[low_tech_love]

So basically you came to the same conclusion as everyone else who is against this (and who I assume you would consider to be your political opponents): that even though it sounds good and reasonable on paper (as a populist concept), in practice it is invariably used for arbitrary exercise of power.

Here is the thing: hard and complex problems require hard and complex solutions, but you chose to put in power the people who like easy solutions. I hope it’s never late to learn a lesson.

[JumpCrisscross]

> hard and complex problems require hard and complex solutions

There's actually a simple solution to illegal immigration: go after the employers. We don't because we want to have our cake and eat it too. (Same reason these raids aren't happening on farms in red states.)

[shadowgovt]

That one is also hard and complex in the sense that it will force the country to come to terms with how much of its economy is based on ignoring its own laws and an incoherent concept of fairness. In a democracy, getting people to accept pain (in this case, higher prices) to write a moral error that they generally experience only in the abstract is known hard; it's one of the reasons America clung to slavery so long, because in addition to unpaid labor propping up the corner of the Southern economy, the northern economy benefited from cheap raw materials.

[JumpCrisscross]

> That one is also hard and complex

It’s hard. Not complex. Simple and difficult.

[shadowgovt]

"Complex" because we'll discover things the under-protected labor are enabling that we have come to rely upon.

Infrastructure becoming unreliable makes complexity, and undocumented immigrant labor is American infrastructure. Has been for decades.

[rolandog]

Completely agree! Did we not learn from the pandemic? Countries run and rely on underpaid essential workers; they shouldn't underpay them, but capitalism pits workers across the globe into a race to the bottom for salary and safety.

[low_tech_love]

So, real story, I work in a university in Europe, and we’ve been told by the immigration explicitly that we need to increase at least 50% of rejections to applications from Pakistani students. Apparently they come with a student Visa to take a Master’s degree but after a month or two they get a job and disappear from the university. And this is not desirable.

The fun part is that they are allowed to work with their student Visa, and they pay the tuition fees normally, which is spicy.

So basically we have a huge gang problem right now, but instead of deporting gang criminals, we’re deporting honest Pakistani young people who are actually working legally for the country’s companies. But guess how many companies ever got in trouble for this?