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They scare the illegals by deporting them back to their country of origin. For most illegals, that is a very scary thing. If you have payed your life savings to some smuggler to get out of some shithole, journeyed far in shitty conditions, perhaps risked your life when crossing the border, and then get ripped out of the existence you build for yourself and instead land right back in the shithole you started from, that is a fucking scary thing. Compared to that, it matters little if you dress up ICE as teletubbies or in Hugo Boss uniforms.
Personally, if I was an illegal, I would try to slave away for some American farm or hotel owner, because that will mean I will not get deported, and hope things will blow over in a few years.
The people who you presumably want gone are not going to self-deport. Likely, even if ICE shot them in the street on discovery half of them would rather risk hiding in the US than going back.
The people you are deterring are the ones who have other options, and are mostly legally in the US. Koreans, Europeans. They see that the US is very bent on kicking out foreigners, and for them a few weeks of imprisonment between their visa being invalidated and them getting deported would actually matter.
Relative to citizens they are slaves.
Problem is, [relative] slavery to Americans is preferable to living in the countries they come from.
Blue tribe technically could make that argument, but because their ur-grievance and founding myth is built
witharound slave labor, they would never in a million years do that.The US is in an anti-slavery mood, and is now more critically examining visas for evidence of slavery. (And sure, one could hold the Korean example of misused B visas up as a standard of "they didn't necessarily know at the time their duties would require them to violate US anti-slavery law"... but that's the textbook definition of human trafficking.)
Funny, I do not see Trump caring about the slavery-like aspect of illegal immigration at all. His refusal to go after illegals who keep the farm and hotel industry running means that he has placed these people in more slave-like conditions, if anything.
Before, a farm worker had the option to go to Home Depot instead and try his luck as a day laborer. Under Trump, he will get rounded up by ICE if he does this. So his employer is not only giving him his meager paycheck, but also legal security.
In general, I see the relationship between an illegal and their employer a bit like the relationship of a 16yo runaway living in the apartment of her 20-something boyfriend: while it might be positive sum for both participants compared to the next best alternative, and I can certainly imagine instances of such a relationship with zero abuse going on, there is also the fact that the intrinsic power imbalance makes such a relationship very ripe for abuse.
Of course, the blue tribe does not talk about it because that would mean acknowledging illegals, and the red tribe is mostly fine with brown people coming into the US as long as they know their place (working on the orchards, far away from the citizens).
I have heard anecdotal accounts of illegal immigrants effectively forced to pay back those that got them across the border (cartels, I assume) from their under-the-table earnings in the States, presumably under threats to themselves or their families back home. I'd bet at least some have been forced to work in prostitution this way. Is it okay that I'm uncomfortable with Biden's effectively open-borders policies because an entire class of outside-of-the law persons tacitly legalizes indentured servitude?
I'm sure some are effectively indentured to their employers, too.
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