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Maybe this is too off topic for HN, but I'm genuinely curious what is the best argument for why it is bad/racist to enforce immigration laws? I've heard people

Maybe this is too off topic for HN, but I'm genuinely curious what is the best argument for why it is bad/racist to enforce immigration laws? I've heard people argue that a wall won't be effective. But some people seem to have the view that immigration laws shouldn't be enforced at all and we should allow people to use whatever loopholes (refugee status, traveling w/ children) there are to get in and then not show up for their court hearing. Im genuinely puzzled that this is so controversial.

alkibiades 7y ago
the argument is mostly that it gives people white guilt to enforce immigration because most of the immigrants are non-white. and the people supporting the unlimited migration don’t have to deal with the consequences themselves it also wins millions of future and current hispanic votes by pandering
jobigoud 7y ago
I'll bite because I'm ambivalent about immigration laws. Why should people that just happen to be born in a third world country live a shitty life with no way out? You can't just say they have to do a revolution in their own country, not everyone is interested in activism, why should this be the fight of their life instead of stuff they actually want to do? You were born in a nice place by sheer luck. It's unfair. I like the idea of a fundamental human right to "mobility". In the grand scheme of things a human being should be able to move anywhere as long as they obey local laws, pay local taxes, etc.
- vokep 7y ago
  >You were born in a nice place by sheer luck. It's unfair. Yes, thats life? Of course where there is abundance we ought to use it to fix the unfairness. But life is unfair. I think it comes down to where do we actually draw the line of abundance. Some feel we're well past it, enough that we shouldn't even have borders, others feel we aren't even close and ought to be quite selective of who gets to stay.
- WillPostForFood 7y ago
  Why should a homeless person be forced to sleep on the street when you have a perfectly good couch in your living room. Yet you keep your door locked.
  - DonaldPShimoda 7y ago
    Because a country is not a house. The analogy is fundamentally flawed. Our government can provide for immigrants in ways that individuals simply cannot.
    - stale2002 7y ago
      > Because a country is not a house. Why shouldn't it be treated as such? Your opinions seems pretty immoral, and leads to homeless people sleeping on the street. > Our government can provide for immigrants in ways that individuals simply cannot. So? That does not change the fact that you indeed are still capable of providing for people in need.
    - hart_russell 7y ago
      The state is product of citizens time and resources. We all contribute. So it's a perfectly apt analogy.
    - WillPostForFood 7y ago
      This is basically saying: I won't help, but I support the government forcing other people to help (and hopefully it won't affect me).
    - fiblye 7y ago
      Governments provide nothing. They make someone else provide. If the government needs a couch, they don’t poof a couch into existence and everyone’s happy. They either take your couch or have someone sit down and make one. It’s bizarre though how many people think governments can simply “provide”. America now can’t even provide for all the struggling people who already live there. You could argue that they could redefine their priorities and focus on immigrants, but that comes at a cost of something else, and people affected by those cuts would not be happy.
- meowface 7y ago
  There's a tragedy of the commons problem. While I think there's nothing wrong with wanting to move your family from a poorer country to the US, if in theory every person who wanted to do this did do this - from every country (Latin America or otherwise) - it'd eventually become unsustainable. At least not without a huge government program to try to manage it all, which may or may not succeed. Another issue is that criminal organizations can try to exploit this for their own gain, to the detriment of all, and it can become harder and harder to detect or prevent this as the rate increases. Perhaps we'll eventually be in a future where surplus and government and security improvements makes this much easier to manage, and then maybe more countries will start moving to a more open-borders / global union model, but that future is probably at least a century away (probably several centuries). I think we should strive for that future, but that we should also accept pragmatic reality until it happens. And I do think we should probably increase the amount of families we currently accept every year. Especially war refugees. Totally eliminating national boundaries is very different from that, though.
  - jobigoud 7y ago
    > it'd eventually become unsustainable. If a sizable fraction of a country started to leave or plan on leaving, it could also force these countries to get their shit together to become more attractive and retain them. Similar to what we have now with counter-measures to brain drains.
    - meowface 7y ago
      If anything, I think they'd just be relieved that dissenters are leaving while true believers / "patriotic citizens" are staying put. Makes politics a lot easier. But I'm sure the reaction would vary a lot by country.
- magashna 7y ago
  If you can move anywhere then you would have many more economic migrants looking for the best benefits.
- rufus_3 7y ago
  > sheer luck Not really. Your ancestors worked hard to improve the environment you were born in. It wasn't luck that created western civilization, it was the hard work and ingenuity of the generations that came before us.
  - reroute1 7y ago
    Sure, but none of that has anything to do with you or your accomplishments which is where luck enters the equation as to your starting place. For the record I think borders should be secure, but also allow pathways to citizenship.
    - lliamander 7y ago
      > Sure, but none of that has anything to do with you or your accomplishments which is where luck enters the equation as to your starting place. We didn't earn it, but we were given it by our ancestors. While it does behoove us to be generous, it is still ours by right. We also have an obligation to our descendants to preserve it for them. What good is it working to improve the fate of our descendants, if it is only going to be taken away from them because they didn't "earn" it?
      - reroute1 7y ago
        Yes you were given it, which means you were lucky in what you received. By all means try to do the same for your descendants I didn't say anything to the contrary, just that they would be lucky in the same way
- 4bpp 7y ago
  The standard counterargument is that not allowing mobility is what enabled us to have any nice places to begin with, in an "ant and grasshopper" way. Building a "nice" and affluent country is generally a multigenerational project involving plenty of individual sacrifice for the sake of a future that the sacrificing individuals will rarely themselves experience. If Norwegians knew that they all could move to any country they choose at their pleasure at all times, why would they save their oil money in a sovereign wealth fund instead of quitting work, blowing it all on blackjack and hookers right now, then taking out the greatest national credit line their country can secure to buy some more blackjack and hookers, and relocate a few 100km into Sweden once it's all used up? Knowing that the Norwegians would be thinking along those lines, what would stop the Swedes from racing to beat them onto the blackjack-and-hookers train? Now, in reality, Norwegians and Swedes are sufficiently similar and familiar with each other that they probably would be able to predict the other's actions and jointly avoid racing to the bottom, but could you say this about, say, Germans and Egyptians, for more complex downward spirals than "burn through our assets faster than the others get to"? Add to it that the short-sighted policies that actually make the difference between successful and failed countries rarely are so straightforwardly bad as buying blackjack and hookers: more commonly, we'll be talking about economic experiments, corruption and kickbacks for interest groups, and really a handful of policies where we still can't confidently say if they were actually good for a given polity in the long run (space programmes, social programmes , infrastructure megaprojects...), but have to rely on history to naturally select for political processes that crystallise better instincts for their selection. In less abstract terms, I think that especially many right-leaning Americans feel that Latin-American socialism gets close to being an instance of "blackjack and hookers" in the sense of the above metaphor, and in the same vein Germans feel that Levantine... sectarianism?... does. (As in, sitting down and negotiating a sustainable peace with people from other ethnic groups who might be heretics and devil-worshippers is the hardship-and-sacrifice option, whereas using any momentary advantage to enrich your friends and blow up infidels is short-term fun.)
  - sgpl 7y ago
    This counterargument conveniently ignores the history of 'European colonization of America from the early 16th century until the incorporation of the colonies into the United States of America [0]'. I'm not the most well-versed on these topic (colonization / mobility) but it would seem that that mobility is what helped shape America into what it is today rather than "not allowing mobility". [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonial_history_of_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonial_history_of_the_United...
- mrdependable 7y ago
  I was wondering about this topic not long ago as well and came across this article: http://dieoff.com/page99.htm http://dieoff.com/page99.htm (not sure if that's the original link I saw but it is the same paper). Basically it's about there being a curve for population size vs standard of living. We can't control the size of the population for the entire world, but a country can for themselves. I don't really have much of an opinion on it, and can't say whether the article is bunk, but I did find it an interesting read.
- hart_russell 7y ago
  Yeah, and I wasn't born to billionaires. So, we should take all the money from rich people and redistribute and become communist?
- ng12 7y ago
  > Why should people that just happen to be born in a third world country live a shitty life with no way out What about someone born in a Mississippi housing project where everyone around them is illiterate? Or in some rust belt slum with drug-addicted parents? What about someone simply unable to get the mental health they need so they end up living on Skid Row? Lots of people are born into very shitty circumstances, and if we have problems taking care of American citizens I don't see how you can make the argument we need to open our borders for everyone in the world born in tough circumstances.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- CapricornNoble 7y ago
  >>>You can't just say they have to do a revolution in their own country, Uh, yes I can. The US exists because the population staged a rebellion. I don't find it unconscionable to expect others to undertake the same effort our forebears did to improve their situation. >>>You were born in a nice place by sheer luck. It's unfair. Some of us are also taller than average as well, which is directly correlated with total career earnings. Sheer luck and unfair. Outcomes will ALWAYS vary due to the inherent genetic variations and capabilities in the human population.
akhilcacharya 7y ago
I'll bite. It's not bad or racist to enforce immigration laws. Very few people in America support legitimately open borders and I do not either; the only ones that do are purist libertarians. Faux concern for these issues however is a hammer used by bad and, yes, racist people in order to batter people who are overwhelmingly poorer and non-white. There is no evidence that a physical wall is a necessary investment and there are zero lives improved by separating children from their families as a "deterrent" during a massive humanitarian crisis. A decade ago, I used to think that the Republican concern over illegal immigration (which is absolutely a legitimate concern), was truly out of concern for those exploited by the system and out of concern for the American worker. I thought that those calling this concern as "anti immigrant" were being disingenuous. Of course, that was before I realized people like Stephen Miller are really saying the quiet part loud these days.
- gotoeleven 7y ago
  As I understand it, separating children from parents isn't some sort of arbitrary punishment, it's literally the only way that immigration laws can be enforced when adults are traveling with children. This is because of court decisions which say children can't be detained more than 20 days. The alternative is to just release the parents and children and tell them to show up for their court date, which they usually don't do. So if you're saying we shouldn't separate children from parents, then you're for defacto open borders. The humanitarian crisis at the border is caused by lots of people showing up at the border, right? It seems like the only way to stop the crisis then is to get people to stop showing up at the border, and the only way to do that is to enforce immigration laws. Is there another answer?
  - akhilcacharya 7y ago
    > separating children from parents isn't some sort of arbitrary punishment, it's literally the only way that immigration laws can be enforced when adults are traveling with children. We've spent 230+ years having borders without separating children at gunpoint to give up for adoption [0]. It was explicitly called a deterrent by Jeff Sessions [1]. The cruelty is the point. [0]. https://theintercept.com/2018/07/01/separated-children-adoption-immigration/ https://theintercept.com/2018/07/01/separated-children-adopt... [1]. https://www.axios.com/sessions-says-he-hopes-child-separation-policy-will-serve-as-a-deterrent-e1b7d3b2-60ef-4099-a3d2-2c3ce986dca3.html https://www.axios.com/sessions-says-he-hopes-child-separatio... > So if you're saying we shouldn't separate children from parents, then you're for defacto open borders. No, not at all.
empath75 7y ago
If our immigration laws were sane and humane I’d feel better about enforcing them, but sometimes laws are so unjust that the right thing to do is violate them. It’s funny that you’ll see people on one hand talk about the laws Uber breaks or laws on piracy as bullshit inconveniences that need to be disrupted and on the other hand talk about immigration law as if it was holy writ.
anigbrowl 7y ago
Your question is quite loaded and rests upon false premises - for example, your assertion that people don't show up for court hearings rehashes an anti-immigrant trope that has little basis in fact. Attendance rates are actually quite high, close to 100% for those who have attorneys and still high even for those who don't: https://trac.syr.edu/immigration/reports/562/ https://trac.syr.edu/immigration/reports/562/ It's a deep complex subject that can't be summed up in a short (or even a long) comment. If your understanding of it is based on misleading tropes that you've heard from pundits or political figures, it might be worth taking up the issue as a research project or taking some classes so that you are not taken in by slanderous misinformation.
- gotoeleven 7y ago
  I think you've been misinformed. The trac study is looking at people who have been here for years who have been going through the system. They show up to court at very high rates. The "don't show up for court" people were part of a program by the EOIR (which is part of the DOJ) to expedite the cases of newly arrived family units in 10 cities. They very largely did not show up. You can read about it here: https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Asher%20Testimony.pdf https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Asher%20Testi... So it seems like there's something very different about these two different groups of asylum seekers. Anyway no need for the high dudgeon about 'slanderous misinformation.'

alkibiades 7y ago

the argument is mostly that it gives people white guilt to enforce immigration because most of the immigrants are non-white. and the people supporting the unlimited migration don’t have to deal with the consequences themselves it also wins millions of future and current hispanic votes by pandering

jobigoud 7y ago

I'll bite because I'm ambivalent about immigration laws. Why should people that just happen to be born in a third world country live a shitty life with no way out? You can't just say they have to do a revolution in their own country, not everyone is interested in activism, why should this be the fight of their life instead of stuff they actually want to do? You were born in a nice place by sheer luck. It's unfair. I like the idea of a fundamental human right to "mobility". In the grand scheme of things a human being should be able to move anywhere as long as they obey local laws, pay local taxes, etc.

vokep 7y ago
>You were born in a nice place by sheer luck. It's unfair. Yes, thats life? Of course where there is abundance we ought to use it to fix the unfairness. But life is unfair. I think it comes down to where do we actually draw the line of abundance. Some feel we're well past it, enough that we shouldn't even have borders, others feel we aren't even close and ought to be quite selective of who gets to stay.
WillPostForFood 7y ago
Why should a homeless person be forced to sleep on the street when you have a perfectly good couch in your living room. Yet you keep your door locked.
- DonaldPShimoda 7y ago
  Because a country is not a house. The analogy is fundamentally flawed. Our government can provide for immigrants in ways that individuals simply cannot.
  - stale2002 7y ago
    > Because a country is not a house. Why shouldn't it be treated as such? Your opinions seems pretty immoral, and leads to homeless people sleeping on the street. > Our government can provide for immigrants in ways that individuals simply cannot. So? That does not change the fact that you indeed are still capable of providing for people in need.
  - hart_russell 7y ago
    The state is product of citizens time and resources. We all contribute. So it's a perfectly apt analogy.
  - WillPostForFood 7y ago
    This is basically saying: I won't help, but I support the government forcing other people to help (and hopefully it won't affect me).
  - fiblye 7y ago
    Governments provide nothing. They make someone else provide. If the government needs a couch, they don’t poof a couch into existence and everyone’s happy. They either take your couch or have someone sit down and make one. It’s bizarre though how many people think governments can simply “provide”. America now can’t even provide for all the struggling people who already live there. You could argue that they could redefine their priorities and focus on immigrants, but that comes at a cost of something else, and people affected by those cuts would not be happy.
meowface 7y ago
There's a tragedy of the commons problem. While I think there's nothing wrong with wanting to move your family from a poorer country to the US, if in theory every person who wanted to do this did do this - from every country (Latin America or otherwise) - it'd eventually become unsustainable. At least not without a huge government program to try to manage it all, which may or may not succeed. Another issue is that criminal organizations can try to exploit this for their own gain, to the detriment of all, and it can become harder and harder to detect or prevent this as the rate increases. Perhaps we'll eventually be in a future where surplus and government and security improvements makes this much easier to manage, and then maybe more countries will start moving to a more open-borders / global union model, but that future is probably at least a century away (probably several centuries). I think we should strive for that future, but that we should also accept pragmatic reality until it happens. And I do think we should probably increase the amount of families we currently accept every year. Especially war refugees. Totally eliminating national boundaries is very different from that, though.
- jobigoud 7y ago
  > it'd eventually become unsustainable. If a sizable fraction of a country started to leave or plan on leaving, it could also force these countries to get their shit together to become more attractive and retain them. Similar to what we have now with counter-measures to brain drains.
  - meowface 7y ago
    If anything, I think they'd just be relieved that dissenters are leaving while true believers / "patriotic citizens" are staying put. Makes politics a lot easier. But I'm sure the reaction would vary a lot by country.
magashna 7y ago
If you can move anywhere then you would have many more economic migrants looking for the best benefits.
rufus_3 7y ago
> sheer luck Not really. Your ancestors worked hard to improve the environment you were born in. It wasn't luck that created western civilization, it was the hard work and ingenuity of the generations that came before us.
- reroute1 7y ago
  Sure, but none of that has anything to do with you or your accomplishments which is where luck enters the equation as to your starting place. For the record I think borders should be secure, but also allow pathways to citizenship.
  - lliamander 7y ago
    > Sure, but none of that has anything to do with you or your accomplishments which is where luck enters the equation as to your starting place. We didn't earn it, but we were given it by our ancestors. While it does behoove us to be generous, it is still ours by right. We also have an obligation to our descendants to preserve it for them. What good is it working to improve the fate of our descendants, if it is only going to be taken away from them because they didn't "earn" it?
    - reroute1 7y ago
      Yes you were given it, which means you were lucky in what you received. By all means try to do the same for your descendants I didn't say anything to the contrary, just that they would be lucky in the same way
4bpp 7y ago
The standard counterargument is that not allowing mobility is what enabled us to have any nice places to begin with, in an "ant and grasshopper" way. Building a "nice" and affluent country is generally a multigenerational project involving plenty of individual sacrifice for the sake of a future that the sacrificing individuals will rarely themselves experience. If Norwegians knew that they all could move to any country they choose at their pleasure at all times, why would they save their oil money in a sovereign wealth fund instead of quitting work, blowing it all on blackjack and hookers right now, then taking out the greatest national credit line their country can secure to buy some more blackjack and hookers, and relocate a few 100km into Sweden once it's all used up? Knowing that the Norwegians would be thinking along those lines, what would stop the Swedes from racing to beat them onto the blackjack-and-hookers train? Now, in reality, Norwegians and Swedes are sufficiently similar and familiar with each other that they probably would be able to predict the other's actions and jointly avoid racing to the bottom, but could you say this about, say, Germans and Egyptians, for more complex downward spirals than "burn through our assets faster than the others get to"? Add to it that the short-sighted policies that actually make the difference between successful and failed countries rarely are so straightforwardly bad as buying blackjack and hookers: more commonly, we'll be talking about economic experiments, corruption and kickbacks for interest groups, and really a handful of policies where we still can't confidently say if they were actually good for a given polity in the long run (space programmes, social programmes , infrastructure megaprojects...), but have to rely on history to naturally select for political processes that crystallise better instincts for their selection. In less abstract terms, I think that especially many right-leaning Americans feel that Latin-American socialism gets close to being an instance of "blackjack and hookers" in the sense of the above metaphor, and in the same vein Germans feel that Levantine... sectarianism?... does. (As in, sitting down and negotiating a sustainable peace with people from other ethnic groups who might be heretics and devil-worshippers is the hardship-and-sacrifice option, whereas using any momentary advantage to enrich your friends and blow up infidels is short-term fun.)
- sgpl 7y ago
  This counterargument conveniently ignores the history of 'European colonization of America from the early 16th century until the incorporation of the colonies into the United States of America [0]'. I'm not the most well-versed on these topic (colonization / mobility) but it would seem that that mobility is what helped shape America into what it is today rather than "not allowing mobility". [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonial_history_of_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonial_history_of_the_United...
mrdependable 7y ago
I was wondering about this topic not long ago as well and came across this article: http://dieoff.com/page99.htm http://dieoff.com/page99.htm (not sure if that's the original link I saw but it is the same paper). Basically it's about there being a curve for population size vs standard of living. We can't control the size of the population for the entire world, but a country can for themselves. I don't really have much of an opinion on it, and can't say whether the article is bunk, but I did find it an interesting read.
hart_russell 7y ago
Yeah, and I wasn't born to billionaires. So, we should take all the money from rich people and redistribute and become communist?
ng12 7y ago
> Why should people that just happen to be born in a third world country live a shitty life with no way out What about someone born in a Mississippi housing project where everyone around them is illiterate? Or in some rust belt slum with drug-addicted parents? What about someone simply unable to get the mental health they need so they end up living on Skid Row? Lots of people are born into very shitty circumstances, and if we have problems taking care of American citizens I don't see how you can make the argument we need to open our borders for everyone in the world born in tough circumstances.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
CapricornNoble 7y ago
>>>You can't just say they have to do a revolution in their own country, Uh, yes I can. The US exists because the population staged a rebellion. I don't find it unconscionable to expect others to undertake the same effort our forebears did to improve their situation. >>>You were born in a nice place by sheer luck. It's unfair. Some of us are also taller than average as well, which is directly correlated with total career earnings. Sheer luck and unfair. Outcomes will ALWAYS vary due to the inherent genetic variations and capabilities in the human population.

akhilcacharya 7y ago

I'll bite. It's not bad or racist to enforce immigration laws. Very few people in America support legitimately open borders and I do not either; the only ones that do are purist libertarians. Faux concern for these issues however is a hammer used by bad and, yes, racist people in order to batter people who are overwhelmingly poorer and non-white. There is no evidence that a physical wall is a necessary investment and there are zero lives improved by separating children from their families as a "deterrent" during a massive humanitarian crisis. A decade ago, I used to think that the Republican concern over illegal immigration (which is absolutely a legitimate concern), was truly out of concern for those exploited by the system and out of concern for the American worker. I thought that those calling this concern as "anti immigrant" were being disingenuous. Of course, that was before I realized people like Stephen Miller are really saying the quiet part loud these days.

gotoeleven 7y ago
As I understand it, separating children from parents isn't some sort of arbitrary punishment, it's literally the only way that immigration laws can be enforced when adults are traveling with children. This is because of court decisions which say children can't be detained more than 20 days. The alternative is to just release the parents and children and tell them to show up for their court date, which they usually don't do. So if you're saying we shouldn't separate children from parents, then you're for defacto open borders. The humanitarian crisis at the border is caused by lots of people showing up at the border, right? It seems like the only way to stop the crisis then is to get people to stop showing up at the border, and the only way to do that is to enforce immigration laws. Is there another answer?
- akhilcacharya 7y ago
  > separating children from parents isn't some sort of arbitrary punishment, it's literally the only way that immigration laws can be enforced when adults are traveling with children. We've spent 230+ years having borders without separating children at gunpoint to give up for adoption [0]. It was explicitly called a deterrent by Jeff Sessions [1]. The cruelty is the point. [0]. https://theintercept.com/2018/07/01/separated-children-adoption-immigration/ https://theintercept.com/2018/07/01/separated-children-adopt... [1]. https://www.axios.com/sessions-says-he-hopes-child-separation-policy-will-serve-as-a-deterrent-e1b7d3b2-60ef-4099-a3d2-2c3ce986dca3.html https://www.axios.com/sessions-says-he-hopes-child-separatio... > So if you're saying we shouldn't separate children from parents, then you're for defacto open borders. No, not at all.

empath75 7y ago

If our immigration laws were sane and humane I’d feel better about enforcing them, but sometimes laws are so unjust that the right thing to do is violate them. It’s funny that you’ll see people on one hand talk about the laws Uber breaks or laws on piracy as bullshit inconveniences that need to be disrupted and on the other hand talk about immigration law as if it was holy writ.

anigbrowl 7y ago

Your question is quite loaded and rests upon false premises - for example, your assertion that people don't show up for court hearings rehashes an anti-immigrant trope that has little basis in fact. Attendance rates are actually quite high, close to 100% for those who have attorneys and still high even for those who don't: https://trac.syr.edu/immigration/reports/562/ https://trac.syr.edu/immigration/reports/562/ It's a deep complex subject that can't be summed up in a short (or even a long) comment. If your understanding of it is based on misleading tropes that you've heard from pundits or political figures, it might be worth taking up the issue as a research project or taking some classes so that you are not taken in by slanderous misinformation.

gotoeleven 7y ago
I think you've been misinformed. The trac study is looking at people who have been here for years who have been going through the system. They show up to court at very high rates. The "don't show up for court" people were part of a program by the EOIR (which is part of the DOJ) to expedite the cases of newly arrived family units in 10 cities. They very largely did not show up. You can read about it here: https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Asher%20Testimony.pdf https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Asher%20Testi... So it seems like there's something very different about these two different groups of asylum seekers. Anyway no need for the high dudgeon about 'slanderous misinformation.'