[ben_w]

You think the threat of deportation is in any sense equivalent to solitary confinement or extra years in a prison sentence?

To someone who immigrated for work, and decides that the specific and only work they're able to do thanks to how they arrived isn't worth it due to the pay and conditions, the threat of deportation is a very weak threat — more than literally nothing, but very very weak.

[wahnfrieden]

Many workers face death if sent back to their cartel-run homes. It’s convenient leverage for exploitative business

I'm simply responding to "Immigrants, legal or illegal, can walk out of jobs that are bad enough.", not trying to make it a contest over degrees of slavery / indentured servitude

[ben_w]

Sounds it.

However "many" is vague to the point of being useless. A hundred is many. And definitionally, there aren't good direct stats for how many illegal migrants there are, nor how they break down by how they got where they are now, only indirect proxies.

What you can do is work backwards from the pay and conditions of those workers to make an educated guess about how much their bosses feel they need to keep their workers sweet. If it's more than the prisons pay, then no matter what else, the workers do in fact have more options than literal prisoners.

Also, if they really do face death, theoretically there's this thing called "asylum" — though I assume political fights over that are at least as dumb in the US as in the UK.

[wolverine876]

Do you have personal experience or expertise about undocumented immigrants?

[ben_w]

> personal experience

I believe so, but was hard to ask as they (plural) were begging on the street, some with hand-made signs, and none spoke good English or German.

Now, my ex, she definitely had personal experience, she drove to the Calais Jungle to distribute donated supplies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calais_Jungle

[wolverine876]

I admire your ex (if that's ok to say! :) ).

> was hard to ask as they (plural) were begging on the street, some with hand-made signs, and none spoke good English or German.

I'm also careful to presume someone is homeless, undocumented, etc. Also, not my business (that is, it is my responsibility to help but their personal lives aren't my business).

[ben_w]

> I admire your ex (if that's ok to say! :) ).

She and I are still friends; she wanted to focus on activism rather than romance.

[wahnfrieden]

The asylum laws are worsening now under Biden:

President Joe Biden’s new border plan focused on deterrence will almost certainly lead to a rise in the already record number of migrants dying at the United States southern border, enrich criminal cartels, and return refugees to likely harm, Human Rights Watch said today.

Biden’s “asylum ban,” announced in a rule in the Federal Register on May 10, 2023 is set to replace the abusive Title 42 summary border expulsion policy originally created by the administration of President Donald Trump under the false premise of protecting public health.

“Despite having more than two years to plan for the end of Title 42 and campaigning on promises to create a humane border, Biden has recycled one Trump policy after another, leading to countless abuses of mostly Black and Brown migrants,” said Ari Sawyer, US border researcher at Human Rights Watch. “His latest plan replaces Title 42 with a policy that continues to rely on failed and deadly deterrence and would bar people from applying for asylum.”

Biden’s new plan combines elements from Trump policies, including Title 42; a hyper-expedited deportation program that after due process abuses was scrapped when the expulsion policy took effect; and the asylum “third country transit ban,” found unlawful by two federal courts under the Trump administration.

The revamped asylum ban will block asylum seekers at the border from entering the United States for five years unless they obtain an appointment through the cellphone application “CBP One.” Appointments are extremely limited and usually book up within minutes, meaning that asylum seekers wait for months, trying each day to secure a spot. The result is electronic “metering” – forcing asylum seekers to wait in dangerous conditions at the border for an indeterminate amount of time.

Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has agreed to accept non-Mexican asylum seekers who are rapidly removed by the United States. Since the implementation of the ‘Remain in Mexico’ policy in 2019 and Title 42 in 2020, asylum seekers sent to Mexico have experienced kidnapping, rape, extortion, and other abuses by organized crime and Mexican officials.

By continuing these rapid removals, albeit with a new legal justification, Biden and López Obrador are knowingly continuing to put asylum seekers at risk, Human Rights Watch said. When the United States sends migrants to Mexico, criminal cartels are enriched by kidnapping them and then extorting money from their US-based family members to secure their release.