dckingsfan wrote:@Nate - I want to see if I can better understand your stance(s) on immigration. Let me know where I am missing the nuance.
1) You feel that we have no effective immigration policy today.
2) Trump came in with a campaign policy (implied) of no new immigration. I would guess this is where you align. And his zero tolerance immigration policy matches up with that campaign policy. You feel that immigrants don't have any implied rights in this country until they are citizens - so the policy is okay although not optimal. Anything else represents open boarders.
3) It is better to have zero tolerance vs. the open (implied) boarders that we have today. This is a good place to take a stand until if/when/probably never immigration reform comes.
4) It is in the best interests of the Democrats (although not the country) to have an open border policy.
5) You feel immigration has put economic pressure on the country, has driven up the costs of our social services and has impacted the wages of our non-skilled labor.
6) DACA - I am not sure I understand your position.
7) You like the idea of a wall and greater enforcement of the boarder.
8) You do not like birthright immigration.
9) You would like very minimal immigration if possible.
10) Once illegal immigrants are in the country, we do not have an effective process or cost effective way of removing them.
#1. I'd say it's not very effective, but certainly what we have now is better than a total absence of any policy. There are real live people who actually do catch and deport people at the border.
#2. I don't think Trump has ever advocated no new immigration. He has advocated strict enforcement of legal immigration, a ban on Muslim immigration, the end of chain migration, and a more merit-based system for legal immigration. I assume he wants less total immigration but I don't know if he explicitly has stated this. I've never heard him say he wants literally no immigration.
#3. Yes
#4. Yes. In the best interested of
elected Democrats. Not necessarily their constituents.
#5. Yes.
#6. I'm against the notion that we should be letting people in simply because they're children. However, I'll cede that immigrants aged 14-24 are likely to make more positive economic contributions than either very young or very old immigrants. Accordingly, I'd be willing to allow the DACA recipients who have already been here a while and integrated themselves in the economy to stay as a means of compromising to get other aspects of my preferred immigration agenda passed.
#7. Yes. And the wall doesn't have to be coast-to-coast. Clearly, in the harsher, more remote regions, border security can be managed with simple fencing, natural barriers, drones and patrols.
#8. Correct. Providing an incentive for illegal aliens to sneak across the border and have anchor babies doesn't seem to make any logical sense to me. As a nation, we should have affirmative control on who we permit to have citizenship.
#9. Yes. For now anyway. I think having immigration levels and near record highs for 50 straight years is enough for now. There's nothing morally wrong with reducing those levels for a while and taking the time to "digest" and integrate all of the recent immigrants. This was done from 1921 through 1965 to absorb the immigrant wave of 1880-1920. It didn't turn us all into Jew-hating Holocaust perpetrators.
#10 Correct. For starters, I would like EVerify to take away the jobs incentive for illegal immigration and to punish business owners for hiring illegals at slave wages to gain a competitive edge over law-abiding competitors.
- so not a good anecdote.
