Mass Deportation and Immigration Catch-All | Trump “Gold Card” path to citizenship for $5 million

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The problem is the hate and ignorance that started the fire. As long as that drives an essentially minor issue, we're not coming to a solution.

Face it. We need the people. We need the labor pool. Let's accept it, start a guest worker program and separate drug enforcement from immigration. They are only tangentially related and distract from a solution to either because of that.
 
Last night we had a family discussion about illegal immigration. It was an interesting conversation that covered several topics and led me to what I believe are some fundamental truths about the situation.

-Every country has the right (actually, the responsibility) to control its borders. Illegal immigration is problem just on this concern. Its paramount to be able to monitor who's coming in.

-The Republicans have been using illegal immigration as a convenient campaign issue for nearly 20 years. They have little incentive to actually solve it. This election was the clearest example...it was the main issue for Trump, it was the constant drumbeat that has marked his campaign.

-The dirty little secret is that America depends on the cheap labor that illegal immigrants provide in certain key industries (agriculture, construction, child care, meatpacking, etc). I love how the immigrants are the ones that get hunted down and pay the price. Start locking up the business owners who hire them and we'd see a compromise mighty quick.The US is currently at full employment; where the heck are they going to get the millions of laborers they will need? If Trump accomplished his campaign promise of sending back every illegal immigrant, the negative impact on the US economy would be severe.

-US immigration policy is divorced from economic policy. I always hear..."have them como here legally". The current setup makes it basically impossible for an unskilled or low-skilled laborer to gain a visa to the US. Heck, in the last Trump administration they made it harder to get all sorts of visas (I'm still traumatized by the renewal of my tourist visa...took about six months). A drastic overhaul is needed in the approach. I've advocated for a guest worker program in the past.

-We have a tense situation around the world between the developed and underdeveloped world regarding immigration. More people wanting to hop on the boat than is possible. Long term, the solution is the economic development of the third world (economically, politically, socially). Thats quite a daunting global challenge, but I'd like to believe that it can be achieved. Costa Rica (as well as other countries) does not have an emigration problem for the most part (we have more immigrants than emigrants). Why? Because in broad strokes people like to live here. My concern is that objective takes concerted leadership from the developed world...hard to achieve when someone wants the lion's share of the kill.
 
CRHeel94 said:
-US immigration policy is divorced from economic policy. I always hear..."have them como here legally". The current setup makes it basically impossible for an unskilled or low-skilled laborer to gain a visa to the US. Heck, in the last Trump administration they made it harder to get all sorts of visas (I'm still traumatized by the renewal of my tourist visa...took about six months). A drastic overhaul is needed in the approach. I've advocated for a guest worker program in the past.
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There was legislation to fix some of this in the border bill Trump got squashed.
 
CRHeel94 said:
Last night we had a family discussion about illegal immigration. It was an interesting conversation that covered several topics and led me to what I believe are some fundamental truths about the situation.

-Every country has the right (actually, the responsibility) to control its borders. Illegal immigration is problem just on this concern. Its paramount to be able to monitor who's coming in.


-US immigration policy is divorced from economic policy. I always hear..."have them como here legally".
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1. I think your first point there deserves its own thread and discussion. I have some questions.
2. They don't want them to come legally. That's just an excuse.

I've had the following conversation so many times:

Me: What is it that you don't like about people coming to this country to work hard, contribute, and do jobs that Americans don't want to do.
Them: I like immigrants. I just don't like them being illegal. They should follow the rules.
Me: So your only objection is that it's "illegal"?
Them: Yes. I love legal immigrants.
Me: So why not just make their immigration legal?
Them: ????
Me: If the problem is purely a function of legality, it's easy to solve. Make it legal.
Them: Why not solve murder by making murder legal?
Me: Because murder is bad. We want laws against things that are bad. But you just told me there's nothing bad about illegal immigration.
Them: But, but
Me: Give me a reason why the immigration you just described as "good, but" should be illegal. People will come as long as there are jobs, and they won't come if there aren't. While they are here, they don't have to hide or work in the shadows or be exploited or be scared to report crimes. Win-win.
Them: [Lies forthcoming]

I've yet to meet a person who decries "the border" who actually wants legal immigration. It only takes a few questions (and not even along the lines of that discussion) to poke the facade.
 
ChapelHillSooner said:
There is some kind of fallacy inherent in the arguments that immigrants are committing crimes but I don’t know if it is a recognized one or has a name.

It is a valid argument to say that immigrants commit crimes at lower rates than the population at large. The response is always that so and so would be alive today if we didn’t have immigrants and while true that seems fallacious considering the crime rate disparity. (I am not using Laken Riley as an example as her perpetrator had previous legal problems which makes that story a bit different.)

IMO that argument boils down to an argument that if we have more people we will have more crime - not necessarily at a higher rate but more in absolute numbers. And of course that is true.

Their argument makes no more sense than saying that we should get rid of people from Burlington because someone in Burlington went to Chapel Hill and committed a crime, a crime that would not have happened had we removed all the people from Burlington 100 miles a way.

Someone needs to develop that thought, maybe wrap it in a mathematical framework, and give it a name.
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What do you mean by mathematical? Like arithmetic? I've done the arithmetic many times on the board. Suppose you live in an rea with a 5% homicide rate. That means every resident has a 5% chance of being murdered in a given year. Now suppose the population doubles, with the new entrants having a 1% homicide rate. Now the area has a 3% murder rate. Every resident has a 3% of being murdered. Literally everyone in town is safer, even though some of the new entrants have committed murders. The general formula is extremely simple. I'm not going to try to write it because formatting is a pain but it's Algebra I level if that.

I don't know if the fallacy has a name. I suspect it does. I don't always learn the names of fallacies as I think it's just easier to point out illogic. But I can think of two ways of characterizing it:

1. "But for" fallacy. When a migrant kills an American, the migration is a "but for" cause -- i.e. if the migrant wasn't here, he couldn't have committed the crime. But so many other things have the same causal status. If the victim had been at home instead of out partying (or vice versa, depending on where the killing occurs), s/he would be alive. If the perp wasn't able to buy a cheap used car, s/he wouldn't have wheels and it's hard to be a killer riding the bus. Maybe the perp was angry at being dumped by a former romantic interest. Maybe the perp had been playing football and suffers from CTE, etc.

If any of those factors in the causal chain had been different, the victim would still be alive. But nobody calls for surcharges on used cars, or preventing people from dumping their partners, or banning football, right? It's illegal immigration that caused it, even though the immigration is very far back in the causal chain. Lots of things had to happen between then and now for the killing to happen.

Maybe we can call this the "fallacy of excess causation." Any analysis that relies on "but for" causation will quickly find that everything is a cause of social ills. Thus does everything become a cause and the whole concept of cause loses meaning. The law mostly uses a concept of "proximate causation" which is sort of a cop-out but at least tries to find a way to distinguish who should be held responsible for an action from those who don't deserve it. And one principle is "intervening criminal act," which is to say that we hold the criminal responsible, and anyone who helps the criminal after the fact, but we don't go after the people who acted (even wrongly) prior to the criminal act -- unless the action was specifically designed to aid the crime (i.e. obtaining an illegal gun) or was an obvious result of the action (here, think of the movie Seven and the way John Doe carried out his crime of lust).

2. Another way to think of it is a fallacy of visibility, if that's a thing. Go back to the arithmetic above. Everyone is safer in the town because of the new entrants -- but nobody sees it because you can't see a thing that doesn't happen. Some % of the crimes that would have been committed against an old resident are now being directed at the new entrants, meaning that the original residents should be thankful that someone else was the target of the killer . . . but of course they can't see that. They don't know that they would have been targeted if the new entrant wasn't here. It's arithmetically required, but we don't know who was "saved" by not being targeted.

It's the way people don't see harm prevented, because you have to look closely to see it. This is what RBG famously described, in her Shelby County dissent, as "throwing away the umbrella in a rainstorm because you're not getting wet."

Maybe we should coin a phrase and call it the umbrella fallacy. It's a bad idea to close your umbrella in a rainstorm even if you're not getting wet.
 
superrific said:
What do you mean by mathematical? Like arithmetic?
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I was thinking more about using an argument with set theory or something although after typing out what I did below it isn't really a set theory argument. Hadn't really thought it through.

Let's say you have groups A and B where the crime rate committed by members of A > B. Let's assume the targets of the crimes committed by members of one group are equally likely to be in any group. (In reality crimes are committed against members of the same group at a higher rate than otherwise which you could add to the argument.) Now let's say you introduce C (immigrants) whose crime rate is less than A or B.

There will be some crimes committed by C against members of A or B. These are the ones you can argue "but if C didn't exist, so-and-so in A or B would not have been harmed." While true and unfortunate for the victims, the actual rate of crimes committed against members of A or B would be lower because A (having the higher crime rate) will now be committing some of their crime against group C. This would be a higher number than C committing crimes against A. So, in effect, you have lowered the rate of crime committed against A and B.

Something like that but I suppose to make it a fallacy one would have to make it about something more generic. I would imagine if we thought hard enough we could come up with other more benign scenarios that essentially boil down to the same problem.

One complication is that it is probably true that the more people you have the higher the overall crime rate tends to be because people having more interactions with others - road rage, etc - although we are talking about a relatively small percentage of people added.
 
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www.nytimes.com

Trump Transition: Lawyer Says Client Saw Gaetz Have Sex With Underage Girl

The client’s reported testimony before the House Ethics Committee added to the controversy around Donald Trump’s pick for attorney general as the president-elect tries to fill his cabinet.
www.nytimes.com www.nytimes.com

“… Mr. Trump’s top immigration policy adviser, Stephen Miller, said that military funds would be used to build “vast holding facilities that would function as staging centers” for immigrants as their cases progressed and they waited to be flown to other countries.

…The Trump team believes that such camps could enable the government to accelerate deportations of undocumented people who fight their expulsion from the country. The idea is that more people would voluntarily accept removal instead of pursuing a long-shot effort to remain in the country if they had to stay locked up in the interim.

Mr. Miller has also talked about invoking a public health emergency power to curtail hearing asylum claims, as the Trump administration did during the Covid-19 pandemic.

… Other elements of the team’s plan include bolstering the ranks of ICE officers with law enforcement officials who would be temporarily reassigned from other agencies, and with state National Guardsmen and federal troops activated to enforce the law on domestic soil under the Insurrection Act.

The team also plans to expand a form of due-process-free expulsions known as expedited removal, which is currently used near the border for recent arrivals, to people living across the interior of the country who cannot prove they have been in the United States for more than two years.

And the team plans to stop issuing citizenship-affirming documents, like passports and Social Security cards, to infants born on domestic soil to undocumented migrant parents in a bid to end birthright citizenship.

Mr. Trump has already signaled his intent to follow through on his promises with personnel announcements. He named Mr. Miller as a deputy chief of staff in his administration with influence over domestic policy. And Mr. Trump said he would make Thomas Homan, who ran ICE for the first year and a half of the Trump administration and was an early proponent of separating families to deter migrants, his administration’s “border czar.” …”
 
ChapelHillSooner said:
Let's say you have groups A and B where the crime rate committed by members of A > B. Let's assume the targets of the crimes committed by members of one group are equally likely to be in any group. (In reality crimes are committed against members of the same group at a higher rate than otherwise which you could add to the argument.) Now let's say you introduce C (immigrants) whose crime rate is less than A or B.

There will be some crimes committed by C against members of A or B. These are the ones you can argue "but if C didn't exist, so-and-so in A or B would not have been harmed." While true and unfortunate for the victims, the actual rate of crimes committed against members of A or B would be lower because A (having the higher crime rate) will now be committing some of their crime against group C. This would be a higher number than C committing crimes against A. So, in effect, you have lowered the rate of crime committed against A and B.

Something like that but I suppose to make it a fallacy one would have to make it about something more generic. I would imagine if we thought hard enough we could come up with other more benign scenarios that essentially boil down to the same problem.
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I think this is identical to what I wrote above. You've reproduced the arithmetic argument precisely, and the fallacy can be named "but for" or "excess causation."

Legal theory addresses these problems because they come up in court. There's a famous case where an ambulance was driving an injured person to the hospital when it was hit by another vehicle and rendered undriveable. It wasn't like a hit-and-run or a reckless driving or anything like that -- it was just an ordinary accident. But the patient died because they didn't get to the hospital in time, and the patient's family then sued the driver for wrongful death. If the driver hadn't hit the ambulance, the patient would have survived. And the court said (and this is either a view of all states or a large majority of them) that the accident was not the cause of the patient's death. It was a "but for" cause, but not the "proximate cause" (which was whatever caused the injury in the first place).

There was also a subplot in the third season (I think, maybe second season) of The Good Place that indirectly addressed the issue. It was the discovery that nobody had been able to get into the Good Place for centuries because so many of our actions cause harm that we can't see, and thus we aren't "good." Like if you eat chocolate, you are subsidizing slave labor in Africa so you're bad.
 
nycfan said:
And the team plans to stop issuing citizenship-affirming documents, like passports and Social Security cards, to infants born on domestic soil to undocumented migrant parents in a bid to end birthright citizenship.
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This is core MAGA. The cruelty is the point. These are men who are literally taking out their anger on babies. The economic anxiety is just so much to overcome.
 
JCTarheel82 said:
Isn't this also unconstitutional?
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Says who? There are only nine justices whose opinions matter, and those justices loathe the 14th Amendment, except when they use it to strike down diversity initiatives. If they want to end birthright citizenship, the fact that the text and original intent of the 14th clearly establish it will not matter to them at all.
 
JCTarheel82 said:
Isn't this also unconstitutional? 14th Amendment?
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To add to what super said, I believe their argument revolves around the "and subject to the jurisdiction thereof" phrase. That phrase is why children born in the US of diplomats aren't granted citizenship because they are not subject to the jurisdiction of the US. The same if a foreign army invaded the US and some soldiers had children while here. Since they are foreign invaders they wouldn't be subject to the jurisdiction of the US.

Conservatives are trying to make the argument that an undocumented immigrant - via their status - and children are not subject to the jurisdiction of the United States. Most people think it's a weak argument but it doesn't matter what most people think.
 
CFordUNC said:
The entire prison population in the United States is currently around 1.2 million people. Fascinating that the Trumpers believe that they'll be able to somehow arrest, detain, and hold 10-15 million undocumented immigrants.
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If it gets done, it will resemble Nazi concentration camps (the ones that were not considered death camps but plenty of people still died of disease and starvation) far more than US prisons. There isn't going to be anything humane about it. Even if their intent is to do it humanely, that will get lost in the process.
 
ChapelHillSooner said:
If it gets done, it will resemble Nazi non-death concentration camps far more than US prisons. There isn't going to be anything humane about it. Even if their intent is to do it humanely, that will get lost in the process.
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Yeah. I agree, the inhumanity of such a scenario would be the worst aspect, and of course there would be dire economic ramifications felt by all of us, as well.

I tend to think that this whole "we're going to deport illegal immigrants" thing will look very similarly to the "build a wall and make Mexico pay for it" bullshit from the first term. There will be widely-publicized raids and round-ups of people who are *already* incarcerated or in the crosshairs of the legal system. There will be an enormous Trumpian show and performative theater, as there always is, and there will be all sorts of outright lying and fudging and obfuscation of statistics and data that will make it seem like the five-figure number of illegal immigrants "deported" actually numbers in the millions. But short of creating a concentration camp-style system of incarceration, it's hard to even understand logistically how Trumpers expect it to work.
 
superrific said:
Says who? There are only nine justices whose opinions matter, and those justices loathe the 14th Amendment, except when they use it to strike down diversity initiatives. If they want to end birthright citizenship, the fact that the text and original intent of the 14th clearly establish it will not matter to them at all.
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Would it be retroactive? Could every citizen who is the child of an immigrant have their citizenship revoked? I mean we are all ultimately children of immigrants (except NA), but I'm wondering if this policy would be going forward only or would existing birthright citizens of immigrant parents be at risk as well?
 
CFordUNC said:
Yeah. I agree, the inhumanity of such a scenario would be the worst aspect, and of course there would be dire economic ramifications felt by all of us, as well.

I tend to think that this whole "we're going to deport illegal immigrants" thing will look very similarly to the "build a wall and make Mexico pay for it" bullshit from the first term. There will be widely-publicized raids and round-ups of people who are *already* incarcerated or in the crosshairs of the legal system. There will be an enormous Trumpian show and performative theater, as there always is, and there will be all sorts of outright lying and fudging and obfuscation of statistics and data that will make it seem like the five-figure number of illegal immigrants "deported" actually numbers in the millions. But short of creating a concentration camp-style system of incarceration, it's hard to even understand logistically how Trumpers expect it to work.
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Hope you're right; I think you're wrong. Cruelty is a feature, not a bug of the gqp. In fact, cruelty is often the only point.
 
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