DACA

[Jason Harvestdancer]

Here's what I'm trying to figure out. Since it is apparently the Democrats who want to allow the Dreamers to stay, does that mean they want to actually change our immigration laws?

To put it simply, the entire reason they might be deported is due to a violation of immigration law. The debate is whether or not to enforce that law on these people.

 

[southernhybrid]

It's not just Democrats that want the Dreamers to stay. A large majority of Americans want Dreamers to stay, but the Republicans think they can use DACA as a way to get some rather harsh immigration laws passed. I'm ashamed of what has happened to our once welcoming country.

 

[Jason Harvestdancer]

But do those who want the dreamers to stay want to change immigration law?!?!?!?!

 

[jonatha]

But do those who want the dreamers to stay want to change immigration law?!?!?!?!

That sounds like a tautology.

Is there some reason to think we don't want to change immigration law so that Dreamers can stay?

 

[bilby]

Those people are mocking of the law.

It's the duty of all residents in a free country to mock the law, when the law is absurd, and/or fails in its purpose.

The law should serve the needs of the people, not the other way around.

Only authoritarian arseholes consider 'mocking the law' to be a problem in its own right. Such people need to be ridiculed.

 

[Playball40]

But do those who want the dreamers to stay want to change immigration law?!?!?!?!

Yes, I absolutely want to see immigration reform (law changes). I want to see a fairer system that requires a reasonable path to legal migration FOR ALL.

 

[Jason Harvestdancer]

Okay. I thought it was a simple question, but it was so hard to get an answer.

After all, progressives do support immigration controls. I see Trump enforcing the law as written, and Democrats saying "But we just don't like the unjust consequences of Our law but we don't want it repealed. We want it to stay on the books and be enforced. We just want toe president to not enforce the law against people that we favor. We want the president to have the authority to determine which illegal immigrants will be the privileged ones - the ones who won't have the law enforced against them."

I don't agree with the law, but I do see Trump enforcing it and Democrats whining about him doing so. Now if the law had a provision in it that allowed the president to make exemptions that would change the discussion, but it really doesn't.

 

[Playball40]

And I suppose you're hunky dory with the residents of Colorado, California, et al being thrown in jail for smoking pot then.

Okay. I thought it was a simple question, but it was so hard to get an answer.

After all, progressives do support immigration controls. I see Trump enforcing the law as written, and Democrats saying "But we just don't like the unjust consequences of Our law but we don't want it repealed. We want it to stay on the books and be enforced. We just want toe president to not enforce the law against people that we favor. We want the president to have the authority to determine which illegal immigrants will be the privileged ones - the ones who won't have the law enforced against them."

I don't agree with the law, but I do see Trump enforcing it and Democrats whining about him doing so. Now if the law had a provision in it that allowed the president to make exemptions that would change the discussion, but it really doesn't.

 

[Jason Harvestdancer]

Okay. I thought it was a simple question, but it was so hard to get an answer.

After all, progressives do support immigration controls. I see Trump enforcing the law as written, and Democrats saying "But we just don't like the unjust consequences of Our law but we don't want it repealed. We want it to stay on the books and be enforced. We just want toe president to not enforce the law against people that we favor. We want the president to have the authority to determine which illegal immigrants will be the privileged ones - the ones who won't have the law enforced against them."

I don't agree with the law, but I do see Trump enforcing it and Democrats whining about him doing so. Now if the law had a provision in it that allowed the president to make exemptions that would change the discussion, but it really doesn't.

And I suppose you're hunky dory with the residents of Colorado, California, et al being thrown in jail for smoking pot then.

Why did you attach your reply to someone else to my post?

 

[bilby]

In mature liberal democracies, it is recognised that some law is bad law, and that as it takes a lot of time and effort to repeal or update bad law (and in some cases it's impossible to do at all), it's reasonable to simply enforce the law selectively (until such time as it can be updated) to avoid unpleasant and/or inhumane consequences.

Many countries have taken the alternative approach of enforcing all laws, or of enforcing certain areas of law, with 'zero tolerance'. These countries are known as 'totalitarian states', and are fucking horrible to live in.

Of course, even democratic nations usually have a sizeable fraction of their population who prefer the simplicity of the totalitarian approach over the humanity of flexible enforcement.

Many people would rather live in a dystopian nightmare (particularly one in which the majority of the pain falls on the backs of others), rather than be forced to live in a complex society in which they need to think about what they do, instead of mindlessly obeying the law as it is written.

The idea that all laws should be equally enforced is a dangerous oversimplification, and leads to awful and inhumane results. Such as people going to jail for smoking a bit of weed; Or being deported to a place they have no connection to, because their parents didn't get the correct visa when they crossed a border several decades earlier.

Authoritarians are horrified by the very idea that we should use reason and compassion to override the law as written; They imagine that if we are permitted to disregard some of the law, none of it will be enforceable. But this is a gross error. Failure to imprison dope smokers does NOT lead to bank robberies going unpunished.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Something else I'm trying to understand. We do have immigration laws in place, which is why the DACA children are such a hot topic. What Obama did with his executive order was to declare a certain group of people exempt from that law.

Do those wanting to keep the DACA children want to change immigration law, or simply not enforce it?

Change. This is a case where good intentions produce a bad outcome. Fix it.

- - - Updated - - -

Nope.

The best protection is denying them a driver license. Any mistake or breaking of traffic law will identify them as committing fraud using fake ID and be deported.

This is the best solution: not to give them any opportunity to take advantage after their crossing of the border illegally.

Of course the ones already in the US will suffer a lot, but at the end of the day, discourage will work very well and less migrants will see the US as a place to get inside illegally.

No. Getting stopped doesn't cause them to be deported because it doesn't reveal them to be illegal, just unlicensed.

 

[Elixir]

My ancestors never lived in mud huts. If they did, I expect I would feel at home in one.

Do you feel at home in trees? You sound like one of those young-earth, evolution-denying "I ain't no monkey!" types. Is that the case? If so I'll leave you alone - I learned long ago that such folk are a waste of time.
If not, I would challenge your knowledge of your own genealogy. How far back can you fully trace your family history?

 

[RavenSky]

Okay. I thought it was a simple question, but it was so hard to get an answer.

You ignore any answers you receive

Democrats saying "But we just don't like the unjust consequences of Our law but we don't want it repealed. We want it to stay on the books and be enforced. We just want toe president to not enforce the law against people that we favor. We want the president to have the authority to determine which illegal immigrants will be the privileged ones - the ones who won't have the law enforced against them."

That's the biggest load of crap I've seen on this topic yet. Are you quite done with your strawman?

As I already gave you:

In 2007, when the immigration issue was less polarized along party lines, a bipartisan comprehensive immigration reform bill that included DREAM Act provisions was killed by bipartisan, but mostly Republican, opposition.

Then in 2010, when the lame duck Democratic Congress tried to move a standalone DREAM Act as a down payment on broader immigration reform, five Senate Democrats joined the vast majority of Senate Republicans to filibuster a bill that had majority support.

Then in 2013, a bipartisan comprehensive package that, again, contained DREAM provisions passed the Senate with 68 votes. All indications were that it had majority support in the House of Representatives, but then-Speaker John Boehner wouldn’t allow it to come to the floor due to the Hastert Rule (which holds that only bills supported by a majority of the majority party’s members get a vote).

Between the 2010 and 2013 failures, the Obama White House came up with the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program which gave most DREAM Act-eligible people the ability to obtain renewable work permits and formal protection from deportation...

Then in September last year, Trump killed DACA, with the goal of ending it completely by March 5.

 

[Kusa]

My ancestors never lived in mud huts. If they did, I expect I would feel at home in one.

Do you feel at home in trees? You sound like one of those young-earth, evolution-denying "I ain't no monkey!" types. Is that the case? If so I'll leave you alone - I learned long ago that such folk are a waste of time.
If not, I would challenge your knowledge of your own genealogy. How far back can you fully trace your family history?

I actually used to be a tree climber for a power company as a young man. I used to trim around the power lines.

As an Atheist I don’t subscribe to young Earth pseudo science.

According to my dna, my ancestors came from Scandinavia and England.

 

[bilby]

My ancestors never lived in mud huts. If they did, I expect I would feel at home in one.

Do you feel at home in trees? You sound like one of those young-earth, evolution-denying "I ain't no monkey!" types. Is that the case? If so I'll leave you alone - I learned long ago that such folk are a waste of time.
If not, I would challenge your knowledge of your own genealogy. How far back can you fully trace your family history?

I actually used to be a tree climber for a power company as a young man. I used to trim around the power lines.

As an Atheist I don’t subscribe to young Earth pseudo science.

According to my dna, my ancestors came from Scandinavia and England.

Then they almost certainly lived in mud huts before the eleventh century, and quite probably more recently than that.

 

[Kusa]

I actually used to be a tree climber for a power company as a young man. I used to trim around the power lines.

As an Atheist I don’t subscribe to young Earth pseudo science.

According to my dna, my ancestors came from Scandinavia and England.

Then they almost certainly lived in mud huts before the eleventh century, and quite probably more recently than that.

And all of our ancestors probably lived in the mud if you go back far enough. Anyway if I was born in Europe and got sent back there then I’d just be at home.

 

[LordKiran]

My ancestors never lived in mud huts. If they did, I expect I would feel at home in one.

Do you feel at home in trees? You sound like one of those young-earth, evolution-denying "I ain't no monkey!" types. Is that the case? If so I'll leave you alone - I learned long ago that such folk are a waste of time.
If not, I would challenge your knowledge of your own genealogy. How far back can you fully trace your family history?

Because living in a house made of sticks/clay/mud/rocks/whatever is available really with rat-infested thatch roofs is so much better than just a house made out of mud.

 

[bilby]

I actually used to be a tree climber for a power company as a young man. I used to trim around the power lines.

As an Atheist I don’t subscribe to young Earth pseudo science.

According to my dna, my ancestors came from Scandinavia and England.

Then they almost certainly lived in mud huts before the eleventh century, and quite probably more recently than that.

And all of our ancestors probably lived in the mud if you go back far enough. Anyway if I was born in Europe and got sent back there then I’d just be at home.

I was born in Europe, and if I got sent back there I would be about as far from home as it is possible to get without joining the space program.

It's a fundamental freedom to be able to go and live somewhere else. If people can't move to another country, then they are basically in prison - it's just a very large prison.

 

[barbos]

It's a fundamental freedom to be able to go and live somewhere else.

OK, I want to live in your house

If people can't move to another country, then they are basically in prison - it's just a very large prison.

I think most enlightened countries agreed that you have a right to leave but you have no right to get/stay anywhere.

 

[SimpleDon]

My solution is simple: to every illegal immigrant never have the opportunity to receive permanent residence under any circumstances.

That is simple, yes.

Would that apply to yourself, though?

I mean, I BELIEVE I was born in the US. I have a birth certificate from a tiny little town in Idaho. But I only really have the word of my parents about that. I don't remember it. It's possible I was born in some other country and entered the US illegally, where a sympathetic (or bribable) official provided documentation to support the story my parents later told.

I grew up pretty sure I was American. I served in the military, had a clearance above Top Secret, was 'Decorated,' and work as a contractor now. I've been voting since Reagan.

How's your stance if it suddenly comes out that my parents are frauds? As far as I know, as far as I live, I'm as American as anyone else in the room, any room, and suddenly I'm to be deported to god-only-knows-where because of a lie someone else told?
Do I get my service to the country back on the way out? You guys owe me 20 years.

In UK, migrants from Africa just used a boat and crossed the waters, reaching UK territory, having a child and the child was the UK citizen used by them to obtain benefits from the government.

What I hear is that in the UK, for a child born over there, the requirement to be consider as a UK citizen, the grandparents must be UK citizens. I asked, why no just the parents? The answer was, no, no only the parents but the grandparents.

Apparently they had a huge, but a huge problem with many Africans crossing the waters with the purpose of having children and the children become UK citizens. After that, the benefits to the child were "shared" by the fathers who later on became also citizens of the UK.

What I wrote above was a conversation made a decade ago with a guy from UK, I don't know if this law existed or has expired or still in place, or if this law was just an initiative which never passed.

The point is that not only the US has a similar problem. Years ago a newspaper wrote an article of how Mexican pregnant women just crossed the US border, had their child here in the US and returned back to Mexico, and coming and going, appearing at the social service office to receive food stamps and other benefits.

The idea input in people is that these illegal immigrants are people without school, poor people, and more. Reality is that you don't need school to commit felonies, you don't need school to make what is illegal.

They laugh of you when you concede to their smart moves and obtain what they want.

From my part, look, I have not a single problem when smart people take advantage of others. The problem is when the government supports them.

The government must care for the US citizens, not so for illegal immigrants who take advantage and make mocks of the law.

My position is never give them what they want because goes against the law and affects the ones who are in their countries and want to come to the US the legal way.

Not because a party crasher is in your house drinking and eating and dancing, means that he also will be treated as your friend. You decide to take him out, that is your right. He has no rights to stay, you have the right to decide about it. He can't demand to stay, you can decide what to do and no one can judge your decision.

The US government must be very cautious about these dudes from DACA. Before making any decision, all the consequences must be considered, from three million obtaining legal status, it will become more than 10 million in a period of 6 or more years.

Houston, we have a problem.

Yes, we have a problem. What we don't have is a viable solution. Trying to solve the problem of created by the huge demand for cheap labor in the US coupled with the huge supply of unemployed and underemployed people in Mexico and Central America willing to work for cheap by choking down on the border is never going to be fully successful. It is also a creator of unintended consequences.

Strengthening the border started in 1968 and really clamped down in the immigration bill of 1986. It was these efforts that turned a century old seasonal migration of agricultural workers to do work that Americans didn't want to do into a population of year round illegals competing for the jobs that native Americans wanted to do. Once crossing the border became difficult the illegals, once they succeeded in crossing the border, wanted to stay here year round rather than face the uncertainties of crossing the border. Staying here year around meant that they wanted to have their families with them. Staying here year around meant that they couldn't depend on seasonal farm work so they had to compete with legal workers for full time work. There was little competition because the illegals are willing to work for lower wages.

We have to find someway of controlling our immigration into the US. It should be obvious that turning the border with Mexico into a DMZ/Iron Curtain type border is quickly reaching the area of diminishing returns. The border patrol is now the largest law enforcement agency in the US. Diminishing returns means that an additional billion dollars spent on the border isn't going to prevent many more illegals from crossing the border.

Since it is the demand for cheap labor in the US and the excess supply of workers in Mexico and Central American that causes the problem it is obvious that we should be working on reducing the supply and the demand to reduce the problem. How do we do this?

We would reduce the demand by changing the law in the US and making employers responsible for checking the status of the employees of subcontractors as well as of their own employees.

Enforce the laws on hiring illegals. The Clinton administration prosecuted an anemically small number of employers compared to scope of the problem but it was ten times the number of employers who hired illegals than the following Bush administration did and collected higher fines.

Show

The Bush administration was hampered by the Supreme Court ruling that a corporation is a person responsible for its actions and therefore the executives who made the decisions aren't responsible for the decisions that they made. Executives who are happy to use low wage workers to increase their profits would not do it after seeing no more than a handful of other executives in handcuffs being led to prison.

Which is less of an excuse for the Bush administration because they supported the ruling.

We could reduce the supply of unemployed workers on the other side of the border by increasing our cross border industrial partnerships by doing the labor intensive work in Mexico. We already do this for about 140 billion dollars worth. How can we increase this?

We are currently funding the largest foreign aid project in history by offshoring more than 300 billion dollars a year of labor intensive industrial work to our nominal enemy China which shores up their communist economic system. Not only is this indefensible from a geopolitical view think about how many people could be employed in Mexico if that 300 billion dollars was spent there instead of in China. And how many fewer illegals we would have in the US.

Our birth rate is below the replacement rate and our native born population is declining. We are short of workers and our population is getting older. We should declare the rest of North America, Mexico and Canada, to be favored immigration partners and to increase the immigration quotas from those two dramatically, to compensate for the lower birth rate in the US. This would reduce the supply and the demand at the same time.

The main things standing in the way are the irrational Malthusian obsession and the irrational fear of foreigners, i.e. xenophobia, demonstrated here by liberal and conservative alike.

It is ridiculous to say that we will suffer from overcrowding by maintaining our population, which we now feeding, clothing, housing, educating and to whom we are providing an almost adequate level of health care.

Foreign countries don't send their worse of the worse to the US. For one thing the countries don't send us anyone. Immigrants come to this country on their own. And it is not easy to leave the country of your birth, you have to be highly motivated to leave everything that you have ever known behind for a dream of what you can be in the US. And the vast majority of them dream much bigger than signing up for welfare.

I can say unequivocally that Trump is wrong when he says that they are mainly drug dealers, terrorists and criminals. immigrants, legal or illegal, are less likely to commit crimes than citizens born in the US.

I can't help but to feel that part of the reluctance to try to solve this problem is that the presence of the illegals working in our country aids the neoliberal/movement conservative goal of suppressing wages to increase profits and the incomes of the already rich and very powerful. We have many neoliberals and conservatives here who should be able to answer this question.

Certainly progressives/liberals/trade unionists are put into a bind by this subject of what to do about the illegals. The presence of the illegals working in the US suppresses wages but if the illegals were somehow normalized so that they were not illegals their wages would rise and the widespread xenophobia and racism of employers would take hold and more natives would be hired instead of the immigrants.