teamosil
DP Veteran
- Joined
- Oct 17, 2009
- Messages
- 6,623
- Reaction score
- 2,226
- Location
- San Francisco
- Gender
- Male
- Political Leaning
- Liberal
The only way to solve illegal immigration, or really any problem, is with both the carrot and the stick. Just going only for enforcement won't work. It would just be like another "war on drugs"- a giant hole you can pour money and civil rights into without ever making a dent in it...
The real solution is FIRST to set up a path to legality that you want people to follow. Maybe a guest worker program with a path to citizenship that is far longer than the normal avenue, where they are paying taxes, but still ineligible for most social services. Then you tighten up the border, although it's true that is pretty futile given how long our border is and how much legal traffic goes over it. Then you give that like 6 months for people to come out of hiding and get signed up. Only then do you increase enforcement. You use enforcement to go after the straglers, not as your primary approach. It's ludicrously impossible to try to locate and physically capture 10 million people who don't want to be caught... We could spend our whole GDP on it and never get half of them. They live here, have jobs and families and cars and places to live here. They're not just going to up and leave and there are too many to catch, so the only option is to give them a viable option then nudge them towards that. Just beating on them when they have no viable option is just brutality for the sake of brutality.
The real solution is FIRST to set up a path to legality that you want people to follow. Maybe a guest worker program with a path to citizenship that is far longer than the normal avenue, where they are paying taxes, but still ineligible for most social services. Then you tighten up the border, although it's true that is pretty futile given how long our border is and how much legal traffic goes over it. Then you give that like 6 months for people to come out of hiding and get signed up. Only then do you increase enforcement. You use enforcement to go after the straglers, not as your primary approach. It's ludicrously impossible to try to locate and physically capture 10 million people who don't want to be caught... We could spend our whole GDP on it and never get half of them. They live here, have jobs and families and cars and places to live here. They're not just going to up and leave and there are too many to catch, so the only option is to give them a viable option then nudge them towards that. Just beating on them when they have no viable option is just brutality for the sake of brutality.