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Earlier quoted context omitted.
What a novel, insightful conclusion. Thanks for sharing.
Funny, how the anti ICE crowd wants people to immigrate illegally. What about voting somebody to the office and changing the laws instead?
WITH THAT SAID, one side-effect of having such extensive laws is that it really depends on how much you enforce them. If you make laws so difficult and hard that anyone can fail them, but remain quite selective on how you enforce them, that means you have a green light to deport the people that are deemed undesirable, while also having the option to turn a blind eye to desirable people.
One small error can easily get some random Indian or Mexican worker deported, even if they've worked in the US for 20+ years, if the state feels so. Meanwhile I suspect they wouldn't do a damn thing if it turns out that some immigration billionaire outright lied on their paperwork.
Also, I hate to pull the fascism card, but one hallmark of fascism is to make laws so rigid (and punishment draconian) that everyone is potentially a criminal, but then very selectively enforce those laws.
I don't think US immigration laws are rooted in fascism, not at all - they're the product of decades / centuries of complex immigration...but how you enforce them, is a different thing.
Question is - why would anyone with cash immigrate to US? Doing business there does not require citizenship. What is it more than doing business that attracts people if one has a citizenship of just about any first world country? I mean, America is about making money, but those people already have money, what else? Citizenship for kids? Just give birth in US. Question again, is why. Top concern for the rich is taxes.…
His reasons for leaving the UK make interesting reading in current circumstances:
> The USA is putting curbs on surveillance, expanding its national healthcare, and there are mass parental boycotts of standardised testing in its public schools. The UK just elected a Tory majority government that's going to continue to slash and burn the welfare state, attack schools, health, legal aid and teachers, and impose mandatory cryptographic backdoors in the technology we use to talk to each other. They've even announced that merely not breaking the law is no reason to expect that you won't be arrested.
https://boingboing.net/2015/06/29/why-im-leaving-london.html
Edit: improved wording below and added quote
A lot of his other problems are London specific. Why do people forget the rest of the UK exists?
> London is a city whose two priorities are being a playground for corrupt global elites who turn neighbourhoods into soulless collections of empty safe-deposit boxes in the sky, and encouraging the feckless criminality of the finance industry. These two facts are not unrelated.
> My office rent has doubled this decade. We live in 600 square feet, up six flights of stairs, and can't possibly afford anything even remotely larger.
> We've seen the writing on the wall: this is not a city for families. It's not a city for people running small firms. It's not a city for people who earn their living in the arts. We've given it the best we have, and we're getting out because we can.
Summary: legal immigration is very difficult to impossible. The solution, IMO, isn't "just enter illegally". When you're not a citizen then, quite frankly, the fact that you want to immigrate doesn't matter. It's the country that says whether you should get in or not.
It's the laws of physics that decide whether you actually get in or not.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Immigrants account for ~98% of the American population.
100% if you go back a little further. Large hominids aren’t native to this continent. BTW have you ever thought about what incredible bad asses people had to be to cross the Bering strait during the ice age with Stone Age tech? We could definitely settle space if we had the will. It’d probably be more comfortable, safer, and easier, even in the early days, than that.
Doctorow makes a lot of good points and I get how terrifying the state is when it gets riled up like this. That said... 1) There seems to be an assumption here that everyone in the US agrees there should be brisk immigration. To me, if the laws in-practice make it impossible to immigrate then that would suggest that the polity might not believe that. There also seems to be a common belief that just because the laws a…
Well then explain to me how the US Marijuana industry exists despite it being a schedule 1 controlled substance.
Laws are a social construct and their enforcement is based on what society thinks is ok. People don’t want to throw their community members is jail for marijuana. They do want to throw murderers in jail. They don’t want to throw upstanding community members who just don’t have the right immigration status in jail either.
Summary: legal immigration is very difficult to impossible. The solution, IMO, isn't "just enter illegally". When you're not a citizen then, quite frankly, the fact that you want to immigrate doesn't matter. It's the country that says whether you should get in or not.
For the true asylum seekers, that feat for their life wherever they're from for example, the laws of the country they're entering just don't matter. If it's a choice between life as an illegal or death I think we would all choose life.
For the economic cases, sure. That's where the legal immigration system applies. And I agree with what you said about rules and each country gets to decide.
1. Personal. In the aftermath of 9/11, a simple switch from F1 Student Visa to H1 work visa became a perfect Kafkaesque nightmare. The consulate denied the visa without giving a reason. After two months of non-response, my company reached out to the congressman's office. Apparently, the consulate wanted a copy of my transcript and they reached out to my university, but did not tell me that. The university would not release my transcript without my permission, but did not tell me that DHS was asking for it. It was an infinite loop that left me out.
2. In 2006-2007, I was consulting for Hormel Foods (this time with a legit green card). There was a raid at one of their plants, and I was talking to a couple of middle managers who commented how difficult the jobs are, and people only last for a short time. Only migrants are willing to do the job. I would later learn that meat packing jobs used to be unionized, and that put limits on the number of animals processed per shift. The deregulation of the eighties did away with unions and regulations, and created an untenable work situation. This can ONLY be done by disposable labor, which happens to be immigrants.
A simple solution to the immigration problem would be to arrest the CEO of the company employing illegals. Perhaps that will percolate down to the line level to make the jobs humane.