[apical_dendrite]

> Any sort of "pleasant" outcome would effectively require turning birthright citizenship into defacto citizenship for the parents as well, at least if they can stay illegally for long enough.

No, there are lots of immigration statuses between "illegal" and "citizen". DAPA, which was the Obama administration's policy, gave parents of US citizens a status where they could get temporary renewable work permits and exemption for deportation. This was not citizenship, or even a status that could allow someone to eventually become a citizen.

[pclmulqdq]

Most of those statuses are called "visas" and they have been around for a while. Obama's innovation was giving a weird form of status ("we know you broke the law and we aren't enforcing it") to people who broke the law when crossing the border. Most people with a non-illegal and non-citizen status are supposed to apply for that status before crossing the border.

[apical_dendrite]

Sure, the point is that the poster I was responding to said that the only way to avoid putting US citizen minor children in a position where they have to either leave the country, or stay in the country without their parents, is to effectively grant citizenship to the parents. My point is that that's a false choice, it would be possible to grant the parents a temporary, conditional status that's based on having minor US-citizen children. It's not an ideal solution, but it protects the constitutional rights of US-citizen minor children without granting citizenship to the parents.

[sashank_1509]

How is that any different from granting parents citizenship. In some sense you presume birthright citizenship doesn’t make sense. Let us say an immigrant illegally comes into the country and becomes a robber. He in fact, just mugs people on the street. Clearly he’s a net negative, someone you want to deport. Now he has a child. Now by virtue of him having a child, we can no longer deport him, because then we make the child who’s a citizen less parent less. Also assume in this case the mother is some criminal too, to drive the point home.

The simpler, logically consistent solution would be that the child’s citizenship is only granted if the parents are citizens. (Or at least if parents are not illegal immigrants). Then when you deport the parents, you can legally deport the child too. It still is not a pleasant situation, there is no ideal solution here, except he should have never been let in at all, but once he is, these seem the only choices

[apical_dendrite]

It's completely different. A conditional work visa is just that, conditional. If you commit a crime you can lose status and be deported. In fact, DAPA eligibility was dependent on not having a felony record. That is not the same thing as citizenship. There's no reason to believe that because you give a temporary work authorization to someone that you have to then make that person a citizen.

Citizenship by blood creates its own problems. I am eligible for Polish citizenship if I choose to pursue it based on where my ancestors lived. I have never been to Poland, don't speak the language, and don't really know that much about the culture or feel any loyalty or even much affinity to Poland. On the other hand, let's say that someone is born in Poland to immigrant parents. Culturally they are entirely Polish - they lived their whole life there, speak the language, were educated by the Polish school system and consider themselves entirely Polish - they've never lived anywhere else. Yet they would not have the same ability to become a citizen that I have. If I got Polish citizenship, I'd just take whatever benefits I could from it and contribute nothing to Poland. How is it logical that I could be a Polish citizen and this person couldn't be?

[sanderjd]

This gets at another portion of the answer to the "what's your alternative suggestion?" question: I'd suggest Congress pass laws, rather than presidents making stuff up, illegally. This is clearly not a partisan point! Every president in my voting lifetime - Bush, Obama, Trump, Biden - has made up immigration law while Congress sat on its thumbs.

[apical_dendrite]

I agree with you.

I think there has to be a reasonable solution that gives legal status to the guy who's been here for 20 years and is making a positive contribution to society, but doesn't allow someone to show up and exploit loopholes to stay forever.

I think a reasonable compromise would look something like this:

* Make it much easier for people to get temporary visas for the kinds of jobs where we need migrant workers.

* Provide a pathway to citizenship for people who have been in this country for a very long time and are contributing to society.

* Make it very difficult for people to come to the US without a visa - e.g. make people apply for asylum outside of the US. Stop issuing temporary protected status to huge blocks of migrants.

Unfortunately, political polarization has basically made it impossible for Congress to solve real problems.

[sanderjd]

Yep, the solution is pretty clear in broad strokes, as you described, but the bases of both parties advocate for radically opposed policy through executive action, which just makes the situation worse.

[roamerz]

There have been many laws passed by Congress addressing immigration. It is against law to cross the border without authorization. This particular case exists as a result of not enforcing those laws. Pretty simple.

[sanderjd]

Despite past congresses passing laws, the system is not good. A major contributor to the problem of people immigrating illegally is that our legal immigration system is a total mess. This is why there have been a number of efforts at reforms over the past few decades. But none of them have worked, leaving us in this situation where presidents from both parties do all this illegal stuff by executive action.

[jfengel]

It's not quite that Congress has sat on its thumbs. Individual Congressmen have been (figuratively) screaming at each other. Committees are at each other's throats trying to get some sort of legislation to the table. Nobody can stand the possibility of giving the other side what they want -- at the insistence of their constituents.

The net result, of course, is identical to if they had all stayed home.

[sanderjd]

Yeah I think you just described what sitting on their thumbs looks like, for a legislative body :)

[pclmulqdq]

Exactly. People forget, but the first selective enforcement edict (on illegal immigration) came from HW Bush.