Seems quite biased, considering they call for "Congress [to] significantly reduce the number of people subject to deportation by—for example—creating a pathway to citizenship for undocumented people, dramatically [reduce] the grounds of removability that are based on criminal legal involvement, and [enact] a statute of limitations on deportations"
Some people might argue that we should be dedicating our scarce housing resources towards expanding the number of legal immigrants with high value skills, not uneducated illegal immigrants, and that illegal immigrants deserve to be deported for entering the country illegally.
You're ignoring the very next line which states "why" they make this particular recommendation, a recommendation that they're pretty consistent about making throughout the rest of the document:
> "While those reforms do not address surveillance itself, they are the most direct way to undercut ICE surveillance authority."
This website, https://americandragnet.org/ , seems dedicated to curtailing dragnet surveillance in the USA. The facts around that surveillance are so disturbing that I'm amazed we can sit around and talk about deportation when it's a just a side show compared to the surveillance. The facts that they're laying out:
- ICE is tracking your address, your home moves, and your driving habits (or at least, they're doing so for ~75% of people in the USA)
- ICE is hijacking government functions like our DMVs and our utility companies without oversight in order to find out who you are, where you live, who you live near, etc. in order to detain and deport... well, I'll leave the who up to you, but if you're not uneasy with the start of that sentence, I doubt any way of ending it will either.
It's not the deportations that are concerning; it's the paths we're taking to get there.
This is a false dichotomy, how we allocate housing is the wrong framing. The problem is that that housing is in any way a scarce resource. Solve that problem instead.
Those are two separate issues which both can be solved independently. We can simultaneously overturn SFH zoning and also aggressively deport illegal immigrants.
The amount of money made by owners off of the labor of those undocumented people is strong evidence that we're throwing out a very valuable resource if we aggressively deport people.
>" We could, or we could not deport humans and solve housing and probably be even better off... "
This feels good to say, but it assumes there are no downsides whatsoever with no longer having deportation as an option and that we can 'solve' housing.
I personally think we can make housing better but housing issues have existed in every civilization throughout recorded history. I can't help but think it's an emergent phenomenon when you get plenty of people living together in a world where land is limited and two pieces of matter cannot occupy the same space at the same time. Not that we shouldn't try to help, but the issue will never truly go away. And, letting anyone who steps foot into your country stay for as long as they like seems like a recipe for creating housing demand that can never keep up with supply.
Those illegal immigrants are here at the cost of the wages of legal citizens. If no legal citizens wanted to work for farmers, two things would happen, wages would go up (a lot), and investment in automation would go up. Both of those things are positives for the US economy and average unskilled US citizen. Food prices will go up, but I don't think they'll go up as much as you think as labor has never been the biggest component of farming costs.
People don't have a right to live in the US just because they decided to walk across the border illegally.
> People don't have a right to live in the US just because they decided to walk across the border illegally.
This is invented nonsense. It would be just as reasonable to say "People don't have the right to live in the US just because they were lucky enough to be born there" or "People don't have the right to live in the US just because their parents were US citizens" or whatever.
"Walking across a border illegally" is an imaginary thing we made up because some people (probably xenophobic people) thought it was a good idea at some point in the past. I don't think unrestricted immigration is necessarily the answer either, but the system as it is clearly does not work.
Nearly all laws are purely inventions designed towards a particular outcome.
That doesn’t mean they’re nonsense, or that instituting the opposite of current laws would be “just as reasonable”.
The system as it is does work. Could it work better? Sure. Perhaps we could actually strictly enforce immigration laws, and the result would be ideal.
You can argue against the idea of community membership being predicated on more than just showing up, but simply calling it “xenophobia” isn’t an argument.
Furthermore, when one side is doing everything possible to undermine the established laws, it’s not convincing when they point out the resulting reduced efficacy as if it were an inherent flaw instead of their own doing.
Only if we let it. A workers coop doesn't engage in a labor market, it pays everyone an equal portion of the company's profit.
And I'm pretty sure we could absorb a lot more labor and have a stronger safety net for the folks who currently need to work three jobs to make ends meet.
Closing borders really only tackles a high level symptom. If we're not excited to have more help building society, we're doing something wrong.
I do not believe it's subject to supply and demand. For several reasons.
Labor is not fungible, even so called unskilled labor is actually quite skilled and requires significant training. (Put me in a strawberry field and I guarantee I'll be slower and worse then existing workers.)
Several sectors are struggling to hire workers, and have been for a long time. But until the pandemic, they really didn't see much increase in pay, despite demand.
We have regulated price minimums on labor.
Unions exist, and can ensure increased labor pool doesn't dilute pay.
The number of immigrants is small relative to the number of working Americans. And the rate of their arrival is slow. Also, we require working people to have work visas, further limiting the number of people who can impact labor pool.
Undocumented immigrants provide a significant and grossly disproportionate chunk of construction labor in the United States. If you kick them out, the housing shortage only gets worse.
Or to but it another way, wages would rise for Americans and legal immigrants in construction, especially those who have been involved with the justice system and have a record.
Or more likely, costs would rise for people in search of those services, and the extra profit would be pocketed by the management and shareholders of the construction companies.
In theory. I meant: specifically for the roles in construction that would become available. These are not high-paying jobs and they lack the benefits that we’ve come to appreciate, such as care or compensation upon loss of life or limb. Since the cost to the employer would increase, what would be the effect on wages?
Further, my understanding is that the employers of day-labor off-the-table construction work don’t much care about arrest records.
Some people might argue that we should be dedicating our scarce housing resources towards expanding the number of legal immigrants with high value skills, not uneducated illegal immigrants, and that illegal immigrants deserve to be deported for entering the country illegally.