[omegaworks]

For this reason it's critically important to push back when this administration claims to only care about illegality.

They are slow walking all immigrants, focusing the brunt of their enforcement activity on black and brown folks, up to and including turning people away from self-deportation processes if they present as white.

It is a coordinated effort to delay demographic shifts.

[kevin_thibedeau]

The US has no obligation to provide benefits and services to non-citizens. If the guest worker program wasn't being horribly abused it would be worthwhile. As it stands, H1-B needs a wholesale revision to serve its stated goals.

[omegaworks]

>The US has no obligation to provide benefits and services to non-citizens.

The conversation is not about about benefits and services to non-citizens, but about whether enforcement is being targeted at specific immigrant populations based on white supremacist ideologies. It is about the false, widely circulated talking-point that this administration simply seeks to push people toward legal pathways.

>If the guest worker program wasn't being horribly abused it would be worthwhile.

This is a claim that requires justification. Any tiered labor system that does not guarantee a level legal playing field for all workers is abusable.

[Mountain_Skies]

Causing demographic shifts isn't the stated purpose of the immigration system. No presidential candidate would ever run on replacing incumbent demographics with planetary demographics. Are you suggesting that demographic replacement should be the purpose of the US immigration system or the purpose of the immigration system of any country for that matter? To do so would invite an incredible backlash against all forms of immigration pretty much anywhere it was openly stated.

[munk-a]

This is flipping the parent poster on their head and then some. The immigration system is supposed to allow a fair and just way for new people to immigrate, _that's it_. There has been (among really stupid internet circles) this concept that demographic replacement is a thing we should all be running around waving our arms over. I believe simple pandering and greed (more than demographic replacement) is a motivation for the immigration law shifts we're seeing today but...

Wanting to avoid a demographic shift is an invalid reason to constraint immigration in my eyes, I find arguments like that to be heavily based in strongly bigoted opinions.

[patrickg_zill]

If you say "the State is electing itself a new people" then the demographic shift is more obviously anti-democratic, which it is. The people who voted are having their votes diluted...

[omegaworks]

>If you say "the State is electing itself a new people"

You're the only one saying that, though.

The state does not create people out of whole cloth.

You can only see immigration as anti-democratic when you see new immigrants as somehow inherently different than the inhabitants. When you discard any notion that they could be equal partners in building better lives here.

[patrickg_zill]

They are different!

They are from another country and bring with them their own views, traditions and culture... They don't get mind-wiped when they land on US soil.

[ralph84]

In fact the current immigration system in the US was explicitly sold to Americans at the time as one that would not cause a demographic shift.

[omegaworks]

Sold how, and at which time, specifically?

In 1882, when the first immigration law specifically called out Chinese people for exclusion?

Or today, when the internationally agreed upon framework for asylum is actively undermined by the current administration?

And what makes these sales just, fair, or even productive?

[ralph84]

The current immigration system in the US dates to 1965. There has been a massive demographic shift in the US since then. The politicians at the time said there wouldn't be.

https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=539139...