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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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