Do you think that all illegals should be deported?

[TheDeadFlagBlues]

I hope everyone who votes no supports abolishing the IRS, since after all it is impossible for the government to possibly confiscate the paychecks of 100 million working people. I also hope everyone who votes no never complains about the free rider problem when advocating against privatization of public goods, since it is difficult to conceive of a more prototypical example of a free rider than one who enters a country and makes use of its public services without paying their way in.

Of course, I agree with you, this is why I support open borders and amnesty. No more free riders!

[TheDeadFlagBlues]

No I don't think that all illegals should be deported, the problem are that the American federal and states' government have allowed these people to enter USA for decades and have not really done anything serious to stop this illegal immigration, if the a government choose not to stop crimes, the message it send, is that it's not a real crime. Of course if USA begin to enforce it own laws serious everybody who enter USA afterward illegal are no longer in good faith, and they should be deported.

No one has really done anything serious to stop illegal immigration because many sectors American economy, particularly agriculture in California and the Southwest has been dependent on Mexican migrant labor for nearly a century. It is not as if this is a new phenomenon, Mexican laborers have been "illegally" crossing the border to work in the US for decades; what changed was that the American government militarized the border, making the barrier to entry/exit increasingly steep, which in turn fed cartels and organized criminal organizations who could profit off as coyotes, which in turn catalyzed the American desire for more border militarization etc.

American could probably force immigrants to self-deport but the disastrous experiments in Georgia and Alabama demonstrate that punitive immigration laws would have a horrible effect on our agricultural sector. We're also at the point where millions of "illegals" are effectively Americans in all but name, who have lived in this country longer than they have lived in Mexico or El Salvador and, therefore, would actively resist deportation.

Basically, America has taken a very lazy approach to immigration characterized by a number of ineffectual compromises that have benefited no one. To the dismay of xenophobes, immigrants continue to flock to the US. To the dismay of economists and corporations, there's a clear need for increased levels of immigration to meet demand for engineers, computer programmers etc. To the dismay of unions, entire industries filled with militant workers are made impossible to organize because the workers are undocumented.  To the dismay of immigrant families, the American immigration system remains an arcane and intrusive mess. For instance, single adult children of lawful immigrants have to wait 9-14 years to legally re-unify with their family, married adult children of lawful immigrants are out of luck etc.

[TheDeadFlagBlues]

No, it would be impossible. I support deporting any openly or publicly known illegals, of course. I want life to be as impossible as it can be fore them. I want "muh Dreamers" to live in the shadows and what have 'ya. But I don't want the ensuing economic collapse if we massively (and inhumanely) just round them up like its 1956.

Sanchez, are you drifting back into White Nationalism? I'm concerned.

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-Pat Buchanan

Clearly, them hot-blooded Latin types have no business living in this country, bringing with them their penchant for deviance, rooster fights and bandito shoot-outs!

[TheDeadFlagBlues]

I also hope everyone who votes no never complains about the free rider problem when advocating against privatization of public goods, since it is difficult to conceive of a more prototypical example of a free rider than one who enters a country and makes use of its public services without paying their way in.

Is it fun being a bigot?

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http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/05/business/illegal-immigrants-are-bolstering-social-security-with-billions.html?_r=0

And there is an obvious flaw with your (and the NY Slimes') line of reasoning. Illegal immigrants are, by their very nature, far more likely to be working off the books. Really, how can you find better employees for the grey market than those whose very presence is a crime? Somehow I doubt the gardener working for $2 below the minimum wage or the few extra workers the industrial farm "forgot" to put into their system are paying payroll tax. However, even ignoring the above chart, one would have to concede that illegal immigrants have to drive and sometimes get sick, both likely disproportionate to their share of the population, which means they are benefiting from public transportation and emergency room care that they have not paid for. And since one cannot ask the legal status of welfare recipients, it seems a bit generous to assume that none have tried to take advantage of that.

Again, this is an argument for "amnesty", not an argument for deporting immigrants that have received our public investments. What, exactly, would be achieved by deporting 17 year olds who were brought here when they were 2 or 3? How is that an appropriate response to putative tax evasion? The goal is to get these people into our system and to fine them appropriately. An obvious solution would be to liberalize our immigration to the fullest extent possible, allowing migrants to come into this country for any reason after a brief screening, an upfront payment of, say, one thousand dollars and a one to three year waiting period to collect benefits from the government.

Look man, if you hate dumb low IQ browns or whatever, just say so. Your argument is very weak. If it was founded on concerns about the wage effects of unskilled immigration, it would be a bit harder to address. This argument, on the other hand, is stupid.

[TheDeadFlagBlues]

We will have a permanent underclass either way. Giving poor Mexicans a green card or even citizenship is not going to magically make them middle class.

Well, you see, Mexicans are actually fairly "socially mobile"; a fact demonstrated by a plethora of sociological studies. This fact should come as no surprise; unlike working class whites, immigrants, whether Indian or Mexican, have large social networks that they can leverage for jobs, savings etc. Immigrants tend to believe in "the American Dream" because they have cultural traditions that are well-disposed to a country that has a meager social safety; working class whites have shed these traditions for a variety of reasons.

This is a pretty "functionalist" account of the family but I think it makes sense in broad-terms. Anyways, it's not mutually exclusive to support "liberalized immigration systems" and an expanded social safety net; which are perfectly commensurate. Immigrants expand our economy (an indisputable fact), which in turn grants policymakers more flexibility/wider opportunity set from which to craft public policy, including a meaningful welfare state and social safety net. Immigrants can enrich "plutocrats", sure, but that's a function of political choice, not a path-dependent inevitability. The notion that it is "inevitable" that immigrants will lead to yawning gulfs of income equality is an intellectual error, conflating correlation with causation.

[TheDeadFlagBlues]

If Mexicans are so socially mobile, why is Mexico so poor?

Seriously man, I'm not sure why I engage in these conversations with you. This post in a non-sequitur, I'm referring to the social mobility of Mexican-Americans in the United States, which clearly offers more opportunities for social mobility than Mexico.

That said, even this non-sequitur is off-base:
1. Poverty is a category distinctly unrelated to social mobility. For instance, the United States is far more unequal than the UK but it also features more social mobility.
2. Mexico is not "so poor", a fact that's belied simply by setting foot in the country. It's a county that has social problems, particularly related to income inequality but it's not poor, that's inane. It's a middle-income country with a substantial middle class.

[TheDeadFlagBlues]

6 million people don't leave a middle class country to go live illegally some place else and work in fields/do under the table labor.

If you have a bunch of middle class people and then you add a bunch of poor people, the average income does not go up. It goes down. It's simple math.

Um, I said that Mexico is a middle-income country with a large middle class, I did not claim that it's middle class or developed. I'm well-aware of the social problems that catalyzed immigrant from Mexico to the United States, those problems are not as existent as they once were, a fact that has been noted by nearly every mainstream media publication. Do you suffer from amnesia or something?

I don't think you understand economics. For one, I was referring to the total share of economic output, from which tax revenues are derived; I was not referring to a measure of income that no one uses when describing the economic health of nation. Immigration certainly increases economic output, an entirely uncontroversial claim. My point is that, even if immigrants pushed down wages for native workers, that this could be remedied by public policy. If immigration increases economic output but increases inequality, the solution is to advocate for pre-distributive and re-distributive policies, not to oppose immigration which is a facile response similar to advocating for rent control or tariffs.

[TheDeadFlagBlues]

You think average income is a bad way to measure the economic health of society but total economic output (not taking into account population or distribution) IS?

How about you actually engage my arguments about Mexico or my claims about social mobility or my claims about immigration's effect on the economic health and capacity rather than continually shifting the argument?

Yes, I believe that looking at measures of total economic output are a better way of measuring the effects of immigration on an economy than making a facile claim about "poor" people driving down the average income by definition. Why? That's not how economies work. There's this thing called a "General Equilibrium Effect". Supposing that immigrants are substitutes for native workers (not true), even still, they would not drive down average wages/income to the extent that you might think because they'd also increase demand in various product markets, cancelling out some of the effects of increasing the labor supply.

Anyways, this is really besides the point. It's a fact that immigrants are far more socially mobile than native born Americans. That's what this argument is about. Engage with it.

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http://www.researchgate.net/publication/254074643_Socially_Mobile_Mexican_Americans_and_the_Minority_Culture_of_Mobility

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http://www.economist.com/node/7063472