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All I care about is immigration. Am I happy that boorish, poorly dressed morons who don’t know the first thing about chesterton’s fence are now in power unraveling a century of American hegemony for no real reason? No, of course not. But this is only happening because the people who opened the gates and didn’t close them went against the will and welfare of the public for decades too long.
The immigration situation could have been resolved firmly in the mid to late 90s, when even California voted resoundingly for highly punitive measures against illegal migrants and at the height of Pat Buchanan’s popularity and the height of American prosperity and global power. Nobody listened. Now, the idiots are in power, and likely won’t even do anything substantive about the immigration issue, but the lesson for politicians is this - until the immigration situation is fixed, populists who promise to tear down institutions will keep getting elected, endlessly.
I won’t defend this administration, though I voted for Trump (not that my vote matters). But I will hold my nose and vote for the most-electorally-viable anti immigration candidate in every single race, in every single jurisdiction in which I can vote, forever until something is done, come what may.
Of legal immigrants, yes, but 1) recently, we have had more of illegals immigrants than legal, and 2) legal family migration is to a large degree downstream of illegal immigration. Illegals come here, and get married to legal residents, which enables them, and their families to start chain migration. They give birth to children who have been treated as US citizens, which again allows them to bring their illegal parents and older siblings through family process, and also to get married to illegals who then are legalized.
As it happens, Trump actually tries to do something about that, with his EO stopping birthright citizenship to illegals. We will see what SCOTUS says about this, but the implications of it could be enormous. For example, it will discourage illegals from starting families in here, because their children will be in bad legal situation. It will make it easier to deport parents of small children if they are no longer US citizen children.
Yes, that’s why I said “get married to legal residents”.
Anything involving legal immigration system is “very difficult” if you talk to pro immigration advocates, but as it happens, I personally know multiple people who went exactly this route, and it worked out for them.
Who do you think are the millions of people coming on family based visa? Are you suggesting that 200k of former employment based green card recipients are bringing 5 family members from abroad each?
You sneak through the border with a husband and a kid. You give birth to an another child. Your child is a citizen. Once he becomes old enough, he sponsors your and his brother’s family based green card.
OK, and how exactly do you think US citizens come about to have foreign family? Again, think it through. These US citizens are almost universally downstream of some relatively recent immigration event. They either became naturalized citizens, or were born to immigrants. People who were born to two American-born parents are highly unlikely to have any foreign family that they could even consider getting in here.
So, basically all family based immigration is downstream of recent immigration. If you ignore the family based legal immigration, then legal immigration has been absolutely overwhelmed by illegal immigration for many years now.
What I am arguing here is that large chunk, if not a majority of legal family based immigration is downstream of some illegal immigration event that happened in recent history. For example, US citizen born to illegal parents, or formerly illegal aliens who legalized their presence in some way (and there are ways to do it for quite a lot of people).
Therefore, when you say that
You are missing the forest for trees: yes, family based chain migration have brought more people here than fake asylum claimants, but the point is that fake asylum claimants will cause more family based migration in future, so reducing the former also reduces the latter.
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