Regarding ICE, the Border Patrol and Illegal Immigration

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Re: Regarding ICE, the Border Patrol and Illegal Immigration

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gonna leave this here
Eric Pavri
February 12 · Colorado Springs, CO

I'm an immigration lawyer. I know that many of my Facebook friends, who are good and intelligent people, honestly have questions like the following: Why don't all these immigrants just become legal, and do they get all kinds of public benefits?
I hope you'll read what I wrote here in the spirit in which it was intended, which is to cut through the BS (from poorly-informed but loud voices on both the left and right) and simply provide correct information so that people can decide for themselves what is right and best.
I recently wrote the comment below to a Facebook story from a local news channel, about a teacher here in Colorado Springs who has DACA.
********************************************************
To several of the commenters on this thread – first, I want to acknowledge that asking why people don’t just become citizens, or whether people without legal status can get public benefits that U.S citizens cannot, are legitimate questions. If they are asked in good faith, no one should mind you asking them.

Therefore, let me answer your questions. Please know that I am well-informed on these topics, as an immigration lawyer for the past 8 years, the past six of those in Colorado, and currently the Director of Family Immigration Services at Catholic Charities of Central Colorado (most of you know us best as the organization that runs the Marian House soup kitchen). You may verify those statements by entering my bar number (44591) on the Supreme Court of Colorado website (http://www.coloradosupremecourt.com/Sea ... Search.asp) or viewing our Catholic Charities website (https://www.ccharitiescc.org/).

First, as to why young people who have DACA haven’t just become citizens:
To become a U.S. citizen (other than by birth), one must first become a Lawful Permanent Resident (“green card” holder). Only after five years as a Permanent Resident can you apply to become a citizen. Thus, the obvious next question: how does a person become a Permanent Resident? There are three primary options to do so:

1) Family-based petitions. This means that a U.S. citizen or Permanent Resident parent, spouse, adult child, or sibling files a “petition” for you. Depending on the category that you fall into, the wait will be anywhere from 1 – 22 years (yep) before you can use that petition to take the next step – applying to become a Permanent Resident (background checks, medical exam, more fees, etc.). That works for people living outside the U.S., but for those who have been here, it may not be possible if they entered the U.S. illegally, even if they were minor children when they did so.

2) Employment-based petitions. A U.S. employer can similarly sponsor you, but generally only if you are in a profession requiring an advanced degree or unique skills (doctors, software engineers, world-class athletes to coach professional sports teams, etc.). Even then, the potential employer must generally also prove that they made good-faith efforts to hire a U.S. citizen for the position, but no qualified applicants applied.

3) Diversity visa lottery. Every year, the U.S. government selects 50,000 people worldwide who enter a lottery and pass background checks to come to the U.S. as Permanent Residents. This lottery, however, is only available to people from countries that traditionally send few people to the US – so, for example, people from countries such as Mexico, the Philippines, China, Guatemala, India, El Salvador, and other countries that send larger numbers of immigrants to the U.S. do not have this option.

Extra note: The current Administration has actively sought to eliminate or dramatically limit Options #1 and #3. The new term being used in the attempted re-branding of Option #1, family-based immigration, which has been the basic principle of U.S. immigration law for over a century, is “chain migration”. If those two options are in fact eliminated or curtailed, legal immigration to the U.S. will be significantly reduced.
The KEY POINT to all of the above: If you do not qualify for one of these 3 options, then there is no “line” to get into to legally become a Permanent Resident and eventually a U.S. citizen. So, if you are not fortunate enough to have, say, a U.S. citizen spouse or a graduate degree in computer science, you very likely can never become a citizen of the United States.

Second, one commenter above asked why President Obama, when he established DACA in 2012, did not just create a path to citizenship for these young people at that time. The answer: earlier that year, Congress had for the 11th year in a row failed to pass the Dream Act, which would have done exactly that. The President acting through his authority as head of the Executive Branch cannot create a path to Lawful Permanent Residency (and eventual US citizenship). Only a law, passed by Congress and then signed by the President, can accomplish that. So President Obama on June 15, 2012 created the more limited DACA program through Executive Action – which is why President Trump, as the new President, was able to end the program, also without an act of Congress, last fall.

Finally, as to the question of immigrants receiving public benefits, only a U.S. citizen or a Lawful Permanent Resident (green card holder) can receive almost all types of public benefit – including Medicaid, Medicare, SSI disability, Social Security payments for seniors, TANF, and food stamps. The irony: most undocumented immigrants work under made-up Social Security numbers and so receive a paycheck from which Social Security, federal income taxes, and state income taxes are withheld, and of course they pay the same local sales and property taxes as anyone else through retail purchases, pass-through costs of apartment leases, etc. Same of course goes for the 800,000 current DACA recipients, who are authorized to legally work in the U.S. But none of those employees, despite paying IN to the system, will ever receive those public benefits listed above, that are paid for by the money withheld from their paychecks. So they are propping up our federal and state government entitlement programs because they pay in but won’t ever take out.

The following are the public benefits that undocumented immigrants can receive in United States:

1) Public education for children in grades K-12. This was definitively established by a 1982 Supreme Court case, Plyler v. Doe. The Supreme Court in its reasoning explicitly stated that it would not serve the overall public good of the U.S. to leave many thousands of children uneducated.

2) Emergency room services, but only to the point where the patient is considered “medically stable”, at which point he/she is released. These services are not free, however, as in my job I meet hundreds of immigrant families who sacrifice over years to slowly pay off high emergency room medical bills.

3) WIC assistance. This is for milk, food, etc, and available only to pregnant mothers. The rationale is that the children in the womb will be U.S. citizens when born, and therefore it is in the long-term economic best interests of the nation to ensure that they receive adequate prenatal nutrition to improve their chances of being productive citizens in the decades to come.

4) Assistance from police if they are the victim of a crime and call for help. To their credit, the vast majority of our Colorado Springs law enforcement officers take their duty to protect all people seriously. Chief Carey of the CSPD and Sheriff Elder of the EPCSO have made clear that their officers can’t do their most important job – keeping us safe by getting dangerous criminals off our streets – if a whole class of people (undocumented immigrants) is afraid to call 911 to report crimes that they witness or are victim to.
5) Assistance from a fire department. Rationale, besides the obvious moral one: If your house was next to that of an undocumented immigrant family, would you want the firefighters to let that house continue to burn, putting yours at risk of catching on fire too?
And that’s it. Those, to the best of my knowledge, are the only public benefits that an undocumented immigrant can receive in just about any part of the United States. As someone who directs a small office that works with hundreds of low-income immigrant families per year, know that when I see the precarious economic situation of many of these families, I'd help them access other benefits if they could. But they simply can't. Now, children of undocumented parents, born in the U.S., are U.S. citizens under the 14th Amendment (the one that declares that all human beings born on U.S. soil are citizens – this was passed immediately after the Civil War to forever end the legal argument that African Americans were not U.S. citizens). As such, those children can qualify for the same public benefits as any other U.S. citizen, if they qualify through economic need or disability. But their parents or undocumented siblings cannot.

I hope that this information has been useful to those willing to read through this long (for Facebook anyway) explanation. Please know that even this long summary leaves out a ton of detail -- there are tens of thousands of pages of statutes, regulations, internal federal agency procedures, and court decisions guiding how all of this is interpreted and implemented. But please take my word that I honestly believe that no detail I omitted for conciseness changes the basic points above. And I'd be happy to answer questions if you have them. Like I said, I don’t mind honest questions, and I believe that legitimate questions asked in good faith deserve well-informed, accurate answers. If all of us in the U.S. would be willing to actually listen to each others’ sincere concerns and do our best to answer each others’ questions, instead of just yelling at each other or retreating to our corners of the internet (left OR right) where everyone already agrees with us – well, I think we’d move our nation forward a lot more effectively
Dr. Silverback has wryly observed that this is like trying to teach lolcats about Shakespeare

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Re: Regarding ICE, the Border Patrol and Illegal Immigration

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If not for double-standards, some people would have no standards at all.
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Re: Regarding ICE, the Border Patrol and Illegal Immigration

Post by BriarThrone »

FuzzyBoots wrote: Wed Jun 27, 2018 11:51 pm That's an interesting question. The simple answer is that if every law was enforced, every single one of was would likely be in jail for a felony charge. The United States law system has evolved over the years, and what was intended to be corner cases have proven pretty broadly applicable. For example, if a bird flew over your yard and dropped a feather, and you made that feather into an earring, would you expect to be charged with trafficking in endangered animals? It's a real case brought against a woman who was unaware that the feather was from an endangered hawk. Or what if we actually enforced jaywalking vigilantly, immediately charging people if they crossed against the light, or outside of the crosswalk (admittedly, something I have fantasies about occasionally, currently living in Pittsburgh, where people can't seem to understand the concept of crosswalks)? It is illegal, after all. And we are just protecting these people by ensuring that they stop that unsafe behavior.

In actuality, of course, law enforcement is selective. If a cop catches a kid shoplifting, they might be forced to give the item back and then let go. Someone attempting to cross the border illegally may just be turned back. The person caught speeding may just get a warning. Ideally, it's done in a manner where every aspect of it from officer to D.A. to prosecutor decides whether a crime has both action and intent, and whether it's worth the time and effort, and punitive action. In actuality, selective enforcement of laws tends to be pretty racist. As people have pointed out over and over again, white people serve less time than black people for the same crime. And it's not even large crimes either. Black and Latino kids in Texas are about ten times more likely to be cited for bicycle helmet violations than white kids. Sadly, humans are far from ideal.
Interesting point, but it's not really a criticism of mine. It's a pretty solid indictment of our current legal system, though. An enforcement system that leaves enforcement up to the law enforcement officer's discretion is inherently discriminatory.

A couple points, though, regarding "enforcement of laws tends to be racist." Have you normalized the racial sentencing gap by the recidivism rate by race? Because basically no one does. That accounts for the majority of the difference. First-time offenders get lesser sentences. As for the rest of it, the judge has some sentencing discretion, and it might sometimes involve racism, but it also definitely involves your conduct and attitude during the proceedings. Racism in law enforcement and the courts isn't the slam dunk case it's claimed to be.

The sentencing gap between male and female, though, holy shit you guys...
FuzzyBoots wrote: Wed Jun 27, 2018 11:51 pmI'll admit that I misremembered it. The original story indicated that she was with her mother (she still is, detained in Texas). Time ran it with the wrong facts and admitted it a few days later. The other media outlets did a better job of looking up the original story. :-D
The mother kidnapped the kid and ran away to the United States for money, without telling her husband or her other children, and they weren't even separated. The kid was crying because she was tired and hungry and it was 2am and she didn't understand what was going on. The mother and child weren't even separated for longer than a pat-down. Yet this is a picture we see repeatedly, somehow supposedly representative of Trump's evil in action at the border.
FuzzyBoots wrote: Wed Jun 27, 2018 11:51 pmYup. More or less what I said. The system was already broken and all that was happening was that the zero tolerance policy was stuffing a broken system with even more kids, making it more broken.
... broken how, though? What is so wrong with verifying that children aren't being enslaved or prostituted? Because I'm against child slavery and prostitution. Why aren't you? I'm against putting children in jail with potential rapists, and I'm against putting potential rapists in a boarding school for children. Why aren't you? Or are you just, like, unaware that they used pictures of the processing center, where the kids spend a few hours, and pretended that those were where the children stay? Because the actual place the children stay looks nicer than most barracks for our troops.
FuzzyBoots wrote: Wed Jun 27, 2018 11:51 pmI'm assuming that you didn't mean to call that "lax". :) You're also quoting a law that was overturned in 2011. But yes, I totally agree that completely open borders generally are a problem because, well, different countries and different laws, and the difficulties of pursuing cases that cross borders.
Compared to most third world countries, yeah, that's pretty lax, and they only changed it because they were called out on the hypocrisy. Mexico doesn't want illegal immigrants either.
FuzzyBoots wrote: Wed Jun 27, 2018 11:51 pm Eyeh... yes, some people are falsely attempting to claim asylum status. But that's kind of like arguing that "People try to get out of shooting other people by claiming 'self defense'." Sure, there's fraudulent cases, but there are a lot of legitimate ones too.
Except that "asylum" is only meant to be a temporary solution while we take action to resolve it. We accept refugees from countries we've got sanctions against, like Cuba, and even then, only the ones specifically targeted by the government. There is a process. My next door neighbor is a Cuban political refugee, and he spent years in Castro's prison. We should not be accepting refugees from Mexico unless we start taking political or military action against Mexico's government/the cartels. We should not be accepting refugees from south of Mexico, because by international law, they're Mexico's responsibility. We shouldn't be accepting refugees without evidence of their need, and being poor isn't enough.
FuzzyBoots wrote: Wed Jun 27, 2018 11:51 pm As to whether we can take everyone in... well, we do have a lot of land.
Err... so? The price of real estate is too high for most right now. What happens if the demand goes up higher? And what about the resources you ignore? Educational facilities and personnel, medical facilities and personnel, consumer goods... increase the demand, and the prices will go up. Meanwhile, assuming that they enter the labor market in a reasonable percentage, that increases the labor supply, suppressing wages. This is not good for the American worker, and I think we have something of a right to look after our own interests.
FuzzyBoots wrote: Wed Jun 27, 2018 11:51 pmAnd these people are willing to do labor that the average US citizen turns their nose up at.
This comment infuriates me. Are you trying to justify slavery? Because this is how slavery was justified. If the job is worth having, and the pay is fair, Americans will do the job. I know. I am currently doing the job. If the job is so shitty that an American wouldn't do it for the pay offered, but migrants will, you would call that "exploitation" in any context outside the immigration debate. And you'd be right. As it is, you're arguing for the stagnation of wages and the suppression of technology. You may not actually be a horrible person, but if you're not, you need to stop taking your talking points from horrible people.
FuzzyBoots wrote: Wed Jun 27, 2018 11:51 pmThey commit fewer crimes than the average US citizen.
Bullshit. This is not what available data shows.
FuzzyBoots wrote: Wed Jun 27, 2018 11:51 pmIf we do a bit of elementary screening for known criminals and infectious disease,
How do we do that without actually securing the border?
FuzzyBoots wrote: Wed Jun 27, 2018 11:51 pmthen we're probably just making our nation stronger. :)
You know what nations those people should be making stronger? The shitholes they're trying to leave. If, as you say, these people are valuable contributors to their economic and political systems, maybe they should stay home and improve those places. If they're so bad as to justify a claim of asylum, maybe they're bad enough to justify a hostile citizenry. If only we weren't allowing those awful governments to unload their problems onto the US.
FuzzyBoots wrote: Wed Jun 27, 2018 11:51 pmBut aside from that, yes, we do not have an obligation to take people in. I do think that we have an obligation to establish a process that is fair and doesn't cause pain and fear because we find that preferable to the idea of immigrants.
Prove fear and pain.
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Re: Regarding ICE, the Border Patrol and Illegal Immigration

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BriarThrone wrote: Thu Jun 28, 2018 9:42 pm Interesting point, but it's not really a criticism of mine. It's a pretty solid indictment of our current legal system, though. An enforcement system that leaves enforcement up to the law enforcement officer's discretion is inherently discriminatory.
Speaking as someone who handles a legal system, there's no good answer.
Any system of laws must either comprehensively define all possible crimes and situations or leave discretion in enforcement. But a human being can't handle that much information and so has to fall back on imprecise things like intuition and heuristics, which are fancy ways to say they have to use discretion. All systems that work do so by attempting to find a golden balance. Just enough codification to make things clear to everyone, not enough to overload the officers who have to track everything. But this still leaves room for human failings, which will continue to be the case for as long as the law is in human hands. Hopefully that's forever.

I find that the absolute best solution is to make the intent of the law clear, leave a large amount of discretion to the enforcer, and have a fast system of rectification for when issues arise. If every incident has three people look at it if it's disputed, bias is marginalized by simple weight of numbers. This of course can't work for the USA because the US legal system has to deal with matters that cannot be rectified if mishandled and are difficult to deal with both carefully and quickly.
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Re: Regarding ICE, the Border Patrol and Illegal Immigration

Post by BriarThrone »

Nunya B wrote: Thu Jun 28, 2018 10:59 pm
BriarThrone wrote: Thu Jun 28, 2018 9:42 pm Interesting point, but it's not really a criticism of mine. It's a pretty solid indictment of our current legal system, though. An enforcement system that leaves enforcement up to the law enforcement officer's discretion is inherently discriminatory.
Speaking as someone who handles a legal system, there's no good answer.
Any system of laws must either comprehensively define all possible crimes and situations or leave discretion in enforcement. But a human being can't handle that much information and so has to fall back on imprecise things like intuition and heuristics, which are fancy ways to say they have to use discretion. All systems that work do so by attempting to find a golden balance. Just enough codification to make things clear to everyone, not enough to overload the officers who have to track everything. But this still leaves room for human failings, which will continue to be the case for as long as the law is in human hands. Hopefully that's forever.

I find that the absolute best solution is to make the intent of the law clear, leave a large amount of discretion to the enforcer, and have a fast system of rectification for when issues arise. If every incident has three people look at it if it's disputed, bias is marginalized by simple weight of numbers. This of course can't work for the USA because the US legal system has to deal with matters that cannot be rectified if mishandled and are difficult to deal with both carefully and quickly.
The word "discriminatory" is an interesting one. Used to be, when you had a keen eye and a preference for fine things, you would be known as a person of "discriminating tastes." Now, it's treated as a synonym for hatred, which is weird. The point is that so much is left up to the discretion of so many people that it's hard to get any real data on why things happen. Someone thought it was appropriate to do this. By definition, "discriminatory."

I agree that the law does need some room for discretion, but with the recent practice of refusing to enforce laws that the executive branch doesn't like but can't get the legislative to repeal it, and activist judges rewriting laws from the bench, and far too much chaff on the books that is irrelevant to the modern world or not worth enforcing except as a shady tactic to use to prosecute the politically inconvenient or a million other things... we need a legal system that is a more transparent, reliable... systematic, basically.
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Re: Regarding ICE, the Border Patrol and Illegal Immigration

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In order to be effective, a legal system must have allowances for discretion by the police, the prosecutors, and the courts.

Officer Krupke walking the beat needs to know that he can nab Little Johnny for swiping a candy bar and instead of hauling him off to central booking, he can just make Johnny apologize to the store owner and have a chat with his mom; Assistant District Attorney McCoy needs to have the prosecutorial discretion to bring lesser (or greater) charges against an offender, cut plea deals, and negotiate sentences; and, of course, the very reason we have judges is to interpret the law.
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Re: Regarding ICE, the Border Patrol and Illegal Immigration

Post by FuzzyBoots »

Batgirl III wrote: Fri Jun 29, 2018 2:24 am In order to be effective, a legal system must have allowances for discretion by the police, the prosecutors, and the courts.

Officer Krupke walking the beat needs to know that he can nab Little Johnny for swiping a candy bar and instead of hauling him off to central booking, he can just make Johnny apologize to the store owner and have a chat with his mom; Assistant District Attorney McCoy needs to have the prosecutorial discretion to bring lesser (or greater) charges against an offender, cut plea deals, and negotiate sentences; and, of course, the very reason we have judges is to interpret the law.
{nods} Which is part of why this "zero tolerance" setup is causing so much trouble, of course.
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Re: Regarding ICE, the Border Patrol and Illegal Immigration

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Ah, but here's the catch, there's a thing known as "protest by obedience" where instead of the more common form of protest by massed disobedience

Author James Scott in his book Two Cheers for Anarchism describes a phenomena known as "Irish Democracy" wherein: "[o]ne need not have an actual conspiracy to achieve the practical effects of a conspiracy. More regimes have been brought, piecemeal, to their knees by what was once called 'Irish Democracy,' the silent, dogged resistance, withdrawal, and truculence of millions of ordinary people, than by revolutionary vanguards or rioting mobs." Basically, every man, woman, and child in a population breaks the same law, day in and day out. There's just too much disobedience for law enforcement to do anything about it. A great recent example of this is a law passed a five-six years ago in Connecticut mandating that everyone with a firearm that fell into the newly defined "assault weapon" category according to some arbitrary definitions created by the legislature must register it with the state. The state estimated that something like 375,000 rifles in the state existed that were now classified as "assault weapons," and had to be registered... But, by the close of registration at the end of 2013, state officials received around 50,000 applications for registrations. That's a lot of non-compliance.

However, widespread compliance with laws can also be an effective form of protest. Most famously are the "Rolling Roadblock" protests, which were pioneered by truckers in the Seventies but sometimes used today. The nature of these "Rolling Roadblock" protests is simplicity itself. You get a whole bunch of big rigs on a major highway during peak traffic hours... and they obey every. single. traffic. law. And they obey them zealously. (And its not just a redneck trucker thing: dirty hippies on bicycles can do it too!)

President Trump and his Administration do not like the current immigration laws and they want Congress to change them. But rather than mimic the previous Obama Administration who would simply decline to enforce laws that the president disagreed with and/or use administrative agency rule-making procedures to essentially re-write the laws ("“I've got a pen, and I've got a phone.”) the Trump Administration is going the 'protest by obedience' route.

Obeying every law in the book, to the letter, until the other guy cries "Uncle!" and rewrites the book properly.
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Re: Regarding ICE, the Border Patrol and Illegal Immigration

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FuzzyBoots wrote: Fri Jun 29, 2018 3:09 am
Batgirl III wrote: Fri Jun 29, 2018 2:24 am In order to be effective, a legal system must have allowances for discretion by the police, the prosecutors, and the courts.

Officer Krupke walking the beat needs to know that he can nab Little Johnny for swiping a candy bar and instead of hauling him off to central booking, he can just make Johnny apologize to the store owner and have a chat with his mom; Assistant District Attorney McCoy needs to have the prosecutorial discretion to bring lesser (or greater) charges against an offender, cut plea deals, and negotiate sentences; and, of course, the very reason we have judges is to interpret the law.
{nods} Which is part of why this "zero tolerance" setup is causing so much trouble, of course.
How much tolerance would you recommend for child abuse and reckless endangerment, then?
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Re: Regarding ICE, the Border Patrol and Illegal Immigration

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BriarThrone wrote: Fri Jun 29, 2018 4:02 am

How much tolerance would you recommend for child abuse and reckless endangerment, then?
Very little. But do you really think this does any good? Which do you think is more likely to be trafficking children, the group showing up at the border station, or the ones smuggling people through in cargo containers?
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Re: Regarding ICE, the Border Patrol and Illegal Immigration

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The ones showing up at border stations aren’t illegally immigrating. Showing up at a border station is what you ate supposed to do...
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Re: Regarding ICE, the Border Patrol and Illegal Immigration

Post by BriarThrone »

FuzzyBoots wrote: Fri Jun 29, 2018 12:35 pm
BriarThrone wrote: Fri Jun 29, 2018 4:02 am

How much tolerance would you recommend for child abuse and reckless endangerment, then?
Very little. But do you really think this does any good? Which do you think is more likely to be trafficking children, the group showing up at the border station, or the ones smuggling people through in cargo containers?
I'm not even talking about the traffickers at this point. I'm talking about the people who bring - or SEND - their children on a dangerous journey through terrain that would be hostile enough to kill a decent percentage of them anyway, even before accounting for the kind of vicious predatory assholes they are likely to meet along the way. They do it in the hope that compassion will drive us to take pity on the child and let them in, and thus begin what is called "chain migration." They are more than willing to potentially sacrifice the lives of their children. I view this as unacceptable. We need to put a stop to it. The only way I know how to stop this is to stop rewarding it and start punishing it. 100% of the time.

Of course, my opinion on the likelihood of trafficked children being caught at the border on foot vs in a container truck doesn't matter.
The only data we have on the matter comes from ICE, and they say that presenting a kidnapped child as one's own in order to hopefully gain legal entry is not an uncommon occurrence.

Besides, we're not even talking about people who voluntarily show up at a PoE and fill out paperwork. We're talking about those who try to bypass the legal immigration system, by definition.
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Re: Regarding ICE, the Border Patrol and Illegal Immigration

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Sorry, double post.
Last edited by greycrusader on Sat Jun 30, 2018 7:07 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Regarding ICE, the Border Patrol and Illegal Immigration

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One may want to actually check out how "chain migration" actually works:

http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter ... n-migrati/

If that's TL:DR, here's the gist: one has to become a naturalized U.S. citizen before petitioning to bring in a direct family member as a legal immigrant. The current average waiting time for immediate family members is close to a decade, so it really isn't any sort of major threat. Asylum seekers who actually receive permission to stay aren't going to be flooding our country with their relatives.

I would contend in most cases parents who subject children to the peril inherent in asylum seeking do so because they fear the alternative is worse-while no longer much in the news as it once was, there are parts of South/Central America and Mexico where there is either genuine fear of starvation (Venezuela), the country is virtually run by violent criminals (rural parts of Mexico), or paramilitary groups remain a chronic danger (Columbia).

Illegal immigration is a crime, but its a misdemeanor. And frankly, it wouldn't exist without U.S. employers who want low-wage laborers willing to toil without benefits. And crossing the Rio Grande is really not the biggest source of the problem-China is the biggest single source of non-Hispanice"undocumenteds" in the modern era, coming in and overstaying work visas. In that last decade, THAT method of illegal immigration has taken over, as border crossings have more or less consistently dropped year to year. I'm sort of thinking a "wall" isn't going to help with that one.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/201 ... rants.html
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Re: Regarding ICE, the Border Patrol and Illegal Immigration

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Illegal entry is a misdemeanor the first time. (1911. 8 U.S.C. 1325) However, after you have been removed from the country, subsequent illegal re-entry is a felony. (1912. 8 U.S.C. 1326)

If you don’t like it, the proper remedy is to protest to Congress to alter the statutes. Not to call for the abolishment of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and certainly not to harass I.C.E. officers and agents in their off-duty lives. I.C.E. officers and agents have a tough job, maybe we can just let them enjoy talking about zombie-dragons and cybernetic elves on RPG.net in peace?
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