I'm sure these people have varying viewpoints across the spectrum on a variety of issues, but this is a direct contract with a client that currently has a large target on it's back. These employees agree they would prefer not to be a partner. Saying all of those who petitioned share a narrow viewpoint is reductive.

You are defending literal slave labor.

https://www.cnn.com/2018/04/17/us/immigrant-detention-forced...

It looks like that lawsuit is alleging that prisoners only making $1-4 a day is slave labor when to my knowledge that's common in almost all prisons in the US.

https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2017/04/10/wages/

That's not to say its a good practice or policy but nothing there looks like its any different for ICE detainees.

The 13th amendment abolished slavery for everyone except prisoners. The fact that migrants are being treated like prison labor is evidence that they are performing slave labor.

Slavery is still allowed for jury duty as well. You are forced to work and if you don't go they can throw you in prison and/or fine you.

Oh Hacker News, you never cease to disappoint.

"Prisoners are being forced to work for almost no pay, its modern day slavery."

"Yeah but think about jury duty, I'm the real slave labour in my middle class lifestyle, having to participate the function of my democracy."

I'm sure you think that taxation is theft as well.

But also other company employees are protesting! There have been news stories for multiple employee protests (including Delta refusing to deport some people)

Maybe you and GP are not seeing the stories because the outlets you read choose not to cover this

"ICE is currently doing some bad things" is a viewpoint shared by a pretty large group of people. Honestly it just sounds like you're projecting.

ICE is getting raked over the coals in the court of public opinion because they don't have the funding nor the manpower to deal with 100k people coming over the border each month. Many asylum seekers are just exploiting the asylum system with invalid cases as economic migrants to delay the process so they don't get sent back home. All the while congress hasn't done much at all to fix the obvious problems in the law (some of which lead to family separation in detainment), nor do reasonable things like give a pathway to citizenship for the dreamers.

Simply saying they are doing bad things is reducing the problems to a soundbite.

Prior world war II the illegal immigration from Mexico was a genuine issue for America. DO you want to know how they stopped illegal immigration cold? They simply fined any business or employer who employed them severely. The problem quickly resolved itself without having to lock people up.

It is entirely possible to curtail the number of people coming here once there is NO work or services for them. It works, and we know it works, because we have done it before.

No one wants to "solve it" because our entire food supply and production (meat packing to local restaurants) is powered by illegal immigrants. Lawn care, construction, plenty of industries run on cheap (illegal) immigrant labor.

> DO you want to know how they stopped illegal immigration cold? They simply fined any business or employer who employed them severely. The problem quickly resolved itself without having to lock people up.

I'd be completely in favor of that. Especially in the recent case where ICE raided a factory in the south owned by the Koch brothers. We need congress to act on that though as AFAIK there is not a current framework to prosecute businesses for it.

> No one wants to "solve it" because our entire food supply and production (meat packing to local restaurants) is powered by illegal immigrants. Lawn care, construction, plenty of industries run on cheap (illegal) immigrant labor.

I agree. Once we stop the illegal flow we could start offering more work visas and other things to the people already here and newcomers. But without stopping the flow the people doing it the legal (hard) way are now competing against the illegal migrants leaving little incentive to do it right.

This is a very good point and I fully agree. Most migration is based on economic opportunity.

Trump is kind of a hypocrite on this point: he happily hires illegal labour because it's cheap, but then wants to put up walls politically.

FYI I believe that illegal labour is a major source of economic inequality as well: it hurts the working class the most, and the gains go to capital and middle class.

K.

Glad to see reasonable discussion is still alive and well on HN. /s

There are plenty of good rebuttals you’ve conveniently missed. Also, 300k/year was the maximum in 2000.

> There are plenty of good rebuttals you’ve conveniently missed.

I got 5 replies in a span of 5 minutes. I can't respond that fast with the detail and nuance of my positions.

> Also, 300k/year was the maximum in 2000.

And now we are up to 500k last year, and another 950k this year. https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/stats/sw-border-migration

Yep, we’re having a record year but it’s been much lower for the last 20 years (going by memory).

And both sides have been claiming it has been a problem for all of those years. Every president since Regan has talked about the problems at the border and Congress has done barely anything to both enforce the laws, and make the system smoother for immigrants.

> it seems reasonable to me to assume anyone arguing in their favor is arguing in bad faith and disengage.

I'm not arguing in their favor. I would like nothing more than for us to have strong border control and a functional immigration system that isn't overloaded with false asylum claims so that the real ones can get through. We definitely need to overhaul things like the H1B programs as well.

My argument here is that no country's immigration system could handle this type of steady influx of 100k+ people per month [1] exploiting the asylum claims. Many of which only claim such after they illegally cross (yes i know you can technically claim whenever, but that's mighty convenient after crossing illegally).

The systems were not built for this kind of thing. Basically under current law you have the choice to detain people until their asylum case is heard or release them on their own recognizance inside the country and hope they return for court. The family separation thing has happened because of a court ruling saying that kids and adults couldn't be detained together because of abuse concerns. If the same thing happened to Canada their systems would be in shambles just like ours. There needs to be a mixture of border security and fixes to immigration law to remedy this problem but none of that can happen while Congress sits on it's hands playing politics.

[1] https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/stats/sw-border-migration

They have the manpower, they're just doing everything as inefficiently and inhumanely as possible in order to arrive at this outcome. This is a choice that the administration is making, and ICE is implementing it.

> They have the manpower, they're just doing everything as inefficiently and inhumanely as possible in order to arrive at this outcome.

Source? Last I checked the system was still drastically in need of border patrol, immigration judges, case workers, beds to house people, etc. Those things can't just spin up in a week and be effective.

I don't have the time to look up a source at the moment, but Trump changed policy to detain immigrants until their hearing rather than releasing them. He's also keeping them in custody longer in order to force them through court proceedings rather than just deporting them.

The system was already desperately in need of resources before Trump added this strain. We could go back to an Obama-era level of need, but instead we've chosen to ramp up the problem and force this outcome.

It was highly controversial, but it's a choice. Obama chose to have some people not show up for their court date. Trump chose to keep people in inhumane conditions and separate children from their families.

There are 2 choices under the law for asylum claims. Either let them go within the country until their court date (hoping they show up) or detain them.

The former did not work and was infamous as the "catch and release" policy. Detainment could work in principal but the overflow of the system has caused long wait times, overcrowded facilities and not enough staff to handle the cases. If you suddenly switched back to catch and release we would most likely have a greater influx of people coming in who have no valid claim to asylum and would not show up to their court date. It's a shitty problem all around.

And pretending that an overcrowded detention system is a concentration camp is disingenuous at best. If that was the case then California's prison system has been a network of concentration camps for years as they have dealt with constant overcrowding and problems.

Most asylum seekers don't have valid claims for asylum. They are economic migrants that are bogging down the system for valid asylum cases. Bogging down a system that was not built for it results in overcrowding, long delays and other pretty shitty things. Thats why congress needs to take further action to 1) limit the number of invalid claims making it into the system and 2) make sure DHS/ICE has the proper resources to deal with it all.

The current administration has been crystal-clear that it intends to reduce legal and illegal immigration through all means available.

One of these means is lengthening the asylum-seeking process and requirements. Another is reducing the allowed number of successful asylum seekers through informal quotas.

The current administration has done both. They are intentionally gumming up the asylum system in order to make good on their campaign promises.

"It's the fault of invalid economic migrants" is a talking point.

What you see as “lengthening the process”, others see as actually aligning the process with the laws.

HN loves to rail against the corrupt H1-B system, but apparently actually getting asylum seekers is amoral.

What would be more honest is to say “I don’t like cheap tech labor, so therefore clamping down on H1-Bs is good.” And “I don’t like the Trump administration and I want an open immigration system, so what Trump is doing to asylum seekers is bad.”

It’s all politics.

Failing to or refusing to seek asylum in an adjacent safe country (i.e., Mexico) is an automatic no-go on an asylum claim.

Also, claiming asylum because of local criminal elements (non-state actors) is an automatic no-go for an asylum claim.

(Note, Obama's DOJ fucked this one up by letting an immigration judge (unlawfully) grant an asylum claim because of local non-state criminal threats.) Hence, the flood gates opened and people began sending women and children first, rather than adults to sneak in and find work.

> What you see as “lengthening the process”, others see as actually aligning the process with the laws.

It is lengthening the process no matter how I or anyone "sees" it. It's comparative, I didn't give a value judgement.

It is all politics. Part of the current administration's campaign promises was to let in less immigrants. They now take political moves to do so, including lengthening the asylum process.

There are other reasons besides not liking cheap tech labor to not like H1-B visas. Because they are tied to employers, workers that hold them are easier to abuse, as they have few other options. Other people don't like that it is based on a lottery system, and so companies that request the most H1B visas will get the most H1B visas.

It is not dissonant to believe that H1B should be reduced or removed in its entirety but other visas and legal immigration avenues should be also be opened up.

H1-B visas and asylum seekers are two entirely different things, I'm not sure why you're trying to conflate them.

Edit: arguing about the legality of the asylum seekers is also missing the point.

The point is, people like to claim “immigration good”, but when you dig down into their actions, you find their actual views are heavily influenced by self-serving goals.

Asylum seekers are supposed to stop in the first country available. Mexico grants people asylum. So you should ask yourself, why aren't they applying there? Because they aren't fleeing imminent physical danger, that's why. They are abusing the system to cover being economic migrants, and they are assisted in this by NGOs with questionable motives.[1][2][3]

People who cross national borders, without documentation, and not at designated points of entry, are NOT "immigrants". They are illegal aliens. People need to stop conflating the two.

[1]https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-48548031

[2]https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/as-trump-t...

[3]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJlOmMj21uM

These aren't people fleeing genocide. These are people leaving Mexico. And they're being put in hotels and buses.

It's easy to pretend you're fellow Americans are monsters, but they're not.

> These aren't people fleeing genocide. These are people leaving Mexico.

No, they are people fleeing violence in Central America through Mexico, in large part.

That violence, incidentally, is in substantial part resulting from the US training nonviolent drug war criminals into extremely violent criminals in its original and then deporting then to Central America what they have no substantial roots.

>>>No, they are people fleeing violence in Central America through Mexico, in large part.

If you are passing through one country because you desire to get to a specific destination, you are basically asylum shopping.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asylum_shopping

Or, you know, the country you are passing through presents (for overlapping, though not identical reasons) reasons the same dangers that you are escaping from, so it's not any kind of escape.

My very cursory understanding of the international legal agreements on this subject don't seem to take that into account. In other words: that problem does not create a legal obligation on the US's part to accommodate them, nor does it put a legal obligation on Mexico or any other intermediate state to facilitate their transfer.

> My very cursory understanding of the international legal agreements on this subject don't seem to take that into account.

Even nativist politicians making incorrect claims about the law here tend to claim it requires efforts to seek asylum in the first safe country, which even if true would, in fact, fully take into account the problem of an intervening country that shared the same problem being fled from in the country of nationality or habitual residence. See, e.g., referring to this claim:

https://fullfact.org/immigration/refugees-first-safe-country...

Hotels? If you call jail (on a good day) a hotel then I have a bridge to sell you. And yes we put them on busses to get them back because it is cheeper than flying them.

> These aren't people fleeing genocide.

https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/traveladvisories/...

You as an American should not go there, but them fleeing here is problematic?

Crime != genocide. And asylum cases require specific threats to your life not just "it's not nice there and I want to come to the US".

https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/asylum-or-refugee-st...

The specific concerns may be new, but the general tactics are neither new, nor specific to progressives; in fact, while the labor movement has had some notable successes with it, the general approach has been most extensively deployed in this country by, and still is extensively used by, conservatives, particularly Christian conservatives, against policies, institutions, art, personages, etc., they disapprove of.

They call it “cancel culture” when it is their ox getting gored, but it is not as if no one told them what the harvest is like when you sow the wind...

"Kids these days with their wokeness. Back in my day we didn't care about things like human rights, wealth inequality, the plights of underrepresented groups, or destroying the planet. All these damned messy ethics are interfering with business!"