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I think those laws are based on crimes where you are far less likely to throw a stone and hit someone who should be arrested. There are only so many carjackers in the world, and most murders are from people close to the victim.
The percentage of people here who are committing a misdemeanor by illegal entry or by overstaying a visa and changing their address without notifying DHS is between 4 and 8%. These misdemeanors become felonies quickly by repeated offenses or stacking against other crimes often necessary to keep a low profile.
So just taking a random sample of the US, 1 in 12 will be here unlawfully.
However, the people here unlawfully are not randomly distributed. They are mostly not Western Europeans, for instance, while a large portion of the United States population still is Western European. They are mostly Mexican, Venezuelan, and Central American. Though the exact number is difficult to nail down, let's be generous and say 2/3s of the people here unlawfully are Hispanic.
Hispanic people make up approximately 20% of the US population. If 5% of the total US population is Hispanics here unlawfully, and Hispanics are 20% of the population total, the odds of any given Hispanic being here unlawfully is 1 in 4.
Now, most Hispanics are here lawfully. Some have family ties to the land well before the land was American. Of the Hispanics here lawfully, most speak very good English, having been raised in the United States or present for decades. Most have little to no accent.
Of the Hispanics here unlawfully, some actually have really good English! Some are DREAMERs. But people who only arrived recently do tend to keep a strong accent for a while.
I will try to give generous estimates. Let's say 50% of Hispanics with strong accents are also here unlawfully.
So if you have someone in the country who is Hispanic and has a strong accent, there is a 1 in 2 chance of them being here unlawfully.
There are ways to make the odds even better. For example, there are certain places someone here unlawfully is likely to be. Using this knowledge, the odds are greater than half that a given Hispanic with an accent is here unlawfully.
If a police officer has located someone who has a more-than-half likelihood of having committed a specific crime, wouldn't you want that officer to at least question that person? Especially if you already have a database of many of the people who have committed that crime, and it's just a matter of checking if that person is on the database.
It's not at all like questioning every black man for a murder, when the majority of black men are not murderers. The only reason to compare them is because the magnitude of the problem is left out in these conversations.
I could quibble with your numbers but that's besides the point, it doesn't fundamentally change anything if the real ratio is 1 in 4 or whatever.
As I said in another reply, there are certainly situations where you might want to change laws and norms to deal with problems that are too bad and too intractable to address otherwise. Everything is mutable if you have enough societal consensus.
But the difference between illegal immigration and many other crimes is that some substantial fraction of the population is not in favor of deportation regardless of how the person is found. You could probably find various different numbers, but first one I found from before ICE was in the news is this: https://www.pewresearch.org/race-and-ethnicity/2025/03/26/americans-views-of-deportations/, which implies that some 40% of Americans think that illegal immigrants who have not committed crimes shouldn't be deported.
So to answer this:
If that crime is illegal immigration, with no other crimes alleged, no I don't want them questioned. The police don't have any right to know who I am while walking down the street, and the immigration hawks don't get to just run roughshod over established practice because they decided that their specific cause is soooo important.
32% of US Adults believe that EVERY illegal immigrant should be deported.
51% believe some should be deported. I'm in this group myself. Of the people in this group:
44% of this 51% believe that all illegal immigrants who arrived in the last four years should be deported. This most cleanly describes my views as well - I really didn't care too much about the situation until the Biden Administration began drawing people in by the millions and stopped deporting people with final orders of removal. Before then, I would have said the biggest change that needed to be made is expanding the immigration court system until every case can be processed within a year.
.44*.51 = 22% of US Adults. Plus 32% gets to 54% of Americans who think that at least criminal immigrants and those who arrived since Biden took office should be deported.
So if anything you were selling your position short. Or there might be some other data point you were looking at?
What percentage of support would you need to see before you would agree my point that, if you have a reasonable suspicion that someone committed a crime, (and a 1:4 or 1:2 likelihood should count as reasonable suspicion) it's perfectly fine and legal (as was recently confirmed by the SCOTUS in Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo) to take five minutes out of someone's day to ask some basic questions?
This is leaving aside the fact that most Americans answering this survey have no clue that pretty much all Illegal Immigrants, whether they came over the border or overstayed a visa, have committed criminal acts. Conduct related to “unlawful presence,” like eluding inspection, is a criminal misdemeanor on the first offense and a felony on the second offense, and the two often go hand in hand. People who overstay visas are often committing crimes. For example: anyone who is here on a visa is required to notify DHS within 10 days of a change of address; failure to do so is a criminal misdemeanor. Those who stay in the country and work here without a visa are also usually committing crimes like document fraud, identity theft, or tax fraud to obtain employment and/or be paid under the table.
Overwhelming support. You can relax other priorities in desperate situations. But I think the fact that ~50% of the population supports a party that does not support much more restrictions on illegal immigration is strong evidence that this is not a desperate situation where we need to start giving up civil rights.
I just want the administration to chill out. Pass some laws to change the asylum system. Make it harder for employers to use illegal labor. Ramp up ICE staffing in sustainable ways. Whatever. None of those are big issues even if I wouldn't actual agree with those policies. But stop pretending we are in some crisis where where the world is going to end if you can't deport millions of people immediately. If it was actually such a crisis people would not be taking to the streets to defend their own neighbors who are supposedly having such a negative effect on them.
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