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I agree with both @lollol and @MathWizard - the median voter in the Anglosphere wants a secure border and minimal in-country enforcement (apart from the expeditious deportation of foreign criminals), and this doesn't work very well in practice. As well as the incentives point, illegal immigrants can arrive by overstaying tourist visas, not just by jumping the border - and before the current wave of "refugee" arrivals most did.
But I don't think this means you should be "pro-stock and pro-flow" or "anti-stock and anti-flow". Once we understand that you can't make sane immigration policy by pandering to the median voter, I think you should try to make policy in the national interest, and that means distinguishing between wanted and unwanted immigrants. The Canadian and Australian experience is that if you are visibly trying to do this (by which I mean actually trying, not pretending to try) the public will tolerate a reasonable number of mistakes. Trump, of course, is not doing this - almost nobody thinks that deporting military spouses over paperwork issues is a good idea, but the administration (and its noisiest very online supporters) want to do it as a show of commitment to "deport them all". What is going on here - if we assume the administration is at least marginally competent, the answer is obvious - Trump's mass deportation policy is about putting on a show for his base, not about appealing to the median voter.
As a separate issue, effective in-country immigration enforcement requires a citizen register including biometric data. (And once you have that, you effectively have ID cards even if you don't require people to routinely carry the card). The US basically has this, but it is split between various databases (particularly the SSA and State DMVs) in a way which makes using it for immigration enforcement ineffective. The UK doesn't, which is why we had the Windrush scandal when we tried to do serious in-country enforcement. I think the MAGA base would now support ID cards, but a noisy minority of Republicans profoundly wouldn't. But in any case, ID cards are less unpopular than either open borders or mass deportations of well-behaved settled illegals.
I feel like you could atleast make the argument for why “being mean and doing cruel things” is an optimal policy.
When the gap between the right and left is gigantic on immigration then being cruel to the stock of foreigners the last administration let into the country is a viable threat for when you are out of power.
When Dems will offer Asylum plus American money when in power then many will come. Being cruel and doing things like throwing a German military wife into gitmo for a year accomplishes a viable counterweight to Dems open borders and free stuff in a way that “maybe we will catch you when in power and put you on a Delta flight to your home country does not”.
Also don’t think we’ve put a German wife in Gitmo but we’ve done some cruel things and works fine as a proposal and we probably should do that.
This is all magnified by the fact that America is ran by executive orders and laws don’t mean anything so our government effectively hinges on the electoral college. It’s an all or nothing election.
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I think Trump is definitely attempting to put on a show for the base rather than doing things that might be effective.
This seems like the worst option of all policy worlds, because it's basically creating a selection effect for the worst types of immigrants.
It will scare off risk averse immigrants, and any immigrants that want a stable/predictable legal situation.
The easiest to find immigrants are ones that are trying to work within our legal system. They leave a paper trail. That paper trail might be from jobs, taxes, school enrollment, etc.
The hardest to find immigrants operate entirely in the black market.
How are we defining "effective" in this context?
One of MAGA's stated goals is to reduce illegal immigration. If "putting on a show for the base" results in illegal border crossings hitting a 50 year low, they may reasonably conclude that doing so is an effective means of achieving said goal. Refer also to my prior posts on "picking up Tuna Cans".
As for your concern about "selection effects", the argument pattern matches to a common form of rhetorical bait-and-switch where legal immigration is conflated with illegal immigration. I imagine that risk averse immigrants who sincerely want a stable/predictable legal situation would apply for legal status without having to be prompted or threatened.
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From a technical perspective, you could do an "ID lite" without biometric data. Give out "federal payroll tax numbers" (call it what you want) that come on a credit card sized NFC enabled card with private and public keys. Expand E-Verify and make it mandatory for every single form of income, and force employers to tap the NFC card to a phone when they sign up an employee. Force them to tap in freelancers. Have the system report nothing back but success or failure to enroll. Then soft-roll-out over a period of time (you'll have a few percent of citizens having trouble proofing their status, but you'll always have that) and slowly take SSN out back and shoot it. Make the cards easily revocable and replaceable when stolen or lost.
Then nail everybody not complying for tax evasion.
I have to ask if you are in gun rights spaces at all, because this is very reminiscent of a more moderate (but still pro-gun) suggestion on private sales: Give NICS access (i.e. the federal background check system for firearms purchases) to everyone, with it returning nothing but "yes" or "no", and then require it for all sales, including private. No official record needed (serial numbers, etc.), but at least allow law abiding citizens to sell guns at any time with peace of mind that they're not selling to a felon. And if they do, and they didn't use NICS, proponents argue legal action against the seller is a minimally intrusive and maximally effective way of curbing illegal sales.
Much in the same way, this is a way to verify workers in a minimally intrusive and maximally effective way. And just like NICS access (and voter ID), I doubt anyone with political weight is going to advocate for it.
Canada essentially did this by mistake with their licensing/registration scheme -- online private sales exploded, because you suddenly had a fairly transparent way of checking that somebody in (say) Newfoundland was who he said he was -- and some sort of recourse if he failed to ship your gun to the Yukon or whatever.
To this day this is an area in which Canada is a lot freer than the US for gun-buyers -- the lack of the whole FFL/interstate commerce thing helps of course, but even if that were repealed I'd think that Americans would find transacting with BamaBoy666 on reddit a bit fraught...
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Caveat: if you've been in the US illegally for several years, get married, and then immediately try to move onto a military base without adjusting your immigration status first... well, I can see how some people might describe that as a "paperwork issue", but I don't think it's an unfair result. And if it isn't a "paperwork issue" in your estimation, sadly, it'll be conflated with those cases that are by people trying to gin up negative publicity, and so I have to eye every story with suspicion that there's more going on behind the scenes than a sob story.
Yeah, I think this is FAFO dumbassery biting them in the rear. Being married to a US citizen, with the aid of a competent immigration lawyer(which military personnel have access to) is pretty much a shoe in for residency.
Yeah, I was thinking of one case in particular:
I saw a lot of people referring to it as a paperwork issue or ICE targeting servicemember spouses, but this case seemed... well, what did anyone expect? The timing of the husband's ship was such that the marriage must have taken place only a few weeks prior to this event, at most. All I can think of is that either the husband didn't know her status (and maybe she didn't, either, somehow, despite having lived and presumably worked in the US illegally for nearly a decade?), or that they assumed (erroneously) that marriage would automatically resolve any status issues. In which case... well, I can forgive her for not knowing the law, but a USCG man should presumably at least think to speak to base counsel or his CO prior to marrying any foreign national, let alone one who has immigration status issues?
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