I am seeing more of these stories of late; longtime resident arrested, detained and headed for deportation.
No news that our immigration laws are a mess. Nevertheless, someone has to adhere to the rules if we insist that we are a fair society. My empathy for this mother of 4 is tempered by the fact that her husband is in the U.S. on a valid visa! Why hasn’t she been working to adjust and legalize her status during the last 20-plus years?
I find all this deportation stuff appalling. It’s just flat out mean and unnecessary.
@LakeWashington I agree with you, but the article says that because she was once caught trying to enter illegally she could not get a hearing. Obviously, this is not a person we need to waste time and resources deporting at this stage.
It is not clear to me whether it is the immigration LAWS that are a mess, or the process.
We have lots of problems in this country. This isn’t one of them.
Imagine if we put these resources into things that actually affect most Americans: crumbling infrastructure, safety net programs, opioid addiction, education, etc.
Deporting people who have been here for decades, have families here, etc aren’t a problem and whether Americans want to admit it or not, our economy thrives off of undocumented individuals.
We;re getting a lot of sob stories in which the soon-to-be-deported person says “All I did was forge checks” or “All I did was drive drunk one time”. Sorry. Not sorry.
Emilybee and Consolation; cases like this do seem unnecessarily painful. Yet I still look for an answer that we can give to the visa applicants who endure our frustrating immigration process and patiently wait for their names to be called. I am not yet willing to say that it’s better that people cheat in the hope that they will remain under the radar and never be discovered.
Then there are stories like this:
As a supporter and advocate for immigrants, I can say with certainty that illegal immigration, even by the people who are otherwise law-abiding, does affect most Americans in all sorts of ways.
Make whatever calculation you want, but be honest about the pluses and minuses. Nothing this complicated ever falls completely on one side or the other.
Frustrating would be an understatement.
My father who went through the legal channels and had an experienced immigration attorney to help him out after the initial set of SNAFUs still had to wait 20 years to get his citizenship from Green Card status because the immigration bureaucracy kept losing multiple sets of forms and misdirecting him and his attorney to different officials who kept giving both of them a runaround.
The attorney was so outraged at my father’s treatment he refused to accept further payment beyond the initial retainer paid nearly 2 decades ago because he felt the immigration system punished my father enough. .
And multi-generationed Americans who haven’t experienced immigration firsthand or whose family’s immigration experience was several generations back and likely had far different experiences because of factors such as less vetting before the mid-19th century and blatant racist policies which favored certain racial/geographic regions over others(US immigration authorities strongly favored White Europeans from Protestant parts of Northern Europe, passage of racially motivated legislation such as the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, etc)
@LakeWashington , I agree strongly with your post #5. Remember the immigration amnesty back in the last century? Did that do anything to help the situation?
Illegal immigration is not a hot button for me, but I have often wondered whether we need to institute some sort of legal guest worker status, likely followed by a legal path to citizenship, and whether we need to revisit the idea that any baby born here is automatically a citizen. I’m fine with deporting violent criminals. We should not be spending $$ jailing them here. I think we should be directing our deportation efforts at people who pose a real danger to society, and I’m fine with extending amnesty to the Dreamers, but that’s a band aid.The situation we have now is simply a mess.
We have a mess right now. Illegal immigration costs us a lot of money, as well as the bad eggs criminals are a huge problem. Like that story above. No other country allows people in so freely and offers them so many perks and benefits. After being in Iceland I looked at their immigration policy. Sorry Charlie, non EU people are not coming to stay without a company sponsoring them, which is not all that easy to come by. We don’t owe the people of the world free access to our country. I don’t disagree with the other idea of yes you can come in, but you can’t take government benefits for 5 years. When my grandmother came here through Ellis Island she had to have a sponsor and a job. As for the Dreamers - when the parents came here with them illegally, they KNEW they were putting their kids in a rotten position. They gambled and assumed we’d look the other way. And yes, I’m not happy that an illegal can get in state tuition, but my kids can’t nor can someone here legally. There is no one size fits all. No, I don’t want grandma kicked out, but I also don’t want every dirt bag rapist getting to stay here indefinitely. Let’s start with the violent criminals and then see where we think it needs to go.
It is outrageous that cities won’t help the federal government deport criminal aliens. They are not doing government’s primary job - that is, to protect its citizens.
The LA Times will front page a sob story of an illegal immigrant being deported over a ‘minor’ offense, but the Oregon story wasn’t covered at all.
Jus soli citizenship prevents the formation of a multigenerational noncitizen underclass like has happened in other countries that do not have jus soli citizenship. Because countries are still defined by territory controlled, jus soli citizenship also makes more sense in that it more closely associates citizenship with those who live in the country.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jus_soli#Restricted_jus_soli
The US and Canada appear to be among the only first world countries that permit this. Most European countries allow birthright citizenship only if at least one parent is a legal permanent resident.
We can discuss moral issues of illegal immigration ad nauseam, but the practical issues are much more clear. It’s impossible to deport several million people, period. And even if we do this, whole industries will suffer. There are just not enough Americans willing to move to California to pick up strawberries, or clean houses, or build them for meager pay. We should concentrate on making the American workforce more mobile, more work-ready and ultimately punish employers who hire illegal immigrants, not employees.
“It is outrageous that cities won’t help the federal government deport criminal aliens. They are not doing government’s primary job - that is, to protect its citizens.”
It’s not their job to enforce immigration, especially if no crimes are being committed. They don’t have the resources. That’s a separate branch of government. Besides, doing so would have unintended consequences in terms of community connections and trust between the local area and law enforcement. It’s too simplistic to expect otherwise.
If I had the threat of deportation and being separated from my husband and kids hanging over my head, I would have done something about it sometime in the last 17 years. I do feel for her, it’s a rotten thing to have happen. But it’s not as though a citizen is being removed - an illegal is being returned. She may be the best person in the world, but who carries the insurance on the kids? If she doesn’t have a license - is she insured? Who is carrying the burden of her victimless crime?
Yes ThreeBeans, that’s my point. I would feel more sympathy for her if she had done like Cobrat’s father and made the effort to get legal status.
Also, I too think that it’s time to scrutinize “birthright citizenship” for every child of an immigrant who is fortunate enough to be born on American soil. You know I think the legal definition of American soil still may include U.S. embassies, which is why there are urban legends from the late 20th Century about very pregnant mothers clutching the flag pole on U.S. embassies’ lawns in the hopes of going into labor on the spot.
Birthright citizenship was enacted on behalf of the former African-American bondmen and women, to protect them from hostile southern governments during reconstruction and thereafter. Like a lot of things, it’s application today may need to change because it’s too broad.
A distinction that is a positive one for the US and Canada.
Some of those European countries have the multigenerational noncitizen underclass problem. Also, it is not surprising to see that European countries, which are more likely to define themselves in terms of ethnicity or through a major ethnic group in their territory, tend to favor primarily jus sanguinis (bloodline) citizenship definitions. That does not make it a good policy, even though it may be favored by ethnic nationalists and racists there.
What? Please tell me what you would have done. There is no path to citizenship for most people living here without citizenship status. Especially if your visa etc has already expired.
“I would’ve done something” is a nice statement until you even take the most cursory look at our immigration system.
My mom wouldn’t have been a citizen if not for birthright. She and her brothers all got citizenship because they were born on military bases to a military father… who wasn’t yet a citizen. (Neither was my grandmother.)
Birthright citizenship should and must remain in my opinion. Stateless children exist in US detention camps and there is nothing that can be legally done with them. They can’t come to the US but there is no where they can be sent to. We don’t need to exacerbate that problem and turn hundreds or thousands of tragedies into millions.