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.