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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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