This is actually a decent article but it misses a few things.<p>People need to understand that undocumented migrants are nothing more than a political football. The article (correctly) points out that nobody really wants to "solve" the problem. I'd go even further and say there is no problem. It's completely made up.<p>The article points out that if you <i>really</i> wanted to address this (made up) problem, you'd go after the employers. Nobody does that. It has been tried, however. For example, the Alabama agriculture sector collapsed when they tried [1].<p>Chicken farms are notorious for bad practices. Underpay undocumented migrants. When they start demanding safer working conditions and more pay, you simply call ICE for a sweep, pay a token fine and then start with a new batch.<p>Undocumented migrants, from the perspective of employers, are about cheap labor and suppressing wages. The easiest solution for this is to document them. We used to do this. It was called the Bracero program [2].<p>Top of this political theater is the "migrant crime" panic. For example, in a country with >20,000 homicides per year, so far this year 27 of them have been committed by noncitizens [3] and that includes documented and undocumented people.<p>Construction and agriculture are utterly dependent on undocumented migrant labor.<p>[1]: <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/oct/14/alabama-immigration-law-workers" rel="nofollow">https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/oct/14/alabama-immigr...</a><p>[2]: <a href="https://guides.loc.gov/latinx-civil-rights/bracero-program" rel="nofollow">https://guides.loc.gov/latinx-civil-rights/bracero-program</a><p>[3]: <a href="https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/stats/cbp-enforcement-statistics/criminal-noncitizen-statistics" rel="nofollow">https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/stats/cbp-enforcement-statistic...</a>
It may be worth noting that a significant proportion - 42% - of "other-foreign-nationals" or "undocumented immigrants" arrived here at airports or other ports with a legal visa, and then overstayed their visa, thus never crossing the "border" (implicitly with Mexico) that looms large in all discussions of this topic.<p>[1]<a href="https://sgp.fas.org/crs/homesec/R47848.pdf#:~:text=An%20estimated%2042%25%20of%20the%20approximately%2011,legally%20but%20overstayed%20their%20period%20of%20admission" rel="nofollow">https://sgp.fas.org/crs/homesec/R47848.pdf#:~:text=An%20esti...</a>.
<i>> But one metric stayed virtually static: the number of managers arrested for hiring undocumented immigrants.</i><p>This was especially obvious during the last administration* when ICE was raiding businesses left and right to deport people and as far as I know, almost never went after the meat packers and farms and other businesses that knowingly hired the migrant workers. As long as the employers don’t see any penalties or they’re so small as to be the cost of doing business, there will always have a large pool of undocumented immigrants who will replace the ones deported.<p>I think if they were actually investigated the well would run deep with plenty of employers actively helping their new hires commit fraud to get past their I9 verification. It’s unfortunate that this approach has never been politically viable because I suspect a majority of the population is willing to approach illegal immigration humanely while punishing the actual lawbreakers upstream to address the core economic impacts.<p>* It was obvious to anyone paying attention during the Bush, Obama, and Biden administrations too but the media focus during Trump’s made it especially stark how little enforcement was going on at the employer level.
Aside from the content of this article and its merits (or problems), that header photo is just excellent. The photographer perfectly captured the visual essence of what it sometimes means to be an illegal migrant.
So why isn’t this a problem in China, Russia, Korea, Japan, or Taiwan? There are many poor countries with people who would benefit from the increased standard of living in the countries I listed.<p>Also it’s obvious that many incoming migrants are not from central or South America, there are significant numbers of people coming from Africa and Asia to the US southern border. Is the only way to secure the US southern border to raise the standard of living in every country in the world?
It's the same situation in most countries.<p>You need young, cheap labour from somewhere in order to sustain domestic agricultural and manufacturing industries. In the US it comes from people crossing the border, UK it was Schengen migration and in Australia legal immigration via loopholes that were never closed.<p>And as we've seen in the UK the minute that goes away those businesses fold en masse as either (a) they make themselves uncompetitive to attract domestic workers or (b) they don't and they have no workers at all.
borders are simply meant to indicate the demarcation of a process : they are dynamic and permeable : to make them literally concrete is folly of the highest order.
To have an honest debate about immigration, we need to admit two things: First, that the issue is global and is affecting most developed nations. Second, that the primary concern is demographic change, not the economics of immigration.<p>This demographic change is the primary reasons for the "populist uprising" of Brexit, Trump and the recent victories of right-wing parties in Europe and, in my opinion, will likely provoke a civil war in at least one Western country in the near future.<p>Demographics arguably determine the future of nations, and we have been under this bizarre delusion the last few decades that it was no big deal that mass migration was causing demographics of many nations to radically change.