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44 points bikenaga | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.205s | source
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jmyeet ◴[] No.41875480[source]
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...

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1. Onavo ◴[] No.41875492[source]
> 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.