The Border Crisis Won't Be Solved at the Border

This is actually a decent article but it misses a few things.

People need to understand that undocumented migrants are nothing more than a political football. The article (correctly) points out that nobody really wants to "solve" the problem. I'd go even further and say there is no problem. It's completely made up.

The article points out that if you really wanted to address this (made up) problem, you'd go after the employers. Nobody does that. It has been tried, however. For example, the Alabama agriculture sector collapsed when they tried [1].

Chicken farms are notorious for bad practices. Underpay undocumented migrants. When they start demanding safer working conditions and more pay, you simply call ICE for a sweep, pay a token fine and then start with a new batch.

Undocumented migrants, from the perspective of employers, are about cheap labor and suppressing wages. The easiest solution for this is to document them. We used to do this. It was called the Bracero program [2].

Top of this political theater is the "migrant crime" panic. For example, in a country with >20,000 homicides per year, so far this year 27 of them have been committed by noncitizens [3] and that includes documented and undocumented people.

Construction and agriculture are utterly dependent on undocumented migrant labor.

[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/oct/14/alabama-immigr...

[2]: https://guides.loc.gov/latinx-civil-rights/bracero-program

[3]: https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/stats/cbp-enforcement-statistic...

> People need to understand that undocumented migrants are nothing more than a political football. The article (correctly) points out that nobody really wants to "solve" the problem. I'd go even further and say there is no problem. It's completely made up.

For the American political class, nobody really cares about the immigrants except to make sure they don't get too uppity. Perpetuating an underclass is the entire point. If they truly cared, they would issue easy to get short term work visas like the Gulf states. This is the legacy of the Monroe doctrine, the Hispanic countries are basically taken for granted as a cheap labor pool given that no other country will try to uplift them and their general corruption and crime are tolerated by the US so long as they don't go full Cuba.

>Top of this political theater is the "migrant crime" panic. For example, in a country with >20,000 homicides per year, so far this year 27 of them have been committed by noncitizens [3] and that includes documented and undocumented people.

Illegal immigrants would have to be really stupid to commit crimes; after all, they jumped through huge hoops just to get into the country, so of course they're going to keep a low profile.

What I'm curious about, however, is how many crimes are committed by their kids? One thing I've noticed about immigrants in many countries is that, while the actual immigrants (the "first generation") went through hell to immigrate (illegally or legally), and generally are extremely hard-working and want a new life, their kids aren't the same. The kids didn't grow up in the old country and don't know what it's like there, and don't understand their parents' sacrifice. But in the new country, they frequently don't fit into the society (particular if they come from an extremely different culture and ethnic background), and then this can lead to big problems later, like joining criminal gangs.

Is don't know if it's a problem or if it's related but in Los Angeles, the city is covered with illegal food stalls setup on sidewalks. I think that's an issue. For one, it takes customers from the stores they set up in front of.

I'm happy to hear arguments this is unrelated to illegal immagration and is a net positive.

the idea that immigration is always a net positive seems to have been challenged recently

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/09/trump-clinto...

> in a country with >20,000 homicides per year, so far this year 27 of them have been committed by noncitizens

Two thoughts on this. First, you appear to be comparing all homicides to homicide convictions. I'm not sure what the national conviction rate is but it brings that number down.

Second, if those unsolved murders, I would suspect that illegal aliens would represent a disproportionate number, given that they are more difficult to find and can easily return home to escape conviction.

Even accounting for that though, it's still a relatively small amount in total but I have no idea what those rates would be like proportionately.

Nobody is entitled to customers

Sure, but you are entitled to equal application of the law protection from competition blatantly flaunting the law.

almost no illegal immigrants can easily return "home".

How terrible.. Let's enforce draconian ID checks, destroy families, corral people into human warehousing centers and then aggressively throw them back into the hell they escaped from over the border..... because some Los Angeles residents (and residents of other cities) cant stand the site of a food stall on their otherwise "perfectly clean" streets.

If those food stalls weren't offering an attractive service at a good price, they wouldn't be stealing customers from anyone anyhow. The restaurant owners aren't owed an income and customers aren't a product to be "taken away" or given. They make their own choices that others decide to serve in this context.

Among all the arguments against illegal or legal immigrants, this has got to be one of the more pedantic and absurd examples.

> I'm not sure what the national conviction rate is but it brings that number down.

It's like 25% for homicide

These numbers you're quoting are so laughably implausible that I had to check and it turns out that you are wildly misinterpreting source [3] as some sort of representation of illegal immigrant crime nationwide. [3] gives a break down of a very specific selection of arrests, "U.S. Border Patrol Criminal Noncitizen Arrests" which total 15,608 YTD in 2024, and then these 15608 arrests are broken down by crime. This should have been a big siren in your head. How many arrests are made by law enforcement in the US, per year, do you think? Well it's around 7 million. So 4-5 orders of magnitude more. So this is some tiny subset of arrested criminals, apparently the ones that CBP, a federal agency, arrested. And they give stats on murders by this tiny subset, and give 27, and you compare that to 20,000, which comes from those 7 million arrests. Fake news.

Second generation children of immigrants vastly outperform children of non-immigrants, when you compare them by family income.

There are some differences by a demographic, but by and large, The stereotype of the hard-working immigrant parents pushing their children harder to succeed is accurate.

I don't know if they work as hard as their parents, but they have higher social mobility and lifetime income then their native economic peers.

Besides that data-driven point, My personal take on the original question is that the children generally don't work as hard as the parents, but that is simply a regression towards the American mean.

That said, just like not all people are the same, not all immigrants are the same. It is a broad classification that by definition includes both doctors and human traffickers. It's pointless to talk about immigration policy without getting into the details

My niece is the child of an "illegal" immigrant. She graduated from University of Oregon last year, works in HR, is starting law school next fall. She was nationally ranked as a cheerleader in high school. As far as I'm aware, she's never committed any crimes. Her dad, whose mom brought him here as a 2 year-old or something, went to school with me and my sister, and he was a bit of a punk back then, skateboarding kid who hung with guys that liked to put firecrackers in lockers and throw bottles of piss at pep rallies, but he's actually a good guy now in his 40s. Didn't marry my sister, but married, three other kids. Never got that citizenship for whatever reason, but living a normal life.

I'm really not sure where these impressions come from. They're just people, humans being humans. They're not any different than me. They're not any different than you.

For what it's worth, Mexican culture is not an "extremely different culture" from California and Texas, which were both part of Mexico and are majority ethnic Mexican. I'm ethnically Mexican, born in California, currently living in Texas.

There’s a joke that basically goes the first generation are immigrants, the second generation are Americanized, and the third generation have opinions about immigrants.

>Second generation children of immigrants vastly outperform children of non-immigrants, when you compare them by family income.

Do they? Can you provide a citation to back up this assertion, in France?

>For what it's worth, Mexican culture is not an "extremely different culture" from California and Texas

For what it's worth, MNEA cultures are "extremely different cultures" from France and Germany.

You're aware this is an article from Texas Monthly Magazine about the border between Texas and Mexico?

You're aware that discussion threads can go on tangents, right? My original message said "One thing I've noticed about immigrants in many countries is..." The US is not "many countries", it's just a single country, and this is a discussion about immigration in general.

This is certainly not made up. I used to think this way and also just cite statistics. But my small town has had central american and mexicans dumped on us the past few years. It's not nice.

How many additional deaths do you think are appropriate to accept with the undocumented immigrants we accept each year?

It is a serious question because some of your other points relating to agriculture are spot on. That we require the people who harvest our food and build our houses to be illegal is ludicrous.

It's significantly easier to flee to where you are a citizen than it is to flee to where you need a passport.

Maybe "easily" wasn't the right phrase but significantly easier, especially in a mental/personal sense.

They do in the US. I have no clue about France.

Here is a source:

Intergenerational Mobility of Immigrants in the United States over Two Centuries, Ran Abramitzky American Economic Review, vol. 111, no. 2, February 2021

https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.20191586

Here is a podcast with the study authors:

https://www.econtalk.org/ran-abramitzky-and-leah-boustan-on-...

My point is that immigration in the US is somewhat different from immigration in most other countries. The US does a much better job of assimilating people from other cultures. How much this can be blamed on the immigrants, geography, or the host countries is debatable though. But instead of doing the American thing and ignoring everything outside US borders, as Americans almost always do, I think it's important to look at how things work elsewhere and see if there's lessons to be learned there.

> in France

Lol

WTF is MNEA ?

Wait, the food stalls are getting customers who would have otherwise gone into the other stores? Sounds like the free market, baby! If you can't compete with food stall tacos or whatever, maybe you're in the wrong line of business.

What on earth does MNEA mean?

I'm guessing that you're a French Islamophobe, since you keep trying to make this conversation about European immigration. But it's not. And you're not taking the conversation on a tangent, you're trying to change the topic of the conversation to something that no one else is talking about.

I dont disagree that there are multiple factors. That said, you do realize that this is an article about the US and the Texas boarder, right?

It seems you want to talk about other countries. Do you have any lessons you would like to share from abroad?

A typo of "MENA"