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This is fair, and worth repeating. But my primary concern is not with the long-term decrease in living standards once they're back home - my concern is with the inordinate amount of suffering involved in grabbing someone from their home without letting them pack their bags, say goodbye to their neighbors and coworkers, figure out what to do about pets, take a last stroll around the neighborhood that was their home for [X] years, etc. It's the difference between having to move, and having your house burn down. That (and of course the threat of violence during the raids themselves) is what I referred to as "brutal". That is what strikes me as being in violation of the Golden Rule, as being unkind, cruel, inhumane about ICE raids. Not the end goal of sending the illegals back to their country of origin.
Nothing can convince me that a not-otherwise-criminal illegal immigrant morally "deserves" that kind of treatment. You can make a pragmatic argument that, in practice, this is the only way to ensure they are deported at all, because they would otherwise vanish into the night the moment the officers' eyes are off them. But that just begs the question of how we got to that situation. It should not be beyond the state's capacity to "tag" an individual once identified by law enforcement, such that if they have not left the borders within [X] days they can instantly be tracked down and arrested. I'm taking ankle monitors, hell, maybe daily check-ins of some sort. Just something so that no human being has to suffer the inordinate stress and grief of being torn from their home literally overnight without the chance to put their affairs in order - an amount of suffering which is totally out of proportion with the very diffuse amount of harm that any given not-otherwise-criminal illegal immigrant causes by their continued presence in a host country.
I seriously do not comprehend this level of bleeding heart. If you sneak into a country illegally it comes with the territory that the life you build there will be precarious and liable to be snatched away at a moment’s notice. If we let people pack up all their possessions and move at their leisure then we are imposing no penalty on them, there would be no deterrence. There should be a degree of fear associated with living in a country illegally, ideally this will make some number self deport.
I suppose part of it is that think of illegal-immigrant status - particularly for people who outstayed a visa, rather than coming in illegally - as… well, not not a big deal exactly, but not the kind of thing that prima facie justifies any kind of retaliatory violence. Outstaying a visa seems more comparable to filing your taxes wrong than driving without a license, and still more similar to driving without a license than to drug trafficking. It's the kind of rule-breaking where if a critical mass of people do it at a time, it begins to harm the country in aggregate, so obviously the government takes measures to prevent it - but where a given rule-breaker isn't much more morally culpable than a jaywalker or someone who forgets a stray $50 on their tax reports.
To put it another way, I recognize at a rational, central-planning level that there must be limits on immigration, but I don't feel any personal animus against someone who circumvents those limits on the margins. My gut reaction isn't "this is an evil thing to do", it's "well, that seems a bit selfish in the grand scheme of things, a more virtuous person would think about the big picture and refrain from adding another straw to the camel's back… but eh, it is not given to just anybody to instinctively think like a central planner about the diffuse economic effects of excess untaxable unskilled labor, this is just some poor shmuck cutting corners and were I in their circumstances I might have taken the same leap". By all means we should try and take broad-level measures so that the opportunities for ignoring the rules close, but, as much as is possible, we shouldn't take this out on the actual human beings involved, who aren't doing anything that emotionally resonates with me as egregiously "immoral".
All of which being said, I'm also just a strong believer in kindness/charity/the Golden Rule. Even in cases where my gut reaction to a crime is disgust or resentment (and there are such crimes, illegal immigration just isn't among them), my higher conscience still generally tells me that to the extent that such a thing can be achieved while still suitably deterring further crimes of the same type, the individuals at issue should still be treated as well as possible - should still be given as much of a shot at happiness as possible without putting innocents at a disadvantage. Presumably your underlying moral principles differ somewhat.
I think ICE is using barbaric tactics and if we were serious about this whole get rid of the illegal immigrants thing we'd have passed Verify and mostly avoided the theatrics. But this view just seems so strangely naive. They didn't make a mistake on their tax, in the metaphor they've just decided that they're not going to pay taxes. They're blatantly and intentionally defying their host country's right to decide who is within their borders. I wouldn't feel like I was doing an oopsie if I decided to violate the borders and laws of my host country. The idea that they need to be served individual papers to be informed that their evicted is baffling, those papers were posted on whatever port of entry they came through. The time to say goodbye to their neighbors was before their stay became illegal. If this was them accidentally missing a renewal or thinking their stay ended next week rather than this week and it was all a clerical error then I could see what you mean but that's not what is happening. These are people who have been here for years and years after their legal status ended if they had one to begin with.
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Recent experience says that you can't have both of these. Because this makes you subject to the very attack that has caused these sorts of ICE shenanigans and the general polarization around immigration: anyone who knows you're squeamish in this way can exploit it by refusing to enforce immigration laws on a local level and then hammer your empathy when someone from ICE finally gets that guy who's slipped past for a half-decade.
At which point, you'll be put in a position to pick a side and end up like everyone else.
My belief is that there are ways to enforce immigration laws that would both cause less harm to the immigrants, and be harder for activists to turn into causes celebres, that have been largely left untried. They amount, in a nutshell, to putting less energy into violence and more energy into surveillance. It should not be the case that once you've found an illegal immigrant your choices are between "lock them up right away" and "they disappear into the ether in-between court dates". There are, it seems obvious to me, technologies (social and literal) that could be employed at scale to make this kind of evasion obviously impossible and not worth attempting - freeing the authorities up to be more chill with identified illegals thereafter, which would in turn make quixotic attempts to run away less and less appealing in a virtuous cycle.
There's plenty of things that can be done if everyone was willing. An obvious solution is to just remove birthright citizenship for non permanent residents and institute a massive guest worker program.
There's often no point discussing those things in isolation though, because the reality is that many states are explicitly hostile to immigration enforcement as a matter of fact
I see little reason to be optimistic about some wonkish solution. This is not a problem of simply not figuring out the right nudge. It's about defeating your adversaries' attempts to stop you. The problem is enemy action.
Given that they're quite clear about their positions, I'm not morally opposed to taking the simple, cheaper solution. There's tens of millions of people illegally in the US. It's insane to expect to put migrants under surveillance long term instead of grabbing them where you know they'll be.
Especially given that it's just a fact that your adversaries let in millions of people in a four year span and leave you with the mess. Where is the sense of fair play in that?
Even worse this sort of no-but-yes suggestion where people demand an unreasonable (imo) standard is a trick used by bad actors who are hostile to enforcement anyway, so they've poisoned the well for you.
A genteel immigration system that slides illegals out of the populace to their homes is possible. It is not possible under these conditions.
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If you are going to strongly stake out this position, I think you have an obligation to spell out what technologies those are. Ankle monitors? Those are usually used for people with ties to the place they are living, as it's much better at monitoring compliance than preventing flight. Common sense tells me recent arrivals with no strong ties to the community would simply throw the ankle monitor in the trash and hitch a ride out of town.
What else are you envisioning?
But suppose the moment the monitor goes silent and/or leaves a certain area, a manhunt is automatically called. Perhaps all citizens in a certain radius get an alert on their phones, with a picture of the guy and instructions to report him if sighted. That's obviously a very blunt way to do it, but then this isn't my job; I admit I can only gesture at the hazy shapes of solutions, here. But it just seems obvious to me that "find a guy if you knew where he was yesterday, already suspected he might run, and had arbitrary amounts of time to tag him however you wanted" should not be a problem for an efficient state apparatus at our current level of technological development. This cannot be an unsolvable problem. I didn't even go into any of the more controversial low-hanging fruit like CCTV, or making people carry mandatory ID.
I don't understand why this seems obvious to you. This is a big country, with lots of people, and not a lot of patience for civic duties. It is far more than a trivial matter to track the activities of someone who does not want to be tracked. People here generally are not comfortable with PRC-levels of domestic surveillance, and if emulating China is the cost of being easy-going with illegal migrants, I doubt very much you will get many willing to pay that price.
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They had literal years, decades even, to do this. How much time is enough?
I'd rather them prosecute the traffickers directly, but "daring to remove trafficked humans" might legitimately be the most punishment for the pro-trafficking faction that the anti-trafficking faction can muster.
Quoting myself from elsewhere in the thread:
Sure, but what actually happened here was half the country going "here's a free plane ticket, come on in, we'll never enforce this law, and you should ignore it- the guard may personally tell you you're in violation but he can't do anything, don't worry".
The guard now has the power to enforce the law, and has proceeded to do that.
As the reply to you states, a good chunk of these are already in the "this is the time you have to pack your bags and say goodbye" stage. For the ones that have not, they've been on notice since January 2025 when some official got on TV and said the guard's power was coming back, and literally half the nation (and statistically, where the trafficked humans are most likely to live) went into hysterics about "the guard is finally removing people".
Killing enemy soldiers is not breaking Golden Rule.
It might not be their fault they were there, but I'm not actually owed special protection from things that are not my fault, and trying to force me to grant it is an injury much like removing trafficked humans is to you. You could have bargained to change that law, and compromised with me, but you didn't do that. So, by
Golden RuleYour Rules, Fairly...No, but the nice thing about killing enemy soldiers is that it's almost perfectly symmetrical. You are killing them to prevent them from killing you (or your countrymen): the nature of the harm you are inflicting on them is exactly isomorphic to the evil that you are trying to prevent by doing so. In contrast, I contend that the amount of suffering inflicted on a given deportee by grabbing them overnight far exceeds the very diffuse harm that their presence on US soil inflicted on a given American. It's basically a torture-vs-dust-specks problem.
Good for you. I do not.
Stealing a cent from everyone would make you very rich; when punished, it looks disproportionate- wasn't it only a mere cent from everyone?
Can't you spare an extra cent?
But it's not about the extra cent, it's about removing the people who have it normalized that cents are available to steal; that's why we punish white-collar criminals when they do this.
(And to the extent that it makes the traffickers feel bad- it should, and "making them feel bad as punishment" is a salient thing, because the way they trafficked the humans was also stealing, though of political power rather than directly financial. Now, that theft is being prosecuted, and the thief's final argument, "but you were bad for being able to afford it and refusing to", is just DARVO.)
Would you care to elaborate on that? It seems very hard for me to picture how a given illegal immigrant, individually, is doing any kind of "harm" to anyone at all. Sure, in some distant sense they're contributing the continuing existence of an economy in which it becomes substantially harder for a certain class of American workers to find a job, and, from there, to all sorts of unpleasant second-order effect on the economy - but that guy in particular - one illegal immigrant more or less - is not going to make a measurable difference in anybody's lived experience. Removing 500,000 illegal immigrants, yes, that gets to making a substantial difference to a lot of citizens' lives. But removing any one guy? As far as I can tell, the effect size is indistinguishable from zero. I don't just mean that the effect is very small; it's that the immediate practical consequences are so irrelevant to the broad market forces at work that that guy's disappearance is not going to reshape the economy one iota, and consequently Americans' collective quality of life will not be improved at all.
Or are you coming at this from the other end, and disagreeing about how traumatic and painful being grabbed overnight would be? That seems even stranger to me.
Which just shows the folly of analyzing harm exclusively on an individual level. If a counterfeiter prints $1000 per month in fake money, his individual impact on the economy will be basically nil. If the government decided that throwing their ass in prison would cause more harm than he's causing the US economy, and as a result every American resident starts printing their own $1000 every month, this would result in total economic chaos. Many laws serve to guide collective, rather than individual, action towards a more beneficial trajectory, and I don't see a reason to suddenly stop and carve out an exception for immigration.
Granted. But surely, if there were already millions of people doing this, punishing every one of them as harshly as we would the first wise-guy to figure out this neat trick in an otherwise law-abiding society would clearly be overkill. We place harsh punishments on these kinds of deleterious-in-aggregate violations as a deterrent - to disincentivize anyone from breaking the norm, crossing the bright line. Part of why the harshness of the punishment is morally justifiable is that you are trying to game-theoretically create conditions such that ~0 people will commit the crime at all, and thus you hopefully won't have to inflict it on anyone in practice.
When Moloch has already sunk his teeth deep into the former norm, when the line is being trampled every day by millions of people, the calculus is completely different. At that point, trying to robotically apply the harsh punishment to every single person who crosses the line trivially creates far more suffering than would be strictly necessary to prevent the greater evil (because the very harsh punishment on the books was arrived at in large part as a matter of deterrence, and the deterrence angle is now moot because everybody's doing it anyway). You need to go back to the drawing board and figure out the least-painful way to right the ship ASAP, not fixate on what the deterrent punishment would have been in a world where hardly anyone crossed the line.
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Yeah, that was the argument that the traffickers made about how all this would improve the economy.
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