And then, what? Are citizens beating down the doors to do these jobs but getting out-competed by migrants? Are these the same citizens who are lining up to do sweatshop labor when manufacturing “returns” to the US?

If undocumented workers are finding productive work in an economy with low unemployment then the problem is that the government is not facilitating them gaining legal status.

The problem would be minimum wage and insurance requirements for employing citizens. There are plenty of citizens that would work those jobs but nobody would hire them because they cost too much. What you are arguing for is to continue allowing people to come here so employers can pay them less than a citizen is legally required to be paid. Once they become legal employers no longer want to employ them for the same reason they don't want to hire citizens.

US citizens by and large don't want to go work in tobacco fields for $15/hr, in a state with $7/hr min wage. But mexican workers coming over legally, getting the work visas and all that... will.

What I'm arguing for is to not let employers do that.

or alternatively that the US doesn't have a guest worker program similar in scope to most of the developed world, and this is at least partially due to political concerns around birthright.

We do have a chicken and egg problem. I think the idea here is that it's a systemic issue and the enforcement is focussed on individuals. This is analogous to the concept of getting everyday people to recycle when the companies creating the products have greater control over how much garbage is produced.

Employers need to stop taking advantage of undocumented workers at artificially suppressed wages. This has acted like a subsidy keeping these poor business models afloat. This has led us to the situation we are in now, where we've become dependent on undocumented migrants (food production etc), who we are being taking advantage of (lower wages, less rights), and also trying to villanize & deport them (the article above). All simultaneously.

It's possible with careful coordination of industry, legislation, and immagration, we wouldn't be here. But now that we are, we need to either find a way to improve the situation or reverse it.

I don't think it's chicken and egg at all. I think lots of employers employ immigrants illegally, and then the immigrants take all the political heat. Anyone pissed about "all these illegals" should be at least just as pissed about all the businesses illegally employing them.

We should stop letting employers do this, and then we all discover that we still really want to employ immigrants, we should enable that, legally.

I think then we would have an "oh shit" moment and finally reform the legal immigration system to allow immigrants to come do all these jobs legally.

It would be a forcing function.

Agree and proper border control which the previous administration failed to enforce. Step 1 is stop the influx.

The data seem to show that at the end of Biden's term, ICE enforcement actions were very low. But for some reason, the stats page doesn't show Trump's previous term. https://www.ice.gov/statistics

Looking at the most recent DHS yearbook (apples and oranges, but the best I can find so far) at https://ohss.dhs.gov/topics/immigration/yearbook and scaling to match the curve at the ICE stats page, it looks like illegal immigration was way down at the end of Biden's term.

So maybe the influx was already slowed dramatically. I don't think it's possible to stop people from wanting to go to the US, except by making it worse that the places people are leaving. I don't think that's a worthy goal.

The question we have to ask ourselves is why was ICE not empowered to conduct enforcement ? Why were border crossings up over Biden’s term and then when Trump is elected and comes into office they drop dramatically ?

I'm in favor of that too, but I think this insistence on it being step 1 is actually just a resistance to solving the real problem. (Which is that employers are happy to pay below market wages to illegally employ immigrants who are here unlawfully.)

We should go after it all to include implementing E-Verify for all. Republicans are also in favor of the guest worker program to legally meet the demand. But we have to stop the flow

I agree that we should do those things. But what I've seen for the past couple decades that I've been voting is that Republican politicians pretend to want to do those things, but refuse to do them "until we've stopped the flow" or "but the border has to be step 1".

This is a classic political tactic to be able to say you want to do something, but never actually have to do it. Politicians use this tactic when they don't actually want to do the thing for some reason. In this case, it's because it's really unpopular with business owners, who like to employ illegal immigrants.

It's perfectly reasonable to say "we need to crack down on employers in conjunction with aggressive border and deportation enforcement". But I'm very skeptical of anyone saying "stopping the flow is step 1". I've heard that story before!

You still owe me three apologies that you promised to gladly make when you posted something that was wrong.

Not enough. Some immigrants come and stay to commit crimes.