Why do people seem unable to distinguish between border security and immigration?

What effect would building a wall have on those immigrants (legal and illegal) currently in the US?

How would granting amnesty or requiring deportation effect border security?

Build a wall and let'em all in.

Pepys:

I think they do, seriously. No one argues the law is irrelevant or against regularizing things legally, but it's like the old adage about your having a problem if you owe your bank a thousand dollars, but the bank having the problem if you owe it a million. When there are ten million citizen-wannabes in the country who are violating immigration law, but who are in demand and contributing productively for the most part, isn't it reasonable to start by questionning the law rather than chasing the malefactors?

And please remember how, like everything else in the modern institutional world, immigration law, regulations, bureaucracy and enforcement have all become so politicized, irrationally bureaucratic and driven by an ethos far removed from what anyone would see as basic common sense that the argument that these illegals are guilty of any moral or ethical wrong corresponding to their legal violations is harder and harder to make. I presume that is why they are marching.

I think there's a number of entangled threads to the issue.

-- One element is border security: it's hard to keep the bad guys out if you have no control over entry and exit, and that's a serious issue. (Major plot point in the new Tom Clancy book is an alliance between the Columbian drug cartels and their coyotes and the Palestinians, which leads to the smuggling of jihadis into the country via Mexico.)

-- There is the issue of immigration itself. Personally, if the world's best and brightest want to come here and become Americans, I'm all for it. Others may feel different, of course.

-- Yet another element to the problem is a scleretic, inefficient, trap-laden system of legal immigration that seems bound and determined to keep everyone who isn't Mohammed Atta out of the country, no matter how desirable their presence here is. It's probably a net incentive to illegal immigration.

-- Finally, there seems to be a whole cluster of strong reactions to illegals based on their race and ethnicity: the Tancredo/Buchanan crowd that doesn't want Mexicans in country because they're Mexican (but then openly wish there were more hard-working, socially-conservative Catholics in the country); the Ruy Texerias who want them in-country because, being Mexicans, they are believed to be demographically destined to become straight-ticket Democrats (despite the fact that the Democrats are the party of abortion, buggery, and other peculiar institutions repulsive to socially-conservative Catholics); the La Raza crew that want foot soldiers for their reconquista fantasies (despite the fact that most Mexicans who come here are coming here to get away from the kind of people who end up in La Raza); and the rest of us, who don't have any particular categorist feeling one way or the other.

-- Then you have Mexico itself, which seems to be using northbound immigration (legal or otherwise) as a way to avoid confronting its own social issues--something we probably do not want to encourage.

The point of all this rambling is that there's no single "immigration issue," there's multiple intertwined issues that really can't be dealt with unless they're disaggregated. There's also a lot of people who have a stake in the debate who don't want to disaggregate these issues for their own partisan reasons.

We have to be diligent and keep our eyes open for the Smoots and Hawleys of today. They are out there.

Peter B;

Actually, from what I've read, the marches were organized by International ANSWER, an openly Stalinist organization.

AOG:

Thanks. I should have known better than to toss out a line like that.

Mike M: I agree. This is really a bunch of tangentially related issues that need to be addressed individually. I suspect that both sides realize this and conflate everything to preserve the status quo. I especially like your point about the difficulty of legal immigration to this country. Like many bad things, the current system is the child of the far left and far right.

I agree with building a wall and then letting them all in. But terrorists apparently want to come in through legal channels and thus far have all been able to find a way.

Peter B:

The way these perverse incentives work can be illustrated by considering a small offshoot of the immigration situation, which concerns foreigners wishing to obtain visas simply for trips (a subject I know a bit about since I work for a hotel company).

Essentially, the number of places (consulates, etc.) you can go to get visas is very limited, and you may have to travel 300 or 400 miles to get there, just to fill out irritating and intrusive paperwork. The people who interview you are usually low-level civil servants who do this job for a few years in hopes of advancing elsewhere, and they may interview hundreds of people a day, usually for two or three minutes each.

As a result of the travel and hassle involved, lots of people who legitimately wish to travel to America decide to go elsewhere. Meanwhile, the few screwballs who really are terrorists certainly won't be stopped by a 400-mile trip to fill out cumbersome paperwork. Then they receive a perfunctory interview and we pass them through. Examining the numerous errors on the forms filled out by the 9/11 terrorists, as National Review did a few years ago, is good for a grim laugh.

The perverse end result is recognizable to any student of government activity: the good guys are kept out and the bad guys get in.

Are we really worried about terrorists coming in from Mexico? Like David said, isn't it the legal channels we should be concerned with?

You'll notice that our elites limit visas for professionals to 65,000 per year. If the jobs of politicians, pundits and professionals were at risk, they'd be singing a different tune.

When the wages of working Americans are artificially depressed like this, eventually they will demand massive new social spending to compensate; "free" health care, larger Earned Income tax credits, etc.

We could come to a point where Latinos comprise a plurality or even a majority--with racial preferences intact. Then we're back to a Jim Crow situation.

Living out west, I've worked with a lot of Mexicans and my impression is generally favorable. But I've also seen them act as trashy as any other hue of the Multicultural Trash Rainbow. Having brown skin does not make one a saint.

We've already got too many people wandering around the country with no particular loyalty to America--they're called "leftists".

We've got to get a grip on this in a way that is fair to everybody.

They point to studies that show the biggest losers from immigration to be high school dropouts.

High school dropouts are losers, period! None of our policies should be driven by a desire to prop up this group of people. It would be tossing pearls before swine. These people don't vote, so who is seriously concerned about them?

So our policies should be driven by foreign high-school drop-outs instead?

I've known drop-outs who went to work and did well--and people with multiple degrees who are over-educated, lacking common sense and unable to tell right from wrong. We call them "professors".