It seems like the people who don't think illegal immigration is a problem in the first place are living very far from the border and don't see the impacts, or are unaware of the impending crisis of billions of extremely desperate climate refugees, or don't consider the risks or criminals and terrorists entering and leaving the country without any record to be a legitimate concern.

> the people who don't think illegal immigration is a problem in the first place are living very far from the border

I used to live in New York. It didn't hit home until we had our own refugee crisis. This is absolutely something you don't get a handle on until you've seen it in person. (We also have a bad habit of conflating legal high-skilled immigration, legal low-skilled immigration, refugees, asylum seekers and illegal migrants.)

With all respect, that sounds like a campaign speech, so I'm almost guaranteed to tune it out. Do you have links that quantify all that stuff to demonstrate why it's a problem?

Massive numbers of people suddenly showing up in your town is a real problem:

https://www.npr.org/2023/11/08/1211632902/major-cities-are-s...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/mollybohannon/2023/08/09/nyc-ma...

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/denver-struggles-cope-4...

Climate refugees are coming and it's a problem:

https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/10/world/climate-global-displace...

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/07/23/magazine/clim...

https://www.wired.com/story/migration-climate-environment-re...

It doesn't seem like this is a problem solved by trying to put up walls and pay for more law enforcement officers and military equipment.

It's not. This is a problem solved by reforming the immigration system. I'll let you try to figure out which of the two parties in power has stonewalled progress on that front for the last 30 years.

It's a problem where regulating the number of people coming into the country today can help substantially. That very well may mean putting up walls and paying for enforcement officers, but at a minimum is must mean monitoring the rate of people entering the US and being able to keep our cities from being overwhelmed by economic migrants so that we're able to accommodate as many of the climate refugees as we can in a way that doesn't cause the same problem or further destroy the environment creating even more climate refugees and further displacement within US borders as our remaining resources grow increasingly strained.

While I get where you're coming from, I think there's a middle ground that isn't just "let everyone in" or "shut it all down." One idea is a market-based immigration system—basically, you pay an entry fee to immigrate, which adjusts based on things like age. So younger people who have their whole working lives ahead of them would pay less, older folks would pay more.

This could replace the broken discretionary system we have now, where it’s all about family ties and not what we need economically. Plus, it would cut down on smuggling, raise a ton of revenue, and make immigration more efficient. It’s a practical way to let people in, without completely open borders, and would bring in the workers we actually need.

It’s not about scrapping border security—just rethinking how we approach immigration to make it work better for everyone.

Family reunification visas have helped America dodge several bullets when it comes to immigration. We're actually one of the easier countries to get admitted to, and we know how to integrate large numbers of unskilled migrants at scale. The trick is that family members already provide a support structure for new migrants, who integrate, and form the support structure for the next wave of migrants. Do this across every nationality ever and you have basically the US's current demography.

A "What we need economically" immigration system is what's currently eating the EU alive. EU countries basically don't do any work integrating immigrants, they expect everyone to be an economically desirable immigrant that can pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. Which is great until you have a refugee crisis, or two, and now your country's flooded with people you don't know how to integrate, your native population is turning hard-right, and the migrants are too but in just an ever so slightly different way that somehow makes them more of a threat to the right than left-wingers and liberals.

We already have a "market-based immigration system", it's called a "golden visa", except the cost tends to be in the six to seven figures. It's a way for really rich people to buy their way into a country, not a serious means to admit large numbers of economic migrants. The above also applies to points systems like Canada's, which selects for middle-income countries that have lots of university-educated English or French speakers. That's great if you want to import half of India and China, not so much if you want a diverse immigrant pool.