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I am very pro-mass deportation but it seems nearly impossible to do at scale in practice with current laws regardless of the money/political capital thrown at it. I understand that we haven’t even really been trying to enforce immigration laws and have in fact been showering illegal immigrants with money and benefits, but even if we stop all of that, I don’t think we can make a serious dent in the illegal immigrant population.
I’m Jose Gonzalez from Mexico, I cross the border illegally without being apprehended, and go live at my cousins apartment in El Paso. I work as a day laborer paid in cash, don’t have a bank account, and have never had a formal interaction with the state where my fingerprints or anything were taken. ICE raids my workplace and I tell them I’m Jose Gonzalez, I’m a US citizen, and I don’t say another word the whole time. How could they affirmatively prove that I’m not? I don’t understand how anyone who wasn’t apprehended and fingerprinted at the border can be deported without significant time being put into an investigation. What’s the way around this unless we can change the law so that the burden of proof is on the individual to prove citizenship?
It seems possible that a lot of the recent wave that claimed asylum could be deported, but I’d imagine that still leaves ~5-10 million who did it the old fashioned way. I think the only way to seriously mass deport is to make it impossible to work as a non-citizen, which would be massively disruptive to agriculture, restaurants, construction etc. in the short term and would be extremely difficult and probably have costly effects to the economy (as far as the costs of compliance for small businesses, not strawberries being more expensive) to enforce perpetually.
Like, on the spot? Nobody carries around proof of citizenship.
I have a drivers license that proves I’m a citizen because my state offers it so some people do…
That proves that you were a citizen (or a legal alien) when it was issued, it doesn't mean you are one now.
Isn't that an impossibly high standard?
Like, you can prove that you were issued a driver's license, but you can't prove that you have a valid one now. I'm sure there's a way around that issue.
The way around the issue is that the cop takes your DL back to the squad car and looks you up in the state database of drivers' licenses. There's no analogous database of citizens.
Then it's not so much "Nobody carries around..." as "There is nothing that could be carried for...". That seems like a bigger problem.
Yes. If you want effective in-country immigration enforcement, then you need a citizen register and either ID cards or a trustworthy biometric database so ID can be checked online. (Only Estonia has successfully implemented the latter to date, and it gets harder roughly quadratically as your population increases.)
Given the ubiquity of driving licenses as ID and that the SSA already has a de facto citizen register, this would be easy for the US to do - although a few long-standing illegal residents with fraudulently acquired SSNs (or genuine ones acquired on a now-expired working visa) will slip through the net. This is particularly true for the US because birthright citizenship makes the whole problem easier - the hardest part of verifying citizenship in non-birthright countries is verifying parent's status at the time of birth. But the people who are most committed to stronger immigration enforcement are by and large the same people who are deeply committed to the idea that the Anglosphere doesn't need no stinking citizen register and is not a papieren, bitte culture, nein und fock auf - so it doesn't happen.
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