries make a stand for the health of the earth. Globalism is completely incompatible environmentalism best I can tell.

Because of the tax dollars (or euros or whatever) which the residents pay and the immigrants don't? Ok so you are saying the right to be anywhere should be given to anyone. Is the right to spend my tax money (which was used up to build infrastructure, institutions, healthcare, etc. etc.) also something that should be given to anyone else in the entire world? How can you possibly think this is just? That every random person should be able to use publicly paid infrastructure that they haven't paid for?

>That every random person should be able to use publicly paid infrastructure that they haven't paid for?

Did you pay for the country's infrastructure upon your birth, or did you freeload for at least 18 years before contributing anything back to it in taxes?

No one is suggesting that sub-18 y/o illegal immigrants should have to pay taxes.

Where do you live, Neverland?

Of course it should be a human right to freely travel, in a political utopia. Guess where we don't live? We don't live somewhere called no place.

If wishes (moral and otherwise) were horses, we'd drown in horse shit.

>If wishes (moral and otherwise) were horses, we'd drown in horse shit.

If everybody thought like this, we'd still be in the stone age. You don't achieve change by deciding it's impossible and giving up.

Sure.. as long as you pay your back taxes.

>Surveillance aside, since when has it been a human right to attend a festival in a country you are not allowed to reside in?

Forgetting about illegal immigrants for a moment, are you saying that visitors to some country shouldn't be allowed at festivals? What have you got against tourism?

There's no right to visit attractions, but there ought to be a right to privacy, and I'd personally prefer a few illegals get to unjustly enjoy themselves over the invasive panopticon required to prevent that.

Because the computer might say you are someone else.

Do not underestimate the power of "computer said so"

We’ve had judicial procedures to challenge the results of technological processes for nearly a century (radar guns for speeding violations, for example). It’s not a foregone conclusion that the computer is always right.

That won't stop you getting hauled off and treated like shit and generally put through the mincer until they realise that the facial "recognition" was incorrect and you are not actually on the most wanted terrorist list they let you out of the holding cell...

Perhaps not, but the same thing can happen if a mistaken person identifies you. In fact, computers are already more reliable than people at identifying individuals. Mistaken identities are tremendous problems with the reliability of criminal convictions. You can dissect an algorithm but not a person’s mind.

Since when was it a human right to tell other people where they're allowed to live?

Good question. I’ll be moving in to your house this evening, thanks.

The illegal immigrants aren't staying in your home, they're staying with whomever they're paying rent to. What right do you have to tell him who he can rent to?

Good question. If he also decides not to rent to black people, certainly, that’s his business, and I have no right to tell him who to rent to. Correct?

If you're asking me personally, then yes it's none of your business what he's doing with his property. If he's not renting to black people, that means more tenants for people who aren't racist to rent to. But that aside, housing discrimination laws are based on the moral principle that people should not be treated worse based on their skin colour. Upon what moral principle is the notion that people should be treated worse based on their place of birth based?

Treat your neighbor like your brother? Nationalism and before that tribalism are as old as our species.

Since property, both private and public, is a fundamental human right. Just as you have a right to privacy of your home, a country's citizens have the same right to their country.

>Since property, both private and public, is a fundamental human right.

If property is a fundamental right, then shouldn't it be the right of a landlord to rent his property to whomever he wants?

Of course it should. But the landlord's private property is still a part of the country citizen's collective property.

Humans (and presumably human rights, if assuming they're fundamental) existed before countries. So how does a concept that came later (a country) suddenly trump something that's fundamental? What is the moral mechanism by which a group of people declare a certain area a country and suddenly gain property rights over everything within that area?

Human rights, just as countries, are a human invention. These inventions are extremely useful, because they allow some rules for conflict resolution — without them, it's just rule of power and violence.

> Surveillance aside, since when has it been a human right to attend a festival in a country you are not allowed to reside in?

This is a pure strawman.

The efforts and the social impact of chasing people doing something illegal must be balanced with the seriousness of the crime.

The right to go about your business without your location being tracked automatically and in bulk is recognized regardless of one’s immigration status.

Recognized by whom?