Comment by gwbas1c

This is not "the legal way."

The people going to their immigration hearings to "stay legal" were apprehended as illegal immigrants, invited to come up with an excuse as to why they should be allowed to stay in the country, and released. You'll literally see "apprehension date" on their paperwork. The "legal way" is to apply for that stuff, then enter the country.

It's annoying that people elide this. There is an ongoing attempt by the current administration to remove these very recently introduced practices that no one voted for. Or a show of an attempt, really, because they love illegal labor.

But it's weird that for the past decade that illegal immigrants who have been caught are released almost immediately into a dilatory multi-year process of hearings. It's also weird that even those that have not been apprehended are issued IDs, work permits, business and drivers licenses, get in-state tuition as state schools, and in some places get to vote for local elections. There was never a debate about this, and it would have never survived a debate.

It's important to note that none of the countries that they are coming from allow people to do this. You can't just walk into Mexico and be Mexican, or fly to Nigeria and be Nigerian. Any shock that they have is in how easy it is to just walk and fly into the US and stay indefinitely.

> it is wiser to stay off paper and off the visa pathway and go underground.

This is how it used to be. But "underground" is nothing like this; it isn't in-state tuition and business licenses and street protests. It's usually harder than just going back home. In the late 90s, net migration from Mexico was negative. The "wall" (that Hillary Clinton helped push, and had a hand in started modern left-bashing among Democratic administrations) was a bad idea because a lot of people just jumped the border for enough time to make a few dollars, then ran back. People would go back and forth half a dozen times. After the wall, getting across was so onerous that you had to stay.

Previously, if you were a Mexican who hit a bad financial patch, you ran to the US, worked like a dog, and ran back with enough cushion to get your life going again - if you failed again, you could just repeat the process. After the wall when you hit that same patch, you had to commit to trying to make a life in the US.

I think the inflection point was the desire to get cheap labor to repair New Orleans after the flood, but they didn't want to hire the black people who lived there, they wanted to get rid of them, to ship them out to FEMA trailers in neighboring states. That's exactly what they did.