[valleyer]

Many of the people being rounded up did in fact come here using legal methods: the asylum process, Temporary Protected Status (which is being arbitrarily revoked). And that's not counting people with even more established credentials, like work visas, student visas, green cards.

[timr]

I made it very clear that I don't support everything the current administration is doing. I still support the enforcement of our laws.

[holmesworcester]

One thing that has been helpful for me in understanding immigration is to think of this as a case where the law (an aggregation of what the public over the past several decades thinks it wants) is in conflict with what the public actually wants, as expressed by its interpersonal and economic decisions.

Americans are overall extremely happy to transact with, socialize with, be neighbors with, have children with, and educate the children of undocumented immigrants. This strong expression of what we really want (in our actual decisions) creates a powerful incentive pulling people here. Put differently, if a majority of Americans hated undocumented immigrants, impeded them at every turn, and boycotted their labor and the services of businesses that hired them, the number of people who come here would be very different.

In an analogy to tech policy, when you ask the average voter "should people have access to private communication tools that are private even against legitimate warrants under the rule of law, even in cases of serious crimes or terrorism" everyone says "no!" But if you ask them, would you like an app where your own messages are private, many people choose that app, and many engineers and major publicly traded companies choose to build such apps.

We explicitly run a society that uses multiple dueling measures of what people want, the main ones being the will of voters and peoples' choices in the marketplace. Immigration is one place where those two measures collide, and here we are.

As a result, I think it's insufficient to simply point to the law. Maybe the laws are wrong. If we have a strong signal that this is true (in this case the economic and social reality of broad acceptance and integration of undocumented immigrants) we should be especially cautious to be reasonable in how we enforce the laws. This is an important principle in freedom-based societies.

[timr]

I actually agree with most of what you said, up until the last paragraph. Specifically this part:

> If we have a strong signal that this is true (in this case the economic and social reality of broad acceptance and integration of undocumented immigrants) we should be especially cautious to be reasonable in how we enforce the laws.

Maybe the laws are wrong -- and I disagree with many! -- but street protests and loud people on social media are not sufficient proof that we should abandon enforcement. Consider, for example, that you might be surrounded by a bubble of opinion that matches your own, while ignoring the opinion of a larger group of people who disagree with you. Or (similar to my own case), there are a large number of people who disagree who simply keep quiet, most of the time, because they don't want to be insulted, or worse.

If you don't like the laws, you can try to elect people who will change them, influence their behavior via legal speech, etc. But if your favored people don't get elected, or they otherwise ignore you, that's tough beans. We live in a republic.

[JoshTriplett]

The comment you originally responded to was calling out cheerful cruelty, and in response, you gave a lukewarm "I don't support all of the methods the current administration is using" in the midst of a comment otherwise defending the current administration. Consider the meaning of the phrase "praising with faint damns". Also consider that much of what the current administration is doing has nothing to do with laws, and has repeatedly targeted people who have broken no law and in fact did everything entirely legally.

[timr]

I quoted the part of the comment I was responding to.

[JoshTriplett]

You quoted the entirety of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44553357 apart from the "Yea" and the period at the end, and then provided a spirited defense on behalf of the current administration, suggesting that everything's largely fine if only people would just stop breaking the law, and complaining about people who call the current administration irredeemable. You then acted surprised and annoyed that your "respectful and polite" comment was downvoted and tried to shame people for flagging it. Won't someone think of the poor beleaguered right-wing politicians who are just enforcing the law, and get called cruel and irredeemable for it?

Respectfully and politely: you are completely failing to appreciate or acknowledge the situation, and doing so helps enable the abuses that are taking place. To give a parallel example, you'd get a comparable response if you said "police only kill criminals, with a few high-profile cause celebrè exceptions; people should just stop breaking the law".