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Notes -
I think you're right about the median illegal immigrant, and maybe about the 90th percentile, but:
The trouble with this is that people tend to be stupid and stubborn, so "surely people won't be stupid and stubborn enough to bring massive consequences down on themselves for no benefit" just isn't going to be universally true, and prospective illegal immigrants probably are not sufficiently better than average in measures of genius and intellectual humility, so we'll still have to metaphorically nuke the most stupid and/or stubborn exceptions.
Look at your analogy non-metaphorically, even: you'd think that literally dropping nukes on someone would have indeed led to immediate surrender, which would have been uniformly preferable (even game-theoretically in this case, though that's an additional complication) to waiting for more nukes and then surrendering, but when we actually tested that theory it took a second nuke and we were all lucky it didn't take a third.
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