Luz shares her apartment with her husband, also from Mexico and also undocumented. They met in America. He works in a bar. They have a young daughter who was born in America and is therefore a US citizen.
The only point you’ve made that has any real practical weight is the issue of labor exploitation of undocumented immigrants, which I agree is terrible, but even then you seem to not care as much about the inequity of it as much as that it “devalues citizenship,” whatever the fuck that is. None of your other points are more than baseless handwringing. Your argument about the legal ramifications is circular and based on nothing more than post hoc mental gymnastics to reach the unsupported conclusion you started with. Your economic argument is hollow and literally concludes that it isn’t important because your circular legal argument is what is important. The moral argument assumes a zero sum game and, again, is not based on anything factual. Finally, your security threat argument is evidenced by effectively nothing–the things you raise are threats regardless of immigration and are most actively guarded against at other points throughout their respective threat trajectory.
I think before you flap about complaining about education quality, you should reflect on your own reasoning as presented. You have applied zero logical process and effectively thrown a heap of conclusory axioms in the air and sputtered with indignation. You have effectively argued nothing and only shown your own severe lack of self-reflection.
The only point you’ve made that has any real practical weight is the issue of labor exploitation of undocumented immigrants
All of my points are both true and perfectly valid. You not liking them doesn’t invalidate them nor does it make them any less significant.
even then you seem to not care as much about the inequity of it as much as that it “devalues citizenship,”
I’m against the exploitation because it’s exploitation, but the solution people like you come up with is not even remotely practical. Your solution to make illegal immigrants have the same benefits of citizens without them actually being citizens. f anybody, anywhere can come into this country without approval or documentation, and start working and getting benefits from the state… then it doesn’t take genius to see how this opens up other types of exploitation.
Not only that, but since there are no controls to regulate the flow of people, then what’s there from stopping the billions of people out there who have live in places with worse economic conditions from just packing up and moving here? The answer is nothing, and with any massive influx of people, you start heavily over burdening the nation’s already stressed systems and start losing social cohesiveness. In other words this is a textbook recipe that leads to collapse.
This type of thinking sounds just and moral on the surface level, but it’s in reality surface level is all it is. The idea falls apart the moment you start looking into the consequences, there’s a reason why unchecked borders haven’t worked well throughout history. The one and only real, practical solution is to overhaul the immigration system to make it more consistent, efficient, quick, and have it work to the benefit of the nation. Once you have that in place, then you make sure that it’s strictly enforced. The only people who are allowed to come here are the people we want to be here. This is common sense.
Your argument about the legal ramifications is circular and based on nothing more than post hoc mental gymnastics to reach the unsupported conclusion you started with.
Your economic argument is hollow and literally concludes that it isn’t important because your circular legal argument is what is important.
The moral argument assumes a zero sum game and, again, is not based on anything factual.
Finally, your security threat argument is evidenced by effectively nothing–the things you raise are threats regardless of immigration and are most actively guarded against at other points throughout their respective threat trajectory.
These are all meaningless buzzword salads. It’s fine if you disagree, but you actually have to put in the effort to explain both your disagreement and your position, otherwise your words hold no weight. Simply saying things like “hollow” and “mental gymnastics” means nothing, and the same goes for insisting that my points are ciruclar and not factual. You saying they are doesn’t make them so, if you aren’t capable of explaining yourself or aren’t able to critique my points on their own merits, then perhaps this conversation isn’t for you.
The only semi-argument you made here is that you think there’s no need to do anything about immigration, because the security threats that I brought up also happen outside of immigration and these issues are being countered elsewhere, but the problem with this argument is that it ignores the fact that the way our immigration is handled a big part of why these issues are much bigger threats than they should be. These threats need to be countered within and outside of immigration.
I think before you flap about complaining about education quality, you should reflect on your own reasoning as presented. You have applied zero logical process and effectively thrown a heap of conclusory axioms in the air and sputtered with indignation. You have effectively argued nothing and only shown your own severe lack of self-reflection.
Look, you’re demanding I present counter arguments to statements that literally aren’t argued. Your entire position is effectively “this is bad because I say it is” so of course I’m not going to spend time and energy to counter that. Explain the actual mechanism of harm without resorting to “it’s clear from history” or “it’s a textbook recipe that leads to collapse.” I mean, if you are making your statements disingenuously as I suspect, that’s fine, but I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt that you’re in fact sincerely not understanding how you are in no way making logical arguments but just rattling off conclusions.
So, here are some actual facts. Immigration of all stripes has been pretty thoroughly shown to only improve economies in terms of productivity and diversity. Immigrants, no matter what, pay substantially into the system, and thus enable scaling of the resources only some of them end up benefiting from. Immigrants, again of all varieties, are significantly less likely to engage in crime than their native-born counterparts. These are all well established in the literature, so I will take them as axiom.
Given the above, your hypothesized concerns simply don’t track as population flows scale. Crime rates don’t increase (actually go down), economies don’t implode (actually improve), and social systems don’t collapse because they inherently scale in resource allocation proportionally to population (in a competently structured system–i.e., where this fails, it is not due to immigration but to extant deficiencies already in play).
Now, let’s address another deficiency in the “reasoning” you presented. People don’t just magically immigrate between countries, regardless of Immigration laws. Even if we had no borders and lived in a space age utopia, most people would nevertheless stay where they are unless that place was inhospitable to their survival–this isn’t to say there aren’t many economic migrants, but they are still inevitably a fraction of the population of their country of origin and so the naive assumption that “billions” would flow across an open border is just absurd and completely unreasonable.
Ultimately, understand that I am not expecting erasure of borders to happen anytime soon. However, yes, it is patently clear that the current “crackdown” on immigration is a solution looking for a problem so that it can justify totalitarian authoritarianism and immigration is not and has never really been a significant threat to the US, documented or no.
You keep putting words into my mouth and then dismissing my points. I’m not “demanding” anything from you, if you don’t want to discuss then just don’t. What I am asking for is a little good faith engagement from you. You keep saying that I made no arguments, but that’s not true. I made claims and I explained why I think they’re true. That’s what arguments are. You could disagree, ask for sources, ask for clarification, explain your case, and so on. That’s all a part of the discussion. However, all of my arguments are valid. Simply saying they’re not because I’m x, y, and z is not a rebuttal, especially when you don’t elaborate on any the claims you make, that just makes them accusations. Dismissing my arguments as being invalid because you said so doesn’t make them so.
To be fair to you, you did actually provide a little more substance here than in your previous comment… but you didn’t actually respond to what I said. If you actually scroll back up and read my points from earlier, you’ll see that I was specifically arguing about illegal immigration. You lumped in legal and illegal immigration, and then tried to argue why immigration is good… but I’m literally a legal immigrant myself, I don’t need you to trying to sell me on the pros and cons of immigration, that’s not the debate. I’m not against immigration, I’m against unchecked illegal immigration. You are arguing against the straw man you’ve made from my actual argument, and this is, ironically, disingenuous.
But I do find it fascinating how you directly contradicted yourself in your first two paragraphs. You literally wrote a whole paragraph berating me about how my entire position is supposedly me saying “this is bad because I say it is” and then demanded that I explain my positions without resorting to saying things like “it’s clear from history” or “it’s a textbook recipe that leads to collapse"… but then you follow this up by ending your second paragraph, the “facts” paragraph, with “these are all well established in the literature, so I will take them as axiom.” You started this whole debacle about how arguments like this aren’t worth your time only for you to end up using them in the same damn comment. The irony palpable.
There’s one more piece of irony to address, and that’s the “deficiency” in the reasoning that you presented. See, you said that my reasoning is deficient, never explain how or why, but unlike you, I can actually explain why your reasoning is inadequate. Let’s start with immigration as a concept. Why do people move? Well, people move for all sorts of reasons. People move for work, family, safety, education, nice whether, and the list goes on and on. The push and pull factors of migration are so vast and complex that there’s specialized fields in academia dedicated to studying them.
However, according to you, you seem to think that most people would only move for survival, and the reason you think this is because you assume that people would naturally prefer to stay where they are unless their environment became inhospitable… but this just an assumption based on another assumption. Sure people, migrate for survival or inhospitable environments, but these are a fraction of migrants. Only about 1.9% of immigrants in the US say safety is the reason they migrated, as opposed to 41.8% saying work and another 32.2% saying education (source). So the vast majority of migrants are economic migrants, so your assumption here is just wrong.
Now I understand, that your goal here was trying to disprove my assumption that billions would move here if we had no borders… but that wasn’t assumption, and it’s silly that you even tried to address that. I was clearly trying to use hyperbole to drive a point. Obviously it won’t literally be billions who would move here, but the rate of immigration would sky rocket as the demand to move to the US is very high, and without restrictions, there won’t be anything to control the flow of people into the country.
But enough snark, let’s be serious for a second. Your central argument here is that immigration is beneficial overall and therefore massive influxes of immigrants, legal or illegal, are a good thing that we should embrace. However, this ignores a few important facts. For example, illegal immigration at a large scale means that we’re absorbing way more people than our systems can handle. These illegal immigrants want houses, healthcare, education, and so on… however, our infrastructure is not being expanded to take in all these people. The end result is something like Canada or Australia where they took on way more immigrants than they could handle every year, and now they’re left with massive crises in things like housing and healthcare… and that’s just with legal immigration. We shouldn’t head down this path, especially since our systems are already struggling. There’s also a social factor to it. Countries like Sweden and France took in large influxes of immigrants both legal and illegal over the past couple of decades, and the end result is they are dealing with surges in crime, erosion in social cohesion, and attacks on the country’s founding principles. We’re seeing this ourselves with MAGA, and the thing that fuels MAGA is anti-immigration sentiment.
We have to be rational with our immigration policies. It is perfectly reasonable to oppose Trump and MAGA and their policies of cracking down on both legal and illegal immigration in the cruelest, most tyrannical ways possible. These policies are unreasonable, uneducated, immoral, and not in the best interests of this country. However, by the same token, the other extreme of wanting open borders where there no restrictions or consequences for immigration legal or illegal is just as unreasonable, uneducated, immoral, and not in the best interests of this country. We can’t be stupid as a country and delude ourselves into thinking that this false dichotomy is all we have. There’s such a thing as reasonable immigration reform where we change the immigration system to be more efficient, secure, principled, and humane while at the same time allows us to control the flow of people into this country so we can get the immigrants that this country needs at the rates we want. At the same time we can crack down illegal immigration and deport violent criminals, while also having a pathway for citizenship for illegal immigrants that have been here for a long time with a clean record. This is not something crazy, this was literally Obama’s platform in 2014 (source). This is the best course of action for this country.
The only point you’ve made that has any real practical weight is the issue of labor exploitation of undocumented immigrants, which I agree is terrible, but even then you seem to not care as much about the inequity of it as much as that it “devalues citizenship,” whatever the fuck that is. None of your other points are more than baseless handwringing. Your argument about the legal ramifications is circular and based on nothing more than post hoc mental gymnastics to reach the unsupported conclusion you started with. Your economic argument is hollow and literally concludes that it isn’t important because your circular legal argument is what is important. The moral argument assumes a zero sum game and, again, is not based on anything factual. Finally, your security threat argument is evidenced by effectively nothing–the things you raise are threats regardless of immigration and are most actively guarded against at other points throughout their respective threat trajectory.
I think before you flap about complaining about education quality, you should reflect on your own reasoning as presented. You have applied zero logical process and effectively thrown a heap of conclusory axioms in the air and sputtered with indignation. You have effectively argued nothing and only shown your own severe lack of self-reflection.
All of my points are both true and perfectly valid. You not liking them doesn’t invalidate them nor does it make them any less significant.
I’m against the exploitation because it’s exploitation, but the solution people like you come up with is not even remotely practical. Your solution to make illegal immigrants have the same benefits of citizens without them actually being citizens. f anybody, anywhere can come into this country without approval or documentation, and start working and getting benefits from the state… then it doesn’t take genius to see how this opens up other types of exploitation.
Not only that, but since there are no controls to regulate the flow of people, then what’s there from stopping the billions of people out there who have live in places with worse economic conditions from just packing up and moving here? The answer is nothing, and with any massive influx of people, you start heavily over burdening the nation’s already stressed systems and start losing social cohesiveness. In other words this is a textbook recipe that leads to collapse.
This type of thinking sounds just and moral on the surface level, but it’s in reality surface level is all it is. The idea falls apart the moment you start looking into the consequences, there’s a reason why unchecked borders haven’t worked well throughout history. The one and only real, practical solution is to overhaul the immigration system to make it more consistent, efficient, quick, and have it work to the benefit of the nation. Once you have that in place, then you make sure that it’s strictly enforced. The only people who are allowed to come here are the people we want to be here. This is common sense.
These are all meaningless buzzword salads. It’s fine if you disagree, but you actually have to put in the effort to explain both your disagreement and your position, otherwise your words hold no weight. Simply saying things like “hollow” and “mental gymnastics” means nothing, and the same goes for insisting that my points are ciruclar and not factual. You saying they are doesn’t make them so, if you aren’t capable of explaining yourself or aren’t able to critique my points on their own merits, then perhaps this conversation isn’t for you.
The only semi-argument you made here is that you think there’s no need to do anything about immigration, because the security threats that I brought up also happen outside of immigration and these issues are being countered elsewhere, but the problem with this argument is that it ignores the fact that the way our immigration is handled a big part of why these issues are much bigger threats than they should be. These threats need to be countered within and outside of immigration.
This honestly proves my point more than anything.
Look, you’re demanding I present counter arguments to statements that literally aren’t argued. Your entire position is effectively “this is bad because I say it is” so of course I’m not going to spend time and energy to counter that. Explain the actual mechanism of harm without resorting to “it’s clear from history” or “it’s a textbook recipe that leads to collapse.” I mean, if you are making your statements disingenuously as I suspect, that’s fine, but I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt that you’re in fact sincerely not understanding how you are in no way making logical arguments but just rattling off conclusions.
So, here are some actual facts. Immigration of all stripes has been pretty thoroughly shown to only improve economies in terms of productivity and diversity. Immigrants, no matter what, pay substantially into the system, and thus enable scaling of the resources only some of them end up benefiting from. Immigrants, again of all varieties, are significantly less likely to engage in crime than their native-born counterparts. These are all well established in the literature, so I will take them as axiom.
Given the above, your hypothesized concerns simply don’t track as population flows scale. Crime rates don’t increase (actually go down), economies don’t implode (actually improve), and social systems don’t collapse because they inherently scale in resource allocation proportionally to population (in a competently structured system–i.e., where this fails, it is not due to immigration but to extant deficiencies already in play).
Now, let’s address another deficiency in the “reasoning” you presented. People don’t just magically immigrate between countries, regardless of Immigration laws. Even if we had no borders and lived in a space age utopia, most people would nevertheless stay where they are unless that place was inhospitable to their survival–this isn’t to say there aren’t many economic migrants, but they are still inevitably a fraction of the population of their country of origin and so the naive assumption that “billions” would flow across an open border is just absurd and completely unreasonable.
Ultimately, understand that I am not expecting erasure of borders to happen anytime soon. However, yes, it is patently clear that the current “crackdown” on immigration is a solution looking for a problem so that it can justify totalitarian authoritarianism and immigration is not and has never really been a significant threat to the US, documented or no.
You keep putting words into my mouth and then dismissing my points. I’m not “demanding” anything from you, if you don’t want to discuss then just don’t. What I am asking for is a little good faith engagement from you. You keep saying that I made no arguments, but that’s not true. I made claims and I explained why I think they’re true. That’s what arguments are. You could disagree, ask for sources, ask for clarification, explain your case, and so on. That’s all a part of the discussion. However, all of my arguments are valid. Simply saying they’re not because I’m x, y, and z is not a rebuttal, especially when you don’t elaborate on any the claims you make, that just makes them accusations. Dismissing my arguments as being invalid because you said so doesn’t make them so.
To be fair to you, you did actually provide a little more substance here than in your previous comment… but you didn’t actually respond to what I said. If you actually scroll back up and read my points from earlier, you’ll see that I was specifically arguing about illegal immigration. You lumped in legal and illegal immigration, and then tried to argue why immigration is good… but I’m literally a legal immigrant myself, I don’t need you to trying to sell me on the pros and cons of immigration, that’s not the debate. I’m not against immigration, I’m against unchecked illegal immigration. You are arguing against the straw man you’ve made from my actual argument, and this is, ironically, disingenuous.
But I do find it fascinating how you directly contradicted yourself in your first two paragraphs. You literally wrote a whole paragraph berating me about how my entire position is supposedly me saying “this is bad because I say it is” and then demanded that I explain my positions without resorting to saying things like “it’s clear from history” or “it’s a textbook recipe that leads to collapse"… but then you follow this up by ending your second paragraph, the “facts” paragraph, with “these are all well established in the literature, so I will take them as axiom.” You started this whole debacle about how arguments like this aren’t worth your time only for you to end up using them in the same damn comment. The irony palpable.
There’s one more piece of irony to address, and that’s the “deficiency” in the reasoning that you presented. See, you said that my reasoning is deficient, never explain how or why, but unlike you, I can actually explain why your reasoning is inadequate. Let’s start with immigration as a concept. Why do people move? Well, people move for all sorts of reasons. People move for work, family, safety, education, nice whether, and the list goes on and on. The push and pull factors of migration are so vast and complex that there’s specialized fields in academia dedicated to studying them.
However, according to you, you seem to think that most people would only move for survival, and the reason you think this is because you assume that people would naturally prefer to stay where they are unless their environment became inhospitable… but this just an assumption based on another assumption. Sure people, migrate for survival or inhospitable environments, but these are a fraction of migrants. Only about 1.9% of immigrants in the US say safety is the reason they migrated, as opposed to 41.8% saying work and another 32.2% saying education (source). So the vast majority of migrants are economic migrants, so your assumption here is just wrong.
Now I understand, that your goal here was trying to disprove my assumption that billions would move here if we had no borders… but that wasn’t assumption, and it’s silly that you even tried to address that. I was clearly trying to use hyperbole to drive a point. Obviously it won’t literally be billions who would move here, but the rate of immigration would sky rocket as the demand to move to the US is very high, and without restrictions, there won’t be anything to control the flow of people into the country.
But enough snark, let’s be serious for a second. Your central argument here is that immigration is beneficial overall and therefore massive influxes of immigrants, legal or illegal, are a good thing that we should embrace. However, this ignores a few important facts. For example, illegal immigration at a large scale means that we’re absorbing way more people than our systems can handle. These illegal immigrants want houses, healthcare, education, and so on… however, our infrastructure is not being expanded to take in all these people. The end result is something like Canada or Australia where they took on way more immigrants than they could handle every year, and now they’re left with massive crises in things like housing and healthcare… and that’s just with legal immigration. We shouldn’t head down this path, especially since our systems are already struggling. There’s also a social factor to it. Countries like Sweden and France took in large influxes of immigrants both legal and illegal over the past couple of decades, and the end result is they are dealing with surges in crime, erosion in social cohesion, and attacks on the country’s founding principles. We’re seeing this ourselves with MAGA, and the thing that fuels MAGA is anti-immigration sentiment.
We have to be rational with our immigration policies. It is perfectly reasonable to oppose Trump and MAGA and their policies of cracking down on both legal and illegal immigration in the cruelest, most tyrannical ways possible. These policies are unreasonable, uneducated, immoral, and not in the best interests of this country. However, by the same token, the other extreme of wanting open borders where there no restrictions or consequences for immigration legal or illegal is just as unreasonable, uneducated, immoral, and not in the best interests of this country. We can’t be stupid as a country and delude ourselves into thinking that this false dichotomy is all we have. There’s such a thing as reasonable immigration reform where we change the immigration system to be more efficient, secure, principled, and humane while at the same time allows us to control the flow of people into this country so we can get the immigrants that this country needs at the rates we want. At the same time we can crack down illegal immigration and deport violent criminals, while also having a pathway for citizenship for illegal immigrants that have been here for a long time with a clean record. This is not something crazy, this was literally Obama’s platform in 2014 (source). This is the best course of action for this country.