[next_xibalba]

The fact that the U.S. immigration system is so obviously broken is the topic on which I am most vulnerable to conspiracy theories. It just makes no sense. From the Southern border to H1-B, it looks designed to anger and disappoint every single stakeholder (excepting the businesses who employ illegal immigrants for poor wages).

[nostromo]

Because the major donors for both parties support illegal immigration.

Republican donors enjoy the labor of illegal immigration which is much cheaper than domestic labor. Any crack down on unauthorized workers in agriculture or hospitality, for example, would disrupt lots of big donors.

Democratic donors have openly stated that demographic changes would help them win more elections. These are the "demographics are destiny" folks that noted that increasing hispanic populations are good for them in elections. (If you're not winning enough votes, change the voters.) There was a lot of truth here -- just look at California, New Mexico, and Arizona elections from the 80s and 90s vs today. Recent polling suggests this may be changing.

So you end up in a strange situation where policies supported by the vast majority of Americans from all political stripes is (mostly) ignored by the parties.

[olliej]

> Democratic donors have openly stated that demographic changes would help them win more elections.

How does "illegal immigration" impact this? You know undocumented workers cannot vote, right? Hell, you know documented, legal, residents also cannot vote? The only people who get to vote in US elections are US citizens.

Demographics shifts obviously help the modern DNC, for the same reason it helped the GOP a century ago: Conservatism is definitionally rooted in having minimal demographic variance (be it race, gender, religion, or whatever), so if you have two parties one of which says "only this group matters" and the other says "more than that one group matters", then increasing the demographic variation will always favor the latter, because for anyone not in the ideal conservative demographic will see that party as actively targeting them.

It's also important to be careful when saying "look at elections from the past", because a lot of laws were passed in many countries in the late 20th century to address a variety of biased laws that impacted the voting power of targeted blocks. In the US there was redlining which prevented specific demographics from voting in specific areas of the country, coupled with extensive gerrymandering this allows large scale disenfranchisement that is still being undone by the courts today, even though redlining itself became "illegal" in the 80s. There are a wide array of actions that occurred in the states you're talking about through the decades you referenced and onwards to now, that both made it possible for demographics to shift where previously people were functionally banned, and to reduce the disenfranchisement of demographics that were already present. None of that resulted in "illegal immigrants" impacting elections though, because again, non-citizens cannot vote in US elections (even though they pay taxes in the country that produced "no taxation without representation").

As an additional note, because of US government representation being determined by total population, and not "legal voters" the abuse of biased law enforcement is hits multiple times: first off victims of that bias lose representation, but then regions that get prisons get increased voting power. If you're in a region with 1000 people, but have a prison that has 5000 prisoners, then you get the congressional representation that comes from 6000 people, but only 1000 of them get to vote. Again, prisoners should be able to vote. Felons should be able to vote. Ex-cons should be allowed to vote. If there are enough of those groups to impact election outcomes, then it's a reasonable assumption that law enforcement is being used as a tool to restrict voting rights (Something that multiple people from the Nixon and Reagan administrations have explicitly stated was the reason for how the "war on drugs" was set up).

[nostromo]

While migrants can’t vote in national elections, they are counted in the census (California has an additional four or five seats in congress just from illegal immigration, for example).

Secondly, the children of illegal immigrants are citizens and can vote. It takes decades for this strategy to pan out obviously. It can be sped up by family unification policies once an immigrant has a child citizen.

[olliej]

> While migrants can’t vote in national elections, they are counted in the census

Much like prisoners and legal non-citizen residents.

> Secondly, the children of illegal immigrants are citizens and can vote.

People born in the US - children of citizens, of legal residents, and of undocumented are all citizens because that's the only how the colonies justified their right to govern the territory they colonized. If you remove birthright citizenship the overwhelming majority of people in the US would not have any right to citizenship, and in fact most "illegal immigrants" would have a much stronger claim to governance and/or citizenship than pretty much every other group.

The fact that some people now find it inconvenient that the rules that were helpful to them now help a different group is irrelevant to that.

Moreover arguing that illegal immigrants are human (let's be clear here, the DNC is anti-immigrants as well, Obama deported more people than bush or trump), is not the same as being "pro-illegal immigrant".

You could make the same argument that conservative states weakening penalties for assault, removing women's bodily autonomy, fighting against actual sex ed, defunding education, etc are similarly a grand plan to increase the representation for conservative states.

[olliej]

An employee with an H1-B is definitionally not an illegal immigrant. H1-Bs are definitionally documented legal workers, the companies using undocumented workers are not companies interested in getting visas.

The solution to the "apparent" scourge of undocumented workers is to make it so that the people running companies the use that undocumented labor are the ones who go to jail, and in the event ICE finds undocumented labor the minimum fine for the company should be a significantly greater than one multiple of the amount the company would have had to pay a documented worker, in addition to ensuring the undocumented workers are fully compensated at the amount a documented worker would have been paid. Threatening to report them to immigration, underpaying, and wage theft are all clear evidence that the company knows they were employing people who were not allowed to work.

That's all that would be needed. Instead of ever more draconian penalties for the undocumented workers - many of whom have lived in the US for essentially their entire lives at this point, and simply don't have a choice - the penalties that should be being increased are the ones that apply to the employers. It's great because it will stop all that evil undocumented labor people claim to hate, because now these employers have to pay the undocumented labor if anything more than documented labor, because undocumented labor can report unsafe or illegal working conditions, come out fully compensated and in addition to those costs the employer has to pay even more in fines, while the managers and executives who knowingly employed said laborers go to jail.

That said as we've seen in Florida, plenty of businesses in America have set themselves up to be unable to operate without violating the law, so when Florida started passing its various "lets punish the workers, but not those that employ them" laws a whole bunch of businesses couldn't handle the idea of capitalism and complained about how they couldn't get any workers.

[bombcar]

It’s not even really a conspiracy. The status quo is good for many and so it continues because people don’t care enough (or are persuaded to care in ways that others want them to).

[kmeisthax]

The system as it currently stands was a quick hack on the prior, explicitly racist immigration system we had before the Civil Rights Act. To be clear, there was no Congressional will for racially equitable immigration at the time. They wanted to keep the immigration system white without having to have the words "white race" in the text of the bill. So instead they changed the system to heavily favor family sponsorship, under the idea that white people would just keep sponsoring other white people and that would keep the system white.

Now, it'll probably be a shock to you, but these family sponsorship visas actually make America's immigrant pool way less white. It may not feel like it if you're trying to get an immigrant visa on an employment basis, but America is actually one of the easiest countries to immigrate to if you have relatives here. Other developed countries are far more selective and bureaucratic.

The trick is to recognize that nobody agrees on what part of the system is actually broken. The DNC said the quiet part out loud[0], but the GOP has been thinking for decades that immigration was just a way to dilute Republican voters. A good chunk of the GOP thinks the problem is that it's too easy to immigrate and we need to become like Japan[1]. Another chunk doesn't care about immigrants, but they want to end illegal immigration by any means necessary. The DNC wants, at a minimum, immigration amnesty with a path to citizenship[3]. And then you have business interests that maximally exploit immigrants, legal or otherwise. None of those positions are reconcilable in a way that will produce an immigration bill that will pass the House, Senate, and President Biden.

[0] "Demographics is destiny", which was DNC-speak for "Hillary Clinton can't possibly lose because we have enough Mexicans in California".

[1] As a massive weeaboo[2] I do not understand why anyone would want to adopt Japanese immigration standards.

[2] "Japanophile", but a different, derogatory term I won't use; wordfiltered by 4chan to a word they stole from https://pbfcomics.com/comics/weeaboo/

[3] Keep in mind that there are two classes of illegal immigration:

- People who just moved in without the proper visa, have been here for decades, have no intention of going back, and are already integrated with their local communities. Deporting them would be needlessly cruel.

- Agricultural companies who are importing massive amounts of day laborers from Mexico to avoid having to pay minimum wage

You can argue that the former should have amnesty while still wanting to have a functional minimum wage law by stopping the latter.