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Comment by cauch

3 hours ago

A lot of people who support the current US government do not want the laws to be enforced, they just want to see people who look brown or foreigners to be deported, regardless of if they are in the US legally or illegally.

The immigration laws are saying that we should stop illegal immigration, but respect the legal immigration. And because of that, it means that each case should be carefully treated to discover if the person is illegal or not.

But a majority of people supporting the crack-down on immigration are more than happy to see 10 innocents being deported if it means 1 illegal being deported, and they will wave around the illegal being deported to explain that before the crack-down, the law was not respected, forgetting that the current situation is breaking the law way more than the previous one (before: 1 illegal not deported, 1 error. after: 10 innocents being deported, 10 errors).

In other words: if you care about the law, you cannot "pick and choose" and say "the laws are not respected because 1 illegal is not deported" but also "10 innocents are being deported, this breaks the law, but this does not count".

Where are you getting the idea that 10 innocents are being deported for every 1 illegal? Or that the "majority" of people supporting the crackdown would support that?

The information I can find suggests only a handful of cases, maybe a dozen, out of 600,000 or so.

  • I'm saying that the majority of the people supporting the crackdown don't care about the fact that the crackdown may break the law. Which is demonstrated by the fact that these people totally don't care of what is the number of innocents deported. You can see these people saying "we should deport the illegals", but how often you can see them saying "but I also want to know the number of innocent deported, and if this number is too high, we should stop the deportation"?

    I'm not saying what is happening right now is 10 vs 1, and I did not in my comment. These numbers were illustrative, to explain that if you want to "apply the law", you should care about how many illegals are not deported AND how many innocents are deported.

    This is the demonstration that people supporting the crackdown don't do it because they want to see the laws being applied, they just want "the laws that benefit them" to be applied. So we should stop pretending these people are acting because of their love for justice or for the laws.

    edit: another way of explaining what I want to say: if you care about "applying the law", then you know that the correct measure will be a balance between the false positive and false negative. The large majority of the discourse of people supporting the crackdown is denying that. They are saying that "every single illegal must be deported". This discourse is explicitly saying that not deporting 1 single illegal is still not fine, and does not mention anywhere the balance with false positive. It shows that they don't care about "applying the law".

    (And about "an handful of cases", that would be extremely unrealistic. Maybe you are talking about the number of cases that are surfaced, which is only a small proportion of the real numbers of case, as it is for all false positive)

    • If there were any evidence of widespread deportations of people who shouldn't be then I think you'd see more people speaking up, but there's not. People don't have to caveat their support of every policy with hypotheticals.

      I also don't think most people want illegal aliens to be deported for "justice". They (rightfully or wrongly) think they're taking their jobs, contributing to crime, facilitating drug trade, costing taxpayers money, etc.

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