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You have to do both, obviously. Preventing people from committing crimes is good. Finding people who have committed crimes is also good.
I always find that if the country has a lot of illegal immigrants, it is always due to deliberate policy of that country.
The USSR had very little illegal immigration or emigration despite a lot of land and sea border. We could laugh about Trump building the wall (that was just an attempt of embezzlement), but if the country is serious, it can guard the border quite well.
The EU has a polity allowing a lot of refugees (in reality economic immigrants) in. It might be a bad policy but most likely dictated by desperate measures to counteract low birth rates. It is all deliberate and the EU has very little undesirable illegal immigrants. They find difficult to get jobs and receive services. Most so called illegals are requesting asylum and in most cases they receive it. Only small part of applicants are refused and deported.
The US is most likely the same situation. Most “illegals” are welcomed but the US does not control illegal employment as strictly as in the EU. That is deliberate as those immigrants have no rights and will work for low wages.
From human rights position that is fundamentally wrong. It is like slavery just with more steps. Now promises to deport them sound good from legal point of view, but expect a lot of protest from businesses who are using their labour.
The correct position would be to legalize most of those workers instead of deporting them. But I don't see democrats, nor republicans being interested in this solution.
This seems like saying, "I always find that if someone is wet, it is because they came into contact with water".
If a bunch of people turn up on your beaches and you can't send them home again because they tore up their papers and their homes won't take them, and you don't want to machine-gun them and bury them in a mass grave, then you have to put them in a hotel or grant them asylum. Is this deliberate policy?
I think it's much more accurate to say that rich, desirable, easily-accessible countries have lots of illegal immigration and undesirable ones don't. Famously the USSR had to put up an actual wall to stop citizens fleeing.
The USSR was a prison, it had to stop people fleeing but it did it quite easily.
People who arrive on beaches could be prevented to cross the sea in the first place. It is not being done because it is a deliberate policy. Countries have contradictory policies that change all the time due to changes in the political power. But a lot of elite that influence all politics are pro-imigration. I am not saying it bad or good but there are many rational arguments that immigration is better than decreasing population.
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