Comment by cogman10

Are you going to allow ER’s to refuse patients and let people die on the street? What if the Patient is unconscious with no identification but looks Hispanic? Can they be turned away?

Stripping away all wefare because of immigration is a bad bad bad idea.

Kids. Kids are the piece of this policy you haven’t considered. Poor people have kids too. Then you have starving babies in the street and 5 year olds trying to find work to pay for food. Then you might think, “okay, maybe we take care of kids. Healthcare? Food? Education?” Great. But do you have forced separation from parents in order to provide these services just to the kids? What if the parents eat the kids food because they’re starving. Now you have to feed the parents. And providing care for orphans costs more than healthcare for parents, so probably rational to give them healthcare too. And do you want to create a system where having a kid gets you food and healthcare? Probably don’t want that incentive. So now you’re maybe giving food and healthcare to people without kids.

So, whenever you think about purely capitalistic policies with no social policies, we just have to be okay with having a large number of babies and toddlers starving on the streets in front of us.

When you hear about republicans cutting $900 billion from Medicaid, and millions of families losing coverage, that means children. Almost 50% of Medicaid recipients are children. Most of the other 50% are their parents. So millions of children now do not have healthcare. Your post advocates for millions more to lose coverage. That translates to children dying and having lifelong disabilities from otherwise preventable illnesses.

The other inevitable outcome of policies like this is exploitation of women. It might start with “voluntary” sex work, but it becomes a bigger business that invites true exploitation and rapidly leads to human trafficking. Btw, that “voluntary” is there because it’s usually a choice between sex work and spiraling into homelessness and poverty - so not super voluntary to begin with. And we’re not even counting women more women who stay in abusive relationships because they are fully dependent on their partner for sustenance and shelter.

All that is to say that anytime advocate for a certain set of social policies over another, it’s usually informative to look at how they impact the most vulnerable in our society. Start with kids, then consider disabled and women. And finally ask why we’re generally okay with men starving on the street but not toddlers.

That’s by design. Maybe not initially, but we’ve been having this immigration debate as long as I’ve been politically aware, which is going on 4 decades. It absolutely is the desired outcome today.

Is this a surprise? This is hardly anything new. The United States was built with slavery.

> This is the part that is the wildest to me. The current system seems to generate a collection of second-class citizens

What do you mean seems too. The biggest proponents of immigration routinely ask "who's going to work the fields?" As a call to allow immigration. I don't know how to interpret that as anything but importing an underclass.

> But I haven't thought through this policy well. Maybe there is something this seemingly solution is missing.

What about long term immigrants who end up disabled through no fault of their own? Or who get cancer? Or who end up having a child (who is an American citizen) and that child is special needs and the immigrant can't manage a full time job and care for their child? If they get pregnant and end up on bed rest or with a traumatic birth that takes them out of the workforce for a period of time?

There are ways to end up needing to rely on welfare that aren't due to laziness or a desire for handouts.

If the answer is 'kick them out', I'd be worried about what we're teaching our American kids watching. There are two lessons they could pick up, and neither is good for their moral development or sense of self. The first is that anyone who lacks the ability to work has no value, and that will engender greater alienation and isolation as they place all of their self-worth on their ability to earn money. They'll look upon the elderly, children, and caretakers with disdain (Interestingly, this probably won't help the birth rates either...). The second is that they are protected but those people should be disposed of when they're not useful. This will make them arrogant and introduce the idea of dehumanizing other groups, which will further the cracks of division in our society.

There are vastly fewer "immigrants for handouts" than right wing media would like you to believe. Coming to the US is incredibly challenging. People who do it are mostly young and wish to work, to support families. Handouts don't accomplish that.

It take tremendous effort to immigrate, legally or illegally. Anyone telling you that they are lazy is obviously lying.

Best I can give you is Russian oligarchs and criminals, and corporate welfare. Deal?

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> The current system seems to generate a collection of second-class citizens

Poor choice of words. Illegals are not citizens. That's the whole point.

> have no recourse if they're exploited

The recourse is to go back. In the era when you could just immigrate to the US just by getting on a boat (before the Immigration Act of 1924), about 1/3 of immigrants went back to their home country if they did not make it in the US.

See:

> From 1908 to 1932, 12 million individuals migrated to the United States. Over the same period, four million returned to their source country.

-- https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00144... (you have to pirate it to view the full thing)

But now, the expectation of leftists is that the government is somehow supposed to help the failed immigrants.

> I question the idea that the US has a strong border compared to other countries of a comparable economic and development level.

It's all over the map. A lot of countries are easier to visit. Becoming a citizen, however, is difficult for most countries.

> Also, allowing farms and construction companies to find cheap labor is a reason for a weak border, not a reason for a strong border.

You are mistaken in thinking this is a normal labor market. The reason it reduces prices is because it weakens the ability for labor to negotiate. A strong border with internal enforcement makes it easier for a farmer to tell a day laborer "do this, or I'll call ICE on you". How well do you think a day laborer can negotiate a raise in that circumstance?

Consider, for example, the fact that farmers aren't employing US citizens or documented workers even though they are infinitely more abundant than undocumented workers. Why do you think that is? What mechanism is making the undocumented worker cheap and the documented one expensive?

A fast path to documentation and more rights lets more people in, but it also increases the labor costs because the workers are able to negotiate in the market.

Strong border policies with moderate (weaker) and selective enforcement will give the combination that GP describes: enough supply backed by the threat of strong individual penalties if someone here illegally “gets out of line”.

> because a weak border creates a larger pool of illegal immigrants to draw from.

A larger pool with more rights and less fear of being deported. That means it's easier for them to pick and choose the jobs they do or even to start their own businesses.

They could, for example, form a union without the fear of deportation.

Look, if this were all about stopping illegal immigration, there are very fast paths to doing that. A prime one would be punishing not the immigrant, but the employer of the immigrant. Fine every farm in the US that employs an illegal immigrant and you'd quickly see the number of those jobs being worked drop.

But that's not what ICE is about which is why they and legislators haven't done that really basic enforcement.

Heck, at the start of this admin, Trump had to pull back ICE from raiding farms because the business interests of the farmers collided with the xenophobia of Steven Miller.

> People flood US borders

They have "flooded" the US borders because in the first Trump term, Trump instituted a policy of having applicants for all sorts of reasons to have to stay in Mexico before they can be accepted.

That's the primary reason why there are now huge encampments at the border. They weren't there under Obama, Bush, or Clinton.

> why don't people stay in their own country or go somewhere else?

A lot of people are asylum seekers, and a lot of that reason they are seeking asylum is US policy which has destroyed their home nations. The best example of this being the likes Venezuela, Cuba, and Haite. The US putting international trade embargos on governments it doesn't like, plunging them into poverty, creates a bunch of refuges.

Some people are simply seeking a better life. Some have bought into american propaganda about how awesome the US is to live in. Some people are simply trafficked into the US for the explicit purpose of being exploited. (In fact, that's the majority of human trafficking in the US [1]).

[1] https://www.dhs.gov/human-trafficking-quick-facts