Comment by notepad0x90
12 hours ago
on the books immigration law has been broken for decades. do you expect people across the border wait a decade to get their turn for an immigration interview only to be turned down, when they can just cross the border?
When laws become impractical, they create 11 million law breakers.
Hundreds of thousands to millions of people have come to the US legally each year for the last thirty years.[0] How is that impractical? In fact the share of immigrants in the US has increased significantly (by 3 times) in the last 50 years, and is above the level of the EU, and is at the highest level in the last 100 years in the US.[1][2] Even if legal immigration was set to zero, that shouldn't give people the right to come here illegally.
To be clear I am not making an argument that mass surveillance is needed to solve any problem.
[0] https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/green-card-holders-a...
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/20/2024... via https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/09/27/u-s-immig...
[2] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SM.POP.TOTL.ZS?most_rec...
US vs EU vs OECD: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SM.POP.TOTL.ZS?most_rec... - I'm pretty sure the values here include illegal immigration as well, so if you factor that in the US may be lower than the EU, but again still at historically very high levels.
The biggest illegal immigration source is the southern border. Yes, lots of people have immigrated, but they're a tiny fraction of those who wanted to immigrate. H-1B is a good example, it counts as immigration but it is really not, it is residency contingent on specific employment contracts. Those people with H-1B have no way to gain permanent residency without their employer sponsoring them, which would let them leave the company so employers don't tend to do that a lot.
The comparison with EU is not meaningful, especially since it isn't even a country. The population growth of the US and the world as a hole has also risen by more than that factor, even in the past two decades or so it has more than doubled.
>Yes, lots of people have immigrated, but they're a tiny fraction of those who wanted to immigrate
What point are you making here specifically? Are you saying the law is considered broken unless all or most people that want to come to the US can come? If so, the citizens (or at least the government) of the country are the ones that decide its laws, not people who want to immigrate to that country.
>H-1B is a good example, it counts as immigration but it is really not
The fist link I gave only includes green cards issued, it doesn't include H-1B visas to begin with. In any case, H-1B is not that significant a source of immigration, it seems to account for less than 1 million people in the US.[0] And it pays better than immigrating illegally in 99% of cases, most people would take that. Also by your own metric immigrating illegally isn't immigration either. I don't see what specific point you are making. Are you saying people come here illegally because they don't want to come via an H-1B visa, or are you just making a general point that immigration is not that high?
>The comparison with EU is not meaningful, especially since it isn't even a country
Then why does the worldbank include it? And why use OECD as a metric for anything if it isn't a country?
>population growth of the US and the world
The "highest in 100 years" statistic is in terms of percentage, so that shouldn't be relevant.
[0] https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/document/reports/U... "As of September 30, 2019, the H-1B authorized-to-work population is approximately 583,420."
> do you expect people across the border wait a decade to get their turn for an immigration interview only to be turned down
The backlog isn't a consequence of the law.
Is there a country that doesn't expect people to go through some kind of qualification process in order to immigrate legally? Here's what it looks like in Canada (where I live), for example: https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/se... It's actually quite complex, and depends on additional provincial legislation. And then there's citizenship on top of that: https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/se...
> when they can just cross the border?
The entire point is that they legally in fact may not do so, and have only been doing so because of the lack of enforcement GP cites.
> When laws become impractical, they create 11 million law breakers.
We don't have nearly the same scale of problem in Canada. That probably has much more to do with only sharing an unsecured land border with a rich country.
>when they can just cross the border
This is also a choice for the people in charge of the border. Enforcing a border is a solved problem for a rich, large-population nation.
It isn't. 2/3rds of illegal immigrants come to the US legally (and then overstay). Unless you make it illegal for non-citizens to visit the US, you can't stop most illegal immigration.
We can start with that 1/3rd. Then we remove as many economic incentives as possible to make overstaying visas that much less attractive to tackle the other 2/3rds.
It's weird to see people (perhaps not you specifically) who often support dramatic gun control measures to address a tiny percentage of crime among the first to trot out the old saw that only a relative fraction of illegal migrants got that way by an illegal border crossing. 1/3rd is a lot. 1/3rd is a great start.
Addressing that 1/3rd also would address the real edge cases (as in there are only a few of them) like terrorists and serial criminals.
1 reply →
employers hiring illegal migrants is also an option for them. those employers are not being targeted by ICE. It's the DEA arresting drug users but being buddies with drug lords all over again.
Employers are being targeted [0]. It also can be difficult to successfully prosecute, especially when one can maintain a clean separation between the labor and the enterprise (agriculture is like this with Farm Labor Contractors).
That said, I wish they would step up the prosecutions. It's critical to hammer away at economic incentives for illegal migration.
[0] https://www.cpr.org/2025/04/30/ice-fines-colorado-janitorial...
> on the books immigration law has been broken for decades. do you expect people across the border wait a decade to get their turn for an immigration interview only to be turned down, when they can just cross the border?
No, I don't expect that at all. However the problem with your scenario isn't that they need to wait their turn, it's that they can "just cross the border". That fact that that has been allowed was an intentional policy decision.
How? As a migrant to the US I have generally found the rules quite reasonable, the UX of the websites is poorer than say the UK but the rules seem fine.
> do you expect people across the border wait a decade to get their turn for an immigration interview only to be turned down, when they can just cross the border?
Well yes, that's what following the law means. They can't complain about it, it's not their country, and they don't have a say on the rules.
In a similar vein by your logic, if you are in a hurry, why should you obey traffic laws when you can just run a red light or a stop sign right?
If the light never turned green you'd bet your butt that plenty of people would run the light.
Sure, then don't complain if you get into a crash and your insurance finds you at fault. Actions have consequences.
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Hierarchy of needs. People want to follow the law, they need food,shelter, medicine,etc.. You can punish law breakers, but if you don't provide a way to lawfully do the thing, you're only breeding law breakers and nothing more.
A missing perspective here might be that even long term imprisonment isn't a deterrent for many migrants. The disparity in living conditions is just that steep.
There is a lawfully way to do the thing. The problem is that the lawfully way wants a very small set of people with specific skills. Canada does the same, most of their immigration are university graduates. The only reason Canada hasn't had an influx of immigration like the USA is because their southern border is the USA, not Mexico.
Most of the immigration to the USA is driven for economic reasons, not political asylum or persecution. There is no right to immigrate in the USA just because you want to, you have to convince the government somehow to let you in.
> even long term imprisonment isn't a deterrent for many migrants
But quick deportation is. Imagine doing the whole trek from south/central america to the USA just to be sent back the next day. That's what deterring a lot of people now, wasting months of travel and money just to have it be worthless seems to be very dissuasive.
A lot of the latest immigration woes would be solved if the Venezuelan government was taken down and some real democratic government stepped in.