[maratd]

Nobody is going to dispute that the immigration laws in the US are draconian. They're a patchwork sown together by various special interests and make very little sense. However, in the past, they were rarely enforced. Only in instances where someone committed a felony or something of that nature. Over the last decade and especially during the Obama administration, ICE stepped up enforcement. If I had to guess, I'd say it's related to the recession? I honestly don't know why.

[Duff]

It's "get tough" politics. Unions donate billions to Democrats, and they are unhappy with immigration in many industries. (ie. Meat packing, whose union membership has declined dramatically as a result of companies being allowed to exploit undocumented labor.) On the other side, you have conservatives, who are always up in arms about the immigration "crisis". These folks are balanced by the business-focused republicans, who need immigrants to make money.

The end result? Instead of allowing legitimized, orderly immigration from Mexico and Central America, we pretend that that it isn't happening, and then spend billions on needless social services and draconian law enforcement.

Both sets of my grandparents were immigrants to the United States from Ireland. On my mother's side, my grandfather had a 7th grade education (common in rural Ireland) and my grandmother was pregnant when they immigrated here after WW2. All they needed to do was scrape together a few buck and fill out some forms, and they arrived in New York as legitimate resident aliens, able to get jobs and function fully in society.

Today, my grandparents would be accused of moving here to give birth to an "anchor baby" and would probably be here illegally, unless they won one of the elusive green card lottery slots.

[jbooth]

Plenty of blame for both sides here, I've heard a whole bunch of immigrant bashing at, well... every Republican event in the last 5 years. Way more than Obama typically does.

My read on it was Obama stepped up enforcement for political cover when he gets accused of things like that by the Republicans, which is still plenty of stupid and weak on his part. Especially since they'll never agree to actually do comprehensive immigration reform if it would be perceived as a victory for Obama.

[knowtheory]

Take this with a grain of salt, since this is conjecture, but don't underestimate the weight and inertia of gigantic bureaucracies.

ICE was set up during the later years of the Bush administration, and now they've hit their stride after ramping up. The Obama Administration could expend political capital to do something about the issue, but that's probably not a winning political stance.

[eis]

I am convinced the economic climate plays at least some part into it. How big of a part, I am not sure. But looking at the history of all kinds of countries, you can see that when there are issues like high unemployment rate, then the sentiment towards foreigners tends to not be the most welcomeing.

Also the worse the situation, the more radical the actions to turn it around will be - no matter if those actions actually help or make it worse.