[zeroer]

The only people Trump has promised to deport are those here illegally, so I'm assuming that the friends you mention are illegal immigrants, whose mere presence in the country is a crime. Is it so much to ask visitors to our country to follow our laws?

I've traveled to a lot of countries. Every country I visit, I read and follow the laws of the country, including visa and immigration rules. Many of these laws I disagree with it find morally repugnant. Forgive me if I don't cry any tears for your deported criminal friends.

[jakewins]

The friends I'm mentioning are a married homosexual couple; if the federal gov't stops recognizing their marriage, the non-citizen wife would lose grounds for residency.

I still want to address this though:

> Is it so much to ask visitors to our country to follow our laws?

I think this is a very strange thing to say. Obviously, if someone intentionally violates visas to stay here illegally, deportation is appropriate - the only main stream politicians who disagree with this are straw men invented by the Republican party.

What the immediate discussion is actually about is two scenarios:

One; you illegally enter the country with your young child. Your kid grows up in US preschool, elementary school, high school. She speaks English as her native language, hasn't been to Mexico since you left 25 years ago and legally works at Walmart under DACA.

Trump has said he wants to revoke DACA and deport the kid. I believe, like most on the left, that your kid should not be held responsible for you breaking the law, and should be given legal means to work and a path to attain citizenship.

Two; you illegally enter the country with your spouse. A year or so later you have a child born on US soil, that child gets a US birth certificate and becomes a US citizen.

As the law currently stands, you can now be deported, and your 2-year old would become a ward of the state, with the usual probabilities of success of those programs. There is a proposal to allow you to stay in the country to raise the kid, DAPA. Trump has said he will strike that down.

Eg: This is not about you breaking the law; it's about whether your children can be held accountable for it.

[alasdair_]

> As the law currently stands, you can now be deported, and your 2-year old would become a ward of the state, with the usual probabilities of success of those programs. There is a proposal to allow you to stay in the country to raise the kid, DAPA. Trump has said he will strike that down. >Eg: This is not about you breaking the law; it's about whether your children can be held accountable for it.

Out of interest, would you feel differently if the parents involved were convicted of a non-immigration crime and were sent to prison instead of being deported?

[jakewins]

To be clear: I'm not saying I support DAPA, I'm saying that and DACA are the two immediate scenarios that were on the table for the election.

As I noted in my comment, I do support DACA.

For exactly the reason you state above, I'm not sure how I feel about DAPA: The same moral problem (of removing a parent from a childs life) exists in any scenario where a parent commits a jail or deportation-eligible non-violent crime.

[kevinh]

Overstaying a visa is not a criminal offense. It is a civil offense.

[zeroer]

You may be right. I don't know the law that well.

Should there be a punishment for overstaying a visa? What should it be?

I think the answer may depend on the type of visa, the length of overstay, and perhaps some other factors, but in the majority of cases, I would expect the answer to be deportation, which would necessitate an arrest and holding. Whether that's called a criminal offense or civil offense is a distinction without a difference.