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I was discussing US politics with my wife, as one does, and immigration laws came up. I briefly told her about sanctuary cities, and in response she asked why anyone would support that. I had no answer.
I googled a bit and got some very bad answers, so I’m turning to the motte.
Can the motte provide some pro-sanctuary arguments, and some pro-illegal immigration arguments in general? Consider that you’re giving these answers to a none-American from an ethno-state that enforces its immigration laws, and generally frowns on immigration to it from different ethnicities.
One argument focuses on particular sub-classes of illegal immigrants. For example, I know a few people who are or were illegally present in the US, and most of their stories are more about some SNAFU with some arcane provision of immigration law (potentially with how it creates conflicts with the law of a foreign country). A math prof I had long ago, for example, had to deal with an awful bureaucratic mess, as she was here legally to teach at the university, but her infant son had no legal right to stay (they had to figure out creative ways to make things work; not sure if it was always legal). I know another person whose mother came over long ago for marriage; I don't actually know the details of what happened, the relationship fell apart. The child (now an adult) never had proper paperwork, but her mother just never took her back home; just kept her here. Eventually grew up to be an adult, and is now like, "Well shit, what am I supposed to do?" In that case, she managed to marry a US citizen and eventually jumped through enough hoops to become legal without being deported. I've heard a story about a student who came from Africa to a European country, and then to the US, which started off legal, but on some trip sometime didn't have whatever right stamp was necessary for whichever government (this was long before the internet, and holy shit, I can't imagine having to navigate the immigration bureaucracy as a young student back then without it), and basically just decided that his best choice among shitty choices was just to just stay in the US illegally.
Thankfully, the internet is making it vastly easier to understand what exactly you're supposed to do in order to check all the legal boxes, but even then it can sometimes be tough. My wife immigrated when we got married, and we almost ended up in a really shitty spot, because they changed one of the requirements mid-process for us, so we got a letter (that was somewhat novel due to it being a new change, so there wasn't a lot of clear existing advice anywhere) that was not that easy to parse for what exactly would satisfy their demand, with a deadline attached that very very very nearly could have been a literally impossible timeline. Thankfully, we were able to scramble like crazy (and pay some additional annoyingly hefty sums) to make it work.
None of these stories are southern-border-adjacent, but they are all real stories. If they were truly representative of the modal story, I could easily see someone thinking that since shit like this happens all the fucking time with USCIS, they should err on the side of protecting people from bureaucratic bullshit unless they really become a problem and start committing other crimes or something. It is genuinely true that the more laws we have regarding this situation and that situation and this requirement and that requirement and on and on, the more often you're going to have situations that are basically just screwed up by accident, be it the fault of the individual or an actual mistake made by USCIS.
(Obligatory, this is not at all relevant to any people who literally just walk across the border at night or whatever, with no paperwork and no reasonable attempt whatsoever to even try to do things legally.)
Thank you, that's a good argument. I can empathize, American bureaucracy really is bad. I assumed it's part of a trade-off, where you get a less organized government on hand, and in return it's also less powerful. Compare to e.g. Israel where the state knows pretty much everything about you, but then it's also very convenient that you don't need to do your own taxes, or a name change after marriage propagates automatically to everywhere.
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