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Yes. Imagine your neighbor's yard was overrun with cats and kittens, and his first impulse was to send in a bunch of men to go and kick the kittens, and pull on the tails of the cats, and to get into fights with the shrill animal rights activists who filmed his "enforcement and removal operations".
"You know, there is an easier way to fix this," you offer. "You could just pick up all the open cans of tuna that have been placed all over your yard. Then the problem would basically take care of itself."
"I couldn't possibly," your neighbor, Donald, replies. "There are so many cans!"
"About that," you continue. "Donald, you know your roommates are the ones leaving the cans all over your yard? Maybe ask them to stop. Or take away their can openers."
"And if they keep doing it?"
"I guess you might have to kick them out."
"Right," Donald says as he nods his head. "Yeah. And then I wouldn't need to hire the men to torture the kittens and cats, cause they would all just go away. And the obnoxious PETA people wouldn't even be able to say I was doing anything wrong. And it would be way cheaper and work way better."
"Exactly," you reply.
Donald feels a growing sense of relief as he think about his new cat free future. But then his mind catches on an unforeseen complication, and he sighs with the sudden grim realization that it couldn't possibly work: "But what about content for my "interrupting cats eating" social media accounts?" If my men can't kick kittens and pull on the tails of cats, the ICE X account will be dead in weeks."
"You're kidding me," you say. "That's your problem?"
"Yeah, Kristi would be crushed—she's the one overseeing this for me. She told me she hasn't had this much fun since she had to shoot that puppy of hers, uhm... Cricket." Donald shakes his head. "Oh well. It was a good thought anyway."
I'm fine with sending in a bunch of men to remove the cats and kittens. Especially since the people now claiming "Oh, go after the cans of tuna" favor providing free tuna by the palletload.
This sudden received indisputable wisdom that going after the employers is the best and only reasonable way to do anything about illegal immigration and, as a result, going directly after illegal immmigrants is cruel and should be verboten is not credible.
Granting somewhere on the Internet someone has probably said this, this looks like a straw man to me.
Multiple honest posters here have claimed that the lack of E-Verify mandate means that everything else is unserious and that failure to do so is why "many conservatives who actually care about immigration are pissed at Trump".
For the specific combination that employer mandates are the only reasonable approach and that going after illegal immigrants is cruel :
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Do you think any nuance exists in these objections? Perhaps something less absolute than "going directly after illegal immigrants is cruel and should be verboten"? Is it possible the presence or absence of certain qualifying adverbs might impact the meaning of such statements?
I think nuance could exist in objections similar to the ones provided: a post that considered things like how sanctuary city policies have actually interacted with enforcement of deportation orders rather than The One Time Someone Got Caught, or whether immigration lawyers might lie in pleadings or asylum filings. I don't think it was shown, here, or that it'd be consistent with PmMeClassicMemes' other recent public positions.
There's nothing wrong with holding those positions. There's nothing illegitimate with arguing them! But they exist, in their strongest form; they are not strawmen.
I do not think @The_Nybbler was referring to "their strongest form." I am aware there are people who genuinely believe immigration laws should not be enforced and everything ICE does is illegitimate. @PmMeClassicMemes does not seem to be saying "immigration laws should not be enforced" (in fact he says the opposite), and I don't know of anyone other than the most radical leftists who'd agree that literally no one, not even a convicted felon, should be deported ever. @The_Nybbler seems to be merely taking a shit, as he usually does, on people who have moderate-to-strong opposition to the maximal position.
The other posts you quoted seem to be generally agreeing with my own personal position, which is that immigration laws should be enforced, but the administration is unserious about really doing that because they are more interested in setting up confrontations on the streets than applying any pressure at all on the businesses who continue to incentivize illegal immigration.
... are you using "strongest" here to describe most extreme, or most defensible? Because I'm talking about the former.
That's nice, and all, but it's a formulation literally only you have ever said, here, and it completely swallows the difference between Nybbler and PmMeClassicMemes' position since both eVerify and direct deportation are immigration laws (hell, even Biden-esque operations are technically 'enforcing' the law, just not in any serious way). If we go back to Nybbler's actual claim, that people believe "going directly after illegal immmigrants is cruel and should be verboten", we see that PmMeClassicMemes clearly does not want immigration law used against actual illegal immigrants, even illegal immigrants with previous criminal histories. Nor is that specific to PmMeClassicMemes, as we can see by the regular refusal by sanctuary jurisdictions to refuse to honor immigration detainers at jails, or the unending panics over Kilmar Abrego Garcia.
Yes, you can imagine the actual enforcement that might be accepted or acceptable to you. But you're the one that had to bring up convicted felons. PmMeClassicMemes hasn't even used the term "convicted" or "felon" in the last month; no example brought here acts as a case where Go 100% Deportation. Maybe he agrees with you, maybe he sets the line a little higher (I don't particularly care if someone sold bootleg cassettes, for example) or a little lower, whatever.
But Nybbler's statement wasn't "literally no deportation against anyone, ever, in any situation, no matter the case". He said "going directly after illegal immmigrants is cruel and should be verboten". That's not the same thing.
Perhaps, but coincidentally he's also pointing out that people claim that eVerify policies would be just, that deporting immigrants is not, and they happen to come from immigration maximalists, and they're not very credible about that first point.
We happen to have an immigration maximalist in this thread making these specific arguments.
You're calling it a strawman.
It is not clear to me that that is true, but I tire of trying to engineer semantics to cast what someone "really" means (especially when this is done to me) rather than just asking them directly.
I suppose in fairness I should ask @The_Nybbler directly, then. Does "going directly after illegal immigrants is cruel and should be verboten" mean one believes no illegal immigrant should ever be arrested and deported under any circumstance?
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