"Related: Mexico has launched a $50 million aid program to provide legal help to migrants who fear deportation from the U.S."

This is the sort of thing that really pisses native born citizens and legal immigrants off.

I'm a realist. I dont expect that illegal residents in the US will ever be completely eliminated, and I don't want to live in a police state which would be necessary for comprehensive enforecent.

That said, there is a lot of room in the middle to put the hammer down and force those illegals who don't want to be deported to live under the radar.

If you are an illegal who gives a press conference or becomes a political agitator, opening your mouth about your illegal status, you should be deported. If you have collected government benefits illegally as a non citizen, you should be deported. If you have stolen someone else's id or entered into a sham marriage to stay in the US, or work in the US, you should be deported. If you have voted illegally in a US election at any time or in any state you should be deported ( and this is only one of the really good reasons for iron clad votor id laws).
If you have a felony conviction you should be deported.

When people realize that we are fucking serious about enforcing immigration laws, it will drive the remaining illegals underground where they are at least scared of breaking US law with impunity. It will reduce the problem to manageable levels.
So far the last thirty years has been an ever escalating problem where a bunch of foreign national special snowflakes have convinced themselves that they are entitled to a life in the US, just because. This sort of thinking needs to be stomped on good and hard.

...Aparicio, 27, said officials told her family that her mother was an enforcement priority.

Enforcement Priority sounds pretty much like a code word for Easy target that can't fight back.

Sometimes I wonder if these easy targets have been specially selected for the purpose of parading them around all over the media and to (obviously) paint the Trump administration as heartless monsters.

Of course, with these kind of things there's no such thing as coincidence, there's only the inevitable.

So far the last thirty years has been an ever escalating problem where a bunch of foreign national special snowflakes have convinced themselves that they are entitled to a life in the US, just because. This sort of thinking needs to be stomped on good and hard.

Um.. People don't risk mugging, rape, being mutilated for falling from trains, and/or death (in the case of Cubans, that also includes drowning) just because.

There's many reasons (extreme poverty to the point of being destitute; running away from organised crime, and all tied up with a government so corrupt that it would make a Chinese politician blush) to risk it all and leave behind a family, only to come back as a bigger burden in a wheelchair, or a casket; if there's ever a body left, some just don't have the luxury of closure.

So I don't think these risks are taken to go on an adventure to catch all the Pokémon.

And then there's all the American retirees (and others) who bring their own market-warping presence into Mexico.

I just don't understand why that country is so shitty. Though disinclined to conspiratorial thinking, this is a context where I'm willing to listen.

"Um.. People don't risk mugging, rape, being mutilated for falling from trains, and/or death (in the case of Cubans, that also includes drowning) just because."

Your reading comprehension is poor. I was specifically referring to the ones who are here already and wailing in front of the TV cameras how unfair it is to be deported (after they have been set up for a confrontation with the INS in order to further their lawyer's political agenda)

There are a lot of safe places in the world from political opression. The US just happens to be the golden ring. Refugees *may* have a colorable claim not to live in a combat zone or a kleptocracy, but that doesnt translate into a right to be specifically in the U.S, and flouting our laws in the process.

And Crid, the short answer to the what is wrong with Mexico is no rule of law.

I've always thought American retireees living in Mexico like it is a cheap charming extention of the US, are not only foolish, but part of the problem.

Mexico makes economic conditions in their country so bad that their citizens want to leave and risk death to come here. Then Mexico gets pissed at us for taking measures to send them back or keeping them out. Go figure !

"They consider my mom as a criminal for " committing multiple criminal acts. Gee, how surprising.

Like Sixclaws I suspect INS is specifically targeting photogenic groups just to cause Trump trouble.

The vast majority of "those breaking the law" are simply in a bad situation created by poor decision making by themselves or intimate others.

Oh, those had it coming. Acting up in front of an audience turns them into a glowing beacon and ICE officials have no choice but to act immediately.

And from what deported and those still living there say, the officers do know who and where they live. So the game is to lay low and do hide and seek.

The Mesoamerican region is a mess. Part of it is institutionalized corruption, another part of it is the Cold War legacy that the CIA left, and a significant part of it has to do with drug lords and drug traffic heading towards the USA.

Except Costa Rica, which has its own headaches of Nicaraguans trying to illegaly cross the border, it also has a modest but noticeable tech sector, and an industry built around catering to retired Americans.

And Belize too, if you don't mind looking the other way when these massive speedboats ride the waves because someone in Florida needs that corn starch ASAP.

I just don't understand why that country is so shitty. Though disinclined to conspiratorial thinking, this is a context where I'm willing to listen. ~ Crid at March 5, 2017 2:56 AM

With all its resources, I don't either. The history of Mexico offers some clues: a succession of dictators and self-proclaimed caudillos, colonizers interested only in robbing the country of its resources (Spain) or taking advantage of its proximity to the US (France), flirtations with Marxism and state ownership of resources, long periods of one-party rule, lack of property laws, a history of entrenched outlaw elements (Pancho Villa, drug lords, gangs), etc. Comanche depredations made Northern Mexico (including what is now Texas) nearly uninhabitable until the US Army defeated them in 1875. A succession of US interventions into Mexico didn't help either.

The history of Mexico makes you appreciate our own Founding Fathers all the more, despite their official tolerance of slavery. They didn't put into place a kleptocracy bent on plundering the country, but a republic governed [mostly] by the people. They insisted on an educated population, an armed population, a free population.

I can give some insight. The locals blame how messed-up things are because these parts of the world were not conquered by the British.

Anywhere where the British Empire landed is doing fine.

But anything the Spaniards, the French, the Portuguese, and the Dutch touched? One hot mess after another.

I could be wrong though, there seem to be tiny island paradises under French or Dutch rule that seem to be fine.

Anywhere where the British Empire landed is doing fine. ~ Sixclaws at March 5, 2017 7:36 AM

Egypt, Afghanistan, Libya, India, Pakistan, Iraq, Zimbabwe, and Bangladesh might disagree with you on that.

But Canada, Singapore, Australia, Botswana, Hong Kong, South Africa, and Bermuda might go along with you on it.

But anything the Spaniards, the French, the Portuguese, and the Dutch touched? One hot mess after another. ~ Sixclaws at March 5, 2017 7:36 AM

After the Revolution, the French colonizers saw themselves as liberators, bringing Liberte, egalite, fraternite to the worlds benighted places, often without regard to the existing civilization there.

Pick up a copy of Napoleon in Egypt for an interesting read about the arrogance of the French in "liberating" the Egyptians.

Isab writes: "When people realize that we are fucking serious about enforcing immigration laws...It will reduce the problem to manageable levels. So far the last thirty years has been an ever escalating problem...This sort of thinking needs to be stomped on good and hard."

Yes, and yes. What many people forget is that the current, massive problems stems directly from the amnesty of 1986. The political arguments of the day are pretty similar to what we are hearing now.

The decision to grant amnesty to the (iirc) 2-3 million illegal immigrants at the times was based on humanitarian arguments. The opponents of the amnesty warned at the time: If you grant amnesty, it will open the gates for a flood of illegals. First, because we obviously have no intention of enforcing our laws. Second, because one amnesty may well lead to another.

And look: here we are, with literally an order of magnitude more illegals than we had 30 years ago.

It's going to hurt a lot more to enforce the law now, but it has absolutely got to be done.

Saw a similar story the other day - He was a great guy, lived here 25 years, etc etc etc.

I couldn't figure out why the media wrote yet another sob story. In 25 years he could have, in any given week, applied for a green card or naturalization.

Even taking two weeks off each year for holidays and whatnot, that's 1,250 weeks of legalization opportunity.

Not sure how that makes America the bad guy.

It's going to hurt a lot more to enforce the law now, but it has absolutely got to be done.

a_random_guy at March 5, 2017 8:35 AM

So true. I remember those days well, when I had to go apply for a new social secuity card to *prove* to the university I graduated from 8 years previously that I was a legal resident entitiled to in state tuition.

The additional paper work requirements just created a booming business in fake documents, and made the problems worse.
It turned a lot of post 86 illegals not eligible for the amnesty who were under the radar working in restaurants, construction work and farming into real criminals when they either had to leave or commit identity theft in order to continue working at legitimate jobs in the US.

People who favor just letting illegals alone don't consider the end game. Probably 1 billion people world wide live in countries with big problems, from dictators, to civil war to lawlessness to terrible economies. Should we let all 1 billion in to the US because they have a sob story? Might that not cause problems?
Further, if you have people willing to break the law to get here, and further break the law to get fake ID etc, might they not also break other laws?

Since when did the crazy hodge podge of laws about immigration become moral Holy Writ?

If letting people into the country overwhelms the welfare state, maybe it's time to start shutting down the welfare state, which is a good idea anyway.

Situations like this one are an inevitable result of lax enforcement and encouraging 'undocumented' immigrants to believe that they have a 'right' to stay in the US illegally.

There are literally millions of people in states like CA who have lived for decades without legitimizing their immigration status ( I live in CA ). There hasn't been any meaningful enforcement of immigration laws here since the early 80's.

Instead the state has chosen to extend benefits like in-state tuition, drivers licenses, childcare, healthcare etc.. It's not surprising, and indeed perfectly rational, for people here illegally to believe they should stay and exploit these benefits.

Now that the laws are being enforced, they're facing the consequences and are totally unprepared to address them. This isn't the fault of Trump or 'racism', it's the fault of the immigrant along with the politicians and activists who created this situation.

My solution, assuming we want a certain number of workers:

Impose severe fines on people who knowingly hire illegal immigrants. People already hiring them will be grandfathered in if the following rules are obeyed:

Illegal immigrants have x months to get their paperwork in to file for work visas. They must provide a letter from the employer to prove they are working.

They can work while they are waiting to hear back.

If their application is denied, they must leave within a week (give them time to pack and put their affairs in order). A letter is sent to the employer. Employeres continuing to hire them face severe fines. Immigrants outstaying their permission must check out at the airport. I don't know what the consequences should be if they do not.

Meanwhile, work visas should be easier to obtain.

Mineral resources are pretty insignificant when developing an economy Conan. Human capital tends to overshadow any geographic benefits by a large margin. Private property and rule of law makes most places first class after a while. Not having those makes you third world pretty quickly too.

I agree with Isab, mostly.

I would be willing to cut illegals some slack, however. Not every government is amenable to just allowing their citizenry to flee to the U.S.

For those, I would say their first order of business once arriving in the U.S. is make themselves legal.

There's a problem when people are so complacent in their illegal status that they have no reservations about remaining illegals for years on end. And when they're so assured that they will be allowed to remain in the U.S., that they're willing to give press conferences and rub our collective nose in their illegal status, the U.S. has simply become too lax.

This is be stomped, as Isab put it, so thoroughly that anyone who enters the U.S. illegally wouldn't dare let the sun set until they were on a path to citizenship.

the short answer to the what is wrong with Mexico is no rule of law

It's not just that, it's the lack of private property rights. John Locke was the philosopher who saw most clearly the nexus between property ownership and citizenship, the link from freedom to property and back. That idea was, in that sense, British in origin. In latin America from the get-go, large estates were concentrated in the hands of a few lucky conquistadors and their chums. It was a highly unequal distribution of property. New settlers didn’t get anything, nor did the indigenous peoples.

As others have said - this person had 25 years to get things legal and didn't.

And there is this:

"They consider my mom as a criminal for lying on paperwork to get welfare."

Hey! offspring of someone who broke the law - that isn't just "lying," it is called fraud!

That should carry a prison sentence. Break one law and think you can continue to break more - we do NOT need more of that mentality here.

I'd prefer enforced deportation with the "penalty" of NEVER being able to return - Never!

"It's not just that, it's the lack of private property rights. John Locke was the philosopher who saw most clearly the nexus between property ownership and citizenship, "

The rule of law is a necessary prerequisite to all property rights. Without it, you have an arbitrary system that is run for the benefit of the people in charge, and their friends.

When the government has the right to deprive you of your property arbitraily through outright confiscation, or ruinous taxes, there can be no reliable wealth creation, because you can't plan for the future.

Mineral resources are pretty insignificant when developing an economy Conan. Human capital tends to overshadow any geographic benefits by a large margin. Private property and rule of law makes most places first class after a while. Not having those makes you third world pretty quickly too. ~ Ben at March 5, 2017 11:31 AM

Read my whole post, Ben. It's not just about mineral resources.

Mineral resources enable a country to exploit them and give the economy a jump start. Part of what gave the US such a head start on much of the world was it mineral and other natural resources.

Human capital is an economic building block when it can be brought to bear. And in a non-global economy where raw materials, knowledge, and skills are not native and have to be imported, that can be difficult.

Mexico has fairly strong human capital. Its labor force is, while not as technologically advanced as Europe's or America's, fairly strong and experienced. Mexican engineers are starting to make significant contributions to automotive engineering as the world's automobile industry seeks locations that combine low labor and regulatory costs with reasonably experienced and sophisticated workforces.

Michael Porter made a study of what makes countries economically successful, The Competitive Advantage of Nations, and determined that natural resources are a key building block to early economic development. BTW, he also highlighted countries with a scarcity of natural resources that nonetheless eventually became economically vibrant, e.g., Japan, and explored reasons for that, including human capital.

Given Mexico's poor governance over the years, when the prime time for taking advantage of the country's abundance of resources was at hand, Mexico was trapped in an endless cycle of violence, corruption, and stagnation.

Building a modern economy today, without the groundwork laid by the Industrial Revolution is difficult. Mexico is struggling to gain ground on the 100+ years of economic development it lost.

I think what we're all ignoring here is how so many of these illegals want to be Americans so bad they'll flee to Canada instead of applying for citizenship in the USA.

"The border officer's union in Canada wants to beef up security along the United States border after 382 people made asylum claims at a single entry point in January and a further 200 entered illegally in the last week."

\http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4284086/Canada-border-control-union-suggests-increased-patrols.html#ixzz4aUzhvcJT

Let's try that again but with a link ...

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4284086/Canada-border-control-union-suggests-increased-patrols.html

I did read your full post Conan. And you are even more wrong now than you were earlier. America did not thrive due to natural resources. Hong Kong certainly didn't thrive due to natural resources. As you mention Japan didn't become an economic power house due to natural resources. And the Congo is failing in spite of it's abundant resources. Yes, there must be exploitable resources somewhere. But it takes incredibly few of them for a nation to thrive. The fact that Mexico has great human capital is irrelevant if that capital is not applied efficiently. And high tech workers are not a good example of abundant human capital.

The reality is you don't even need particularly bright citizens to thrive. You need rule of law and property rights that derive from that rule of law. You also need a leadership that doesn't get too involved in it's citizen's lives. Incentives matter. The output from a human is highly variable based on those incentives. Pepe picking peppers out in a field will pick a completely different number of peppers if you pay him per hour, per pepper, or a flat wage. The same goes for Earnie the Engineer.

Look at WW2 era US and Russia. The US didn't have more resources. Nor did it have a better educated populace. Our technology wasn't more advanced. After all they made it into space well before we did. Our leadership certainly wasn't smarter or more noble. And yet the US had supermarkets full of food while Russians scrounged for stale bread. The growth of the US economy consistently outperformed the USSR and continues to do so.

You brought up the 100+ years of the industrial revolution. But that hasn't held back China which started even later than Mexico down that road. When did China start to grow? When it's government got off of the backs of it's citizens. You don't have to develop all that technology yourself. Send some students to American universities. You will end up 5 years behind and can forget about the other 95 years of development. Not a bad deal at the cost of a couple of university degrees.

As long as you have a corrupt government stealing from it's people they will never advance. Even if your government isn't corrupt if it tries too hard to help it's citizens (like many European nations) the citizens will never advance. All of the coal, computer chips, and PHDs in the world won't make a difference without fixing those two.

Isab is right about the rule of law problem in Mexico. Sure, it's growing, but it's still a corruptocracy filled with violence and uncertainty. It's hard to get an economic foothold in a place like that -- unless you have connections to those in power.

Federal law says all illegal aliens must be deported.

Playing Devils Advocate but I wonder if "Enforcement Priority" could also be a euphemism for please get rid of my Mother-in-Law. Overseas for 7 years and then going to Afghanistan, sometimes hints to problems in the home.

Didn't anyone mention her Mother's status when she went through getting her citizenship (I'm assuming she has it).

After all they made it into space well before we did.

We could have beat them if we were as unconcerned about astronaut saftey as they were

Ben, we're talking about two different stages in economic development.

Property rights were one of the things I cited as important to the development of a modern economy.

However, in the case of Mexico and its resources, I'm speaking of its initial exploitation by the Spanish. The Spanish plundered Mexico, not allowing it to exploit its own resources and develop knowledge and form trade relationships with the rest of the world. Later developments in Mexico, including the denial of property rights, further hindered its ability to exploit is resources and develop the beginnings of a stable economy, one where property rights would have furthered that development.

Ironically, Spain's own later economic development would be hindered by a Church-dominated education system that gave it an ignorant workforce. While European universities were teaching the Enlightenment's new scientific discoveries, Spanish universities were still arguing over how many angels could dance on the head of a pin.

Some natural resources are necessary in the beginning. Why? Because you can have all the property rights you want but if no one has any iron ore to turn into steel, or knows how to. You're gonna get obliterated by the guy who does.

Early development follows resources and the ability of people to exploit them. Later development requires investment, which requires property rights.

Development of a modern economy today requires a reasonably advanced workforce. The world no longer needs buggy whips, Model Ts, and CRT televisions. Those countries that didn't go through the industrial revolution are playing catch up, and it's a hard slog to catch up when you're going from mass production using unskilled labor to mass production with semi-skilled labor - especially when your population is too poor or unsophisticated to understand the products they're making.

Mao tried a brutal top-down approach forcing peasants to produce modern appliances they'd never seen before and couldn't afford. The Chinese government getting "off of the backs of it's citizens" was necessary for development beyond a certain point, but the backs they got off of were not the factory workers, but the intelligentsia making investments in production.

Lenin similarly liberalized property rights in the USSR when its economy started grinding to halt. This met with good results, but Stalin put a brutal and bloody stop to that, suppressing the kulaks and imposing forced industrialization.

Mao's Great Leap Forward failed because it took peasants and brutally forced them into factory work with little to no education or training, just bullets. And Mao was equally brutal to factory managers. A period of foreign investment would have given China an experienced and knowledgable work force as well as exposure to modern manufacturing techniques, which is why Deng took that route after Mao died. And now, China has an experienced work force and can allow internal investment and entrepreneurialism.

Hong Kong's early economy was built on natural resources: fishing, availability of fresh water, and salt production. That's why people settled there and various Chinese emperors kept conquering it. Its modern economy was built on investments and production using imported raw materials. That required it to have a trained workforce, one that was better than that of the country supplying the raw materials. Fortunately, it had already started on that path under British rule.

Some countries built a modern economy without a large supply of natural resources, usually by emphasizing production and investment in non-resource industries. And some with resources and bad governance (e.g., Russia) never developed an advanced economy. That's why Porter was studying how economies developed around the world, from the beginning to the modern age.

Investment (foreign and domestic) and property rights are a major part of developing a modern economy. But each economy had to begin somewhere, and that beginning is in exploiting whatever natural resources the natives can exploit and what items it can trade with other countries exploiting its own natural resources.

The Iron Age economic development in the Congo (now Zaire) was overcome by the more technologically advanced Portuguese. Later, the resources and people of the area were brutally exploited by Belgium's King Leopold.

After the Belgians left, the Congolese were reduced to a subsistence living and were not about to start businesses and argue about property rights. Property rights won't get you very far when your population is starving. Cycles of violence and civil war further reduced the population's ability to thrive economically.

Western intervention often played havoc with Third World countries developing advanced economies. France brutally exploited Haiti and its other Caribbean colonies, despite the Revolution's public insistence on spreading liberte, egalite, fraternite to the colonies of other countries.

Spain was not noted for settlement colonization either, robbing the natural resources of its colonies for the aggrandizement of the mother country. England was different, preferring settlement colonization to overt exploitation in most, but not all, cases.

Even once the exploiting country left, the legacy could live on for several years. Tribalism and collectivism in Africa and the Middle East has stymied economic development there for centuries. To your point, there is no incentive to produce more in a culture in which the fruits of one person's labor belong to all.

Sorry this was so long and convoluted. It's late. In summary, economic development does not hinge solely on property rights, nor on resource exploitation.

From "The Myth of the U.S. Immigration Crisis" (Noah Smith, Bloomberg, Feb. 2017):

"Illegal immigration to the U.S. ended a decade ago and, according to the Pew Research Center, has been zero or negative since its peak in 2007...

[see explanations for why people returned to Mexico] ...

So to all the pundits and thinkers scrambling to find some way to accommodate what they perceive as an anti-immigrant wave, I say: Think again. The outpouring represents a loud, angry minority. And the problem that minority is angry about has been waning for a decade now. Eventually, as people realize that illegal immigration is over, the furor will probably ease.

In the meantime, the U.S. shouldn’t succumb to the urge to enact draconian policies. The possibility of a police state poses a far greater danger to the average American than the imagined threat of immigration. The Democrats’ policy of resisting overreaction and sticking to the status quo doesn’t represent a lack of vision -- it represents a sensible, prudent refusal to overreact to an imaginary crisis."

I agree that ICE is targeting the easiest deportees first (which makes sense from a bureaucrat's view), but in this particular case, when the individual concerned is not a violent criminal, married to a U.S. citizen, and a better and more just solution to her crime would be to have her pay back the welfare she took illegally with a small amount of interest (I'd be fine with ~2%), doesn't it make more sense for her to be merely arrested and not deported?

You clearly don't understand the issue Michelle. After all your quote still mixes immigrant and illegal immigrant as if they are the same thing.

Conan, I agree there usually must be a bare minimum of natural resources to develop an economy. That is why there is no great nation on the south pole. But Hong Kong is the perfect example of just how small those resources have to be. Mexico well surpasses that threshold. It has large cities filled with skilled workers. It has all the raw materials it needs to match or beat the US economically. What holds Mexico back is a mix of corruption and protectionism. I agree that mixture was inherited from Spain. I agree breaking out of that cycle is hard. But others have done it and there is no other option if they wish to advance.

As for the Congolese, you have it backwards. Without some property rights (and safety from having everything stolen is part of that) you won't have farmers and your people will starve. This happened in the USSR, China, all over Africa, and parts of South America. The greatest tragedy for the Congolese is their vast natural resources which makes theft a superior perceived option to fair trade.

Not one word about the Americans who have no jobs due to illegal immigration?

Not one word about the Americans who have no jobs due to illegal immigration?

I agree that ICE is targeting the easiest deportees first (which makes sense from a bureaucrat's view), but in this particular case, when the individual concerned is not a violent criminal, married to a U.S. citizen, and a better and more just solution to her crime would be to have her pay back the welfare she took illegally with a small amount of interest (I'd be fine with ~2%), doesn't it make more sense for her to be merely arrested and not deported?

spqr2008 at March 6, 2017 5:39 AM

No, because what is under attack here is the rule of law. Using my and your tax dollars to rehabilitate an illegal immigrant at the expense of tax payers adds insult to injury.

But repayment of the debt, and associated legal costs of the arrest and prosecution for fraud should certainly be required before she is allowed to apply for reentey into the United States from her home country.

With welfare, section 8 housing medicaid and AFDC worth approximately 40+ thousand a year, you might be amazed at how hefty that debt really is.

But feel free to send in a check or start a fund for these people if this is a cause you really believe in.

Just dont expect me to donate to it.

"The decision to grant amnesty to the (iirc) 2-3 million illegal immigrants at the times was based on humanitarian arguments. The opponents of the amnesty warned at the time: If you grant amnesty, it will open the gates for a flood of illegals. First, because we obviously have no intention of enforcing our laws. Second, because one amnesty may well lead to another."

That actually already happened with the 1986 amnesty. It was the third such since WWII. The previous one was, I think, in 1968. And with each one, the pro-amnesty advocates said, "this will be the last one, we pinky swear!" Of course, they almost immediately started agitating for another one. Don't forget that only a couple of years ago, the pro-amnesty forces were trying all kinds of semantic tricks to couch the hoped-for next amnesty in not-amnesty terms. They actually killed any prospect of immigration reform (which is needed) in the short term, because the public started seeing all such proposals as being merely euphemisms for amnesty. Control of the border will have to be conclusively demonstrated before anyone can credibly talk about immigration reform again.

'They consider my mom as a criminal for lying on paperwork to get welfare,' Aparicio said, adding that officials said that happened more than a decade ago."

The real issue there is that in order to obtain that welfare, she probably committed identity theft. That's not a victimless crime; by committing it, she caused an awful lot of problems for some poor citizen -- who very well may have been a legal immigrant. A few years ago, there was a ring of illegals in this area that were stealing SS#'s in order to get other people's income tax refund checks routed to them. INS wouldn't touch it. The state police finally did a raid and found one illegal in possession of stubs from about 1000 tax refund checks. They interviewed one victim, who talked about having gone through the lengthy legal immigration process and being dismayed because they didn't think this sort of thing happened in America. I'll bet that immigrant isn't a supporter of illegal immigration!

"You clearly don't understand the issue Michelle. After all your quote still mixes immigrant and illegal immigrant as if they are the same thing."

Ben at March 6, 2017 6:20 AM

Although I did not write the article, I did pull the quote.

To rephrase what he wrote, as I understand it:

-Only a small proportion of citizens are upset about illegal immigrants; and

Within that small group, many people who are upset about immigrants are upset about immigrants regardless of whether the immigrants are here with proper documentation.

~~~
Xenophobia is not a value I want to inform how we prioritize enforcement of our civil or criminal codes.

I doubt the man who fired a gun at two engineers who worked for Garmin stopped to inquire about their visa status.

That said, the salient point of the article for me was the data about the decrease in undocumented immigrants over about a ten year period. The efforts of the current administration are fanning flames of a fire that was put out a decade ago.

The decrease in undocumented immigrants was not solely in response to law enforcement efforts, but in response to factors that improved the quality of life for people in Mexico. So if what we care about is reducing undocumented immigration, then maybe working with Mexico to enhance quality of life opportunities is a better practice than deporting grandmothers, and kids headed to college.

"Xenophobia is not a value I want to inform how we prioritize enforcement of our civil or criminal codes."

Speak for yourself, and lead the way.

I really dont care what *informs* our priorities as long as all illegal aliens are treated essentially the same under the rule of law, regardless of the color of their skin or where they cone from.

I'm not interested in importing more crime, more poverty, and third world value systems into our country for the sole purposes of pleasing fat cat industrialists, social justice warriors, and democratic politicians who want to use demographics to achieve a permanent majority.

Invite several 25 year old Muslim Syrian refugees or maybe a group of Illegal LA gang bangers into your home to live there for a year or two.

You are perfectly willing to inflict these criminals on American citizens and legal immigrants who have to live in these neighborhoods. Show us how enlighted and non zenophobic you are, or stuff your bullshit moral posturing.

"Xenophobia is not a value I want to inform how we prioritize enforcement of our civil or criminal codes. "

I like the part where the MS-13 gang members slaughtered the high school girls because, um, white privilege.

As I said Michelle, you clearly don't understand the issue.

"Only a small proportion of citizens are upset about illegal immigrants."

This is false and clearly so. But it is a narrative that is politically expedient.

"Within that small group, many people who are upset about immigrants are upset about immigrants regardless of whether the immigrants are here with proper documentation."

Also incorrect. The xenophobes are separate and distinct from those who oppose illegal immigrants for a variety of other reasons than nationality.

This is the same as the discussion on anti-vax the other day. Media and government figures keep complaining that explaining that vaccines don't cause autism doesn't have any effect on vaccination rates. Well, the fact that almost no one refuses to get their kids vaccinated due to autism fears might have something to do with that. You may as well complain that people don't stop drinking milk because the oceans are full of salt water. The two have nothing to do with each other. Same on the immigration front. Stating we are a nation of immigrants and talking about all the legal immigrants that wouldn't be here if we oppose immigration is irrelevant when the vast majority aren't opposed to immigration but illegal immigration.