Posted by headalgorithm 23 hours ago
Here in the real world, every American I know knows that the only way for "normal" (non-rich, non-connected, non-extraordinary) person to legally immigrate is to marry an American citizen and have them sponsor you. Literally everyone knows the average "illegal immigrant" living in the US isn't eligible for citizenship and couldn't obtain citizenship legally. Exactly zero people think that any (let alone most) "illegal immigrants" could have just "followed the rules" and been able to live here legally. The reason they are "illegal immigrants" is because there's no legal way, other than marrying an American.
A lot of people would prefer if even family sponsorships didn't exist. Many people think of that as "gaming the system" because they allow "average" people to be immigrants. I assume Republicans want to get rid of this.
Do you honestly believe that people who say "Why don't [they] come in legally?" are complaining about a lack of administrative process? Do you really, honestly believe that? Because if you do I have a bridge in Brooklyn I can give you a great deal on.
"Why don't [they] come in legally?" is just conservative doublespeak for for "they don't belong here." It's begging the question and everyone knows that, even the person saying it. They know there's no legal avenue for the vast majority of "illegal immigrants."
People from cosmopolitan well-educated world traveler tech-connected circles are common on HN, but are extreme outliers. I would agree that the overwhelming majority of those sorts are aware of it. The general public? No.
It's true that many don't want anyone (or certain anyones) to come in at all and are saying those kinds of things as a deflection or smokescreen, but plenty of others saying "they should just come in legally" don't realize what a feat they're demanding. They don't know what any immigration process anywhere looks like, in the US or elsewhere. They don't know what ours has been like in the past, either, at all (in fact I bet many think it's been trending less strict and difficult over time, which, LOL). But they're still comfortable suggesting people should simply find a legal route to come in (while, again, having no idea what that actually means).
While this question is definitely used in the way you, I’ve heard it come from the mouths of more legal immigrants than I can count.
It’s not just conservatives who are saying this.
"Chain migration" however is more questionable.
I think Republicans didn’t really understand that this existed until recently. And yes, many want to get rid of it, because it’s a loophole in the skilled immigration system. We apply aggressive filters to 65,000 H1Bs or whatever, and hundreds of thousands of low skill people come over because they’re someone’s cousin.
Why does "the skilled immigration system" represent the whole immigration system? What makes family sponsorship a "loophole" to H1Bs, when family sponsorship could instead be framed as an equivalent form of legal immigration with a different purpose?
> and hundreds of thousands of low skill people come over because they’re someone’s cousin.
Accepting the "low skill" framing and setting aside the fact that family-sponsored immigrants can have "high skill" without proving it through the H1B process, I don't think it makes sense to have an immigration system based solely on "high skill", because not every member of a family should have to be "high skill" for the entire family to move to the US.
If I was an acolyte of Freud or Jung I would say that this dichotomy between "easygration" and "immigration" (im is for impossible, right?) is because easygration is the result of sex and being born in a country (yes yes pedants, that's changing now and not universal, but swallow your pedantry presently and persist with this a moment), and the "STATE" in its everquest to control all aspects of human existence, necessarily seeks to control and intermediate sex and all its analogs (as sex is the intimacy of individuals it seeks to control, it must get between there, too). So if sex-migration (by being born) is easy (as some concessions must be made), then the corresponding path must be a gauntlet gated by the difficulty proportional to how much the state wants to intermediate the individual's intimate affairs. The hard path of immigration, is then a mirror of the control the state ultimately seeks to exercise over every aspect of existence, but which for now, it is constrained by the modesty and norms of its people to resist.
TL;DR - immigration is hard because states can't control yet sex and intimacy as much as they want, so they control the next best thing, that thing which is accepted to arise from the result of sex and intimacy - citizenship or right of abode by birth.
Also one can make the obvious metaphors with borders, porosity, and penetration. One might be inclined to say: the state must currently tolerate the annoying promiscuity of its individuals, so it, in spite and compensation, becomes ultrachaste in turn, wrt its own intimate borders.
But I am not an acolyte of Freud or Jung. Tho sometimes I think as above.
What stuck out to me is that despite obviously being a smart and educated person and having the help of immigration lawyers, the author has made a mistake. Sepcifically this:
> I checked in with our lawyers and was told that the kid couldn't get her certificate of citizenship until she turned 18
When you apply to be naturalized (N400) then your children become US citizens by operation of law as long as they are in your physical custody and are under 18. The "certificate of citizenship" the author is talking about is called Form N600 and it specifically doesn't require the child to be over 18. Go and read the instructions for it [1].
If you know nothing about this, you might be confused because the author says his daughter has a US passport. Isn't that the same thing? No.
This comes up a lot when US citizens adopt children from outside the US. This essentially causes them to become US citizens (there's a whole process) but some parents fail to go through the application and formally recognize their child as a US citizen.
But how does the child travel internationally before any of this happens? There's an allowance for them to get a US passport even though they may not be US citizens. Weird, huh? Some people mistakenly think just having a US passport is proof of US citizenship but it isn't.
So here's my advice to anyone who has a child when they naturalize or adopts a child from overseas: IMMEDIATELY file an N600 for that child so they have proof they are a US citizen. This can be incredibly difficult and costly to reconstruct later when paperwork may have gone missing.
[1]: https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/document/forms/n-6...
It’s not hard. It’s just time consuming and the wait times are very long. But it’s really not difficult to fill out the forms and I never used a lawyer.
Your greencard or documentation may be of no consequence to these masked men, it's up to their mercy or their face scanning app to determine the status you actually have. They may accept your documents at face value OR just deport you no questions asked.
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.
I'm puzzled how you came to this conclusion since its left completely unsubstantiated in your comment. It's not "enforced equally seriously" in the US itself let alone another country. European citizens for one had no fear of being sent to a detention camp or deported speedily prior to the latest Trump adminstration.
I guess the big difference here is that we don't have immigration officers roaming the streets, snatching up people and shipping them to random holding centers. But you can *absolutely* expect to be apprehended if you've received notice, and don't do anything about it. Same goes for criminals that roam around (which is easy due to Schengen), get caught, and are ordered to leave.
From time to time you'll read stories here about people that came here as kids, their parents lied on the application (said the were from Afghanistan/Iraq or similar worn-torn countries back then, but in reality came from some neighboring countries), and now they too have been order to leave - even though they have zero connections with their birth countries.
In Norway, a country with population 5.6 million, around 2500 people were deported in 2024. Per capita that's around 3-4 times less than the US - but we don't necessarily have the same types of immigrants.
We don't have to guess this. We have evidence. Elon Musk is worked illegally in the US [1] and then later obtained a green card then citizenship. He didn't acquire his green card through marriage to a US citizen (where unauthorized work is forgiven).
So if you look at his original I485 (adjustment of status) and N400 (naturalization), you would need to see how he answered the questions about unauthorized work. If he answered yes, he may have been ineligible. If he answered no, then that's a misrepresentation and the government could denaturalize him on the basis that his original green card was improperly granted.
Will any of that ever happen? No.
[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/oct/26/elon-musk...
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.
The comment saying immigrants are 98% of the population of the US is not useful because they are people whose ancestors have been their for many generations.
Defining anyone who has immigrant ancestry as an immigrant is pointless. Sometimes it is useful to talk about, say, second generation immigrants, but not endlessly.
For one thing, after a generation or two the culture of people descended from immigrants diverges from that of their ancestors, even if their ancestry is limited to just one culture.
It's self-evident that this difference between settlers and immigrants has a huge impact. Australia, Canada, and the United States are very similar to each other in terms of language, law, economics, etc. But the U.S. separated from the parent society, Britain, 250 years ago. Subsequently, those countries underwent completely different immigration patterns. So why are those countries so similar? It's because of the difference between settlers and immigrants.
19th century Germans and Scandinavians are difficult to categorize. On one hand, the nation was well established by the time they came. On the other hand, they were the original settlers, creating greenfield cities, in large swaths of the country. Depending on how you count them, a majority of Americans may not have immigrant ancestry. But it’s surely a very large fraction.
I don't see how the numbers support that claim.
What percentage of the population would you like to see made up of immigrants? Would you make immigration harder if the immigrant populating was above 1%?
If it got too high, would you start deporting people or forcing native people to have more children?
According to a 2021 Cato survey--which is a pro-immigration outfit--the median response to "how many immigrants should be allowed each year" was 500,000: https://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/styles/aside_3x/pu.... If we enforced that number long term, we'd probably end up with a foreign-born population under 5%, as we had in 1970. That seems like an appropriate number to foster cultural homogeneity and a high level of social cohesion.
Just tell me, have you ever gone through it? My guess? You haven't as you would think a little different of how easy it is.
And yes, I have.
It's possible it exists in other countries, I don't know that.
As for taxation of income derived from business, these are either completely or mostly tax-exempt in many EU countries (Cyprus, Malta, Greece for 100K a year, Italy for 300K a year, Spain if you do a lot of paperwork, Portugal in some places, probably there's more). There's no US equivalent.
For any kind of acute/emergency care, you don't need "best" hospitals, just good ones are fine. For more complex conditions, you can always travel for treatment/live temporarily.
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.
Also, perhaps the pain is deliberate as to limit the inflow?
Again, vote into office people who do it the way you want and don't try to rip law apart when you're the minority.
Even if you think ICE is the answer, which frankly it's not and even a second of introspection will reveal this, you cannot just pretend that the current situation is desirable.
The undeniable reality is that this administration has absolutely no intention of ending illegal immigration. None. They intend to expand the police state, shut down dissent, and bring the US into a fascist state.
You want to end illegal immigration? Fine. Just start locking up executives who hire undocumented people. It's easy, about 1000x easier than ICE, and much, MUCH less expensive.
Will the Republicans ever propose anything even close to this? No. Because the reality is that that would immediately implode the economy of most red states, and they can't do that to their constituency. I mean, the red states that don't already have a shit economy.
Besides, you cant rage against the machine if you destroy the machine. They NEED illegal immigration for their fascist wet dream. Without that justification for surveillance and violence, they have nothing left.
Look, at the end of the day the only thing keeping states like Georgia from going under, besides the welfare of more economically successful blue states, is a steady supply of cheap labor willing to do dirty work. Even Texas, for Christ's sake, is only economically successful because of, like, 3 blue little dots. They're like Atlas carrying the economy of Texas on their shoulders. Outside of that it's... you guessed it, cheap labor doing dirty work!
That continues to become less true, in the cruelest ways [1]:
> One man told KBI that Border Patrol agents tore his birth certificate up in front of him. He managed to save his Mexican identity card because he had hidden it in his shoe.
[1] https://www.aclu.org/news/immigrants-rights/border-patrols-a...
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 are unfair, stupid, counterproductive or destructive that they can be ignored and that isn't how laws work. If the law is terrible it is still the law. If it doesn't let you do what you want to do then that desired course of action is not a legal option.
2) A big part of the reason that the US is engaging in this (rather terrifying) deportation is because of the appearance that process ran, came up with a basic agreement about how immigration would work and then people started ignoring it on the basis that it was inconvenient. I don't see how a country can be run that way, there has to be a hard choice made about open migration vs. a welfare system.
And while I'm commenting on the debacle that is the Trump anti-immigration campaign, I will just upset everyone and note that people have to accept that governments sometimes go on a rampage. It has happened before, it will happen again and it is really quite important to keep the reins on them and try not to give them control of important things like food, medicine, what people can say to each other, control of the financial system, etc, etc. A bit of principled strategic thinking goes a long way on this stuff.
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.
