you do, if you have sanctuary cities and entire states openly claiming they will not arrest people who break immigration law, it reduces the ability of USA to actually pass policies to take in more skilled immigrants who'll be a net benefit to America as a whole.
Like the War On Drugs, the human cost, violence, and intrusiveness of enforcement is worse than the alleged problem. The much-vaunted localism of America lets states and cities decide that it's not a problem for them to allow people to live there, and they don't want to help the big bad Federal government disrupt that.
(it's still no picnic being in that category, unable to register for social security or even take an internal flight)
World isnt some amazing la la land, I hope people who break laws to immigrate to America, will continue having the same sympathies towards you, when they become majority, and start dominating over you with their culture.
It feels bad to say this, but to build a good well integrated state, integration is key, you cannot integrate people into a society, if you cannot even control the immigration rate. You can't just let people come to your country illegally, setup shop, and then tell everyone 'Cant do anything about it folks'.
The human cost is paid in everything, the cost americans need to worry about, is whether the safety and future prospects of americans is safeguarded, not of people who break laws to illegally immigrate.
It's like having sympathy for a next door neighbour child who is uncared for, and serving him/her food, while you're own child cries and starves to death.
America isnt a country, with limitless resources, and enough food,housing,healthcare to feed everybody, stop treating it like it.
Also, I'm not sure the people who arrive here illegally are as ready to integrate with America's culture, as some americans are ready to integrate with illegal migrants.
I understand life is cruel, and maybe america should even do good things for it, but not at the cost of watching americans starve to death, veterans getting overdosed on the streets wishing after years of suffering to just die and be at peace, and watching them not being able to help them, because our resources are too stretched, Charity starts at home. Even the people who migrate illegally here, they'll help their own first, before even sparing one thought towards you.
One needs to be realistic about certain things, it's perfectly doable to protect your own borders, Singapore does it against Malaysia, India does it against Pakistan and Bangladesh (big borders), China does it against neighbouring countries, most Asian countries can protect their own borders.
> I hope people who break laws to immigrate to America, will continue having the same sympathies towards you, when they become majority, and start dominating over you with their culture.
I don't know how many folks around me broke the law to immigrate to America, but whether or not they broke the law to come here they faced a lot of racism, classism, and suspicion. I've been in the same area for about 20 years, and if I'm not a minority in my neighborhood it's close. It's the immigrants who are kind to me, help me keep my house secure, and trade goods and services with me. They even help me practice my awful Spanish with them. So in my case, yeah it's working out.
> America isnt a country, with limitless resources, and enough food,housing,healthcare to feed everybody, stop treating it like it.
America doesn't have limitless resources, but with 5% of the world's population it uses 25% of the world's resources [1]. To anybody's eyes that's going to look limitless.
I think simple laws of diffusion say that people are going to go where the resources are available. Whether it's politically tenable doesn't matter, this is human nature since we started walking.
If you don't mind sharing, i'm curious to know where you live. I live in North central Oak Cliff which is a large, predominantly hispanic, area consisting of multiple neighborhood just SSW of downtown Dallas. In my neighborhood there's a local Mercado that i can walk to for small things, i speak enough Spanish to manage but I'm eyed with suspicion from when i go in to when i leave. My wife is a HS teacher with about 25% of her students being undocumented. They use a bus service in Oak Cliff to freely move back and forth to Mexico, i'm not sure how that works but that's what they use.
My son's middle school is a DISD public magnet in a wealthy area called Preston Hollow. The middle school is probably 85-90% hispanic and despite my kids being 1/2 Mexican they have faced enough racism and abuse that my wife and I have had multiple meetings with the administration to address it. African American kids face it even worse. One other anecdote, when my kids were in elementary some of their calsses were taught in Spanish because my kids and one other were the only ones who spoke English. The teachers, who barely spoke English themselves, got in trouble for that. Ironically, if you want true diversity in Dallas schools you have to pay/be admitted to the elite private schools.
All this to say, in my experience, neighborhoods consisting of mostly undocumented immigrants and cities welcoming of undocumented immigrants aren't that great... unless you're an undocumented immigrant.
Wow that's interesting. I'm in Longmont, Colorado. Boulder's annoying little brother with a chip on his shoulder. I was born here, and when I was growing up it was predominantly white. As more Latinos immigrated here white people in my mom's generation went through some rough transitions. Some of their racial bias rubbed off on me at the time.
Funny you should mention private school though because my mom did send me to a private high school. At its most diverse it was probably 90% white, and I wonder if that colors my experience. I did decide to learn Spanish there and ended up minoring in it in university.
One of my daughters goes to a predominately Latino high school, and my other daughter goes to a mostly white Jr. High. My oldest doesn't get any harassment like you describe, so my advice is to come to Longmont. Maybe because it's still a city in flux we humans haven't had a chance yet to revert to our normal xenophobic ways.
Haha but yeah when I go to the tortilleria to try my Spanish the people behind the counter almost always respond politely but pointedly in English. I feel like such a dork.
If 20 of the kids spoke Spanish and 2 of the kids spoke English, doesn't it make sense to teach the course in Spanish? Why would the teachers get in trouble?
For now at least half of the US is pretending there aren't 40-50 million illegal immigrants in the US, even though the country is overflowing with undocumented persons and it has become an enormous problem. Every mid-size town and above has a lot of illegal immigrants today, whereas 20 years ago there were few. So if you start switching public school systems over to Spanish because entire schools are now filled with illegal immigrants, or children of illegal immigrants, it's going to get a lot of unwanted attention. Plus it reveals that the US is fracturing rapidly. Whereas English is drastically more valuable than Spanish economically, the US is developing a large population base that does not speak English and it's quite bad for the country's cohesion and economic outcomes.
I'm seeing this firsthand. Where I live in a mid-size university town, 20-30 years ago there was practically zero illegal immigration, undocumented persons. It was fairly unheard of. Now there are a vast number of Spanish-only speaking illegal immigrants. My apartment complex in the span of a few years has become 3/4 illegal immigrants that only speak Spanish, almost entirely young adult males. They harrass anyone that isn't Hispanic and have tried to push all other tenants out of the complex. The police are called frequently for violence issues, and being uneducated young adult males they drink heavily and trash the place constantly.
It can't be fixed either. If you just remove the gigantic base of illegal immigrants GDP will plunge by at least 10%. Nobody will do that. There is no path forward other than chaos. No serious immigration reform will get passed near-term.
Of course when the federal government decided to let millions of them in and the local government in Texas decided that it was a problem for them and decided to enforce it themselves, all those people who are so much in favor of local control when it comes to "sanctuary cities" suddenly lost their shit.
You don't? There's no visa for that category.